Brand New Heavy

Swiss Army Knife by Victorinox, from the book Phaidon Design Classics. (Victorinox/Phaidon Publications)

As I break a sweat hauling all 18 ½ pounds of Phaidon’s new Design Classics up my staircase, I can’t help but wonder if there is a coffee-table book about coffee-table books (which is distinct from Kramer of Seinfeld’s idea of a coffee-table book about coffee tables). If so, these three volumes, collected in a plastic carrying case designed by Konstantin Grcic, would merit a centre spread. With 999 entries, 4,000 images and the involvement of hundreds of researchers, writers and photographers, this is a vast undertaking.

At a rather pricey $225, these volumes require a coffee table of comparable refinement and, given their weight, considerable robustness. I recommend entry No. 307, Isamu Noguchi’s Coffee Table IN50, “a symmetrical structure with the appearance of dynamic and asymmetrical form.”

The venerable Phaidon press, now in its 82nd year, has a history of publishing comprehensive arts-related tomes that manage to bring immense vistas (the history of art, the 500 finest photographed images) into sharp focus. Part of its success comes from the simple, unpretentious writing, but mostly, Phaidon understands that if you’re making a picture book, you don’t skimp on the pictures. There are other coffee-table book publishers, but few have so deftly managed to balance the requirements of the Blahnik-sporting hipster, the Wallpaper* subscriber and the serious academic alike. The underlying principle is simple: showing beats telling.

With this in mind, it is unsurprising that Phaidon decided to tackle the world of design classics — the finest examples of industrial products from the past three centuries — in such detail. After all, cool stuff makes for cool pictures. But is it even possible to produce an illustrated précis of the greatest works of human innovation — everything from eyeglasses to airplanes, lampshades to lawn chairs, pencils to pint glasses — and collect them in one volume? Clearly no, which is why it’s taken three. And who is qualified to compile such a project? Er, no one, apparently, which is why Phaidon Design Classics has consulted a “wide range of experts” — the credits list over 50 contributors, not including the press’s in-house editorial staff.

The phantom authorship is vaguely disconcerting — especially when Phaidon so aggressively touts the comprehensiveness of the volumes. But the insinuation is clear: the Phaidon brand is enough to confer legitimacy on anything that comes off its presses.

The Table Type Soy Sauce Bottle, circa 1960 (GK Design Group; Kikkoman/Phaidon Publications)

The publisher’s criteria for picking objects come off as somewhat inchoate. The objects must have “esthetic value and a timeless quality,” they must “unite technological advances with beautiful design” and they must have “simplicity, balance and purity of form.” Many of the objects are still industrially produced, many are general household objects (the safety pin, the clothes peg). As the books wear on and we get into the high No. 700s, the everydayness of the objects starts to get fuzzy — the Phaidon experts lean towards cool minimalism and neato technological wizardry as touchstones. This is a collection that starts strong (300-year-old Chinese household scissors) and ends with a fizzle (the Lunar bathroom range by design firm Barber Osgerby). From the sublime to the sublimely unnecessary, Phaidon misses very little, but perhaps includes too much.

The books are exceedingly handsome, if not quite the classics of design that the press materials suggest they may become. The volumes allow two-, four- or six-page layouts for each object. The spreads are elegantly arranged, with text usually placed beside imagery, which includes old patent applications, original sketched designs and glossy production stills. Font size and placement correspond with the images, and often mimic the shape of the object in question — a round lamp, or the sensual curves of a bottle. An extended, two-page entry displaying Wedgwood’s Traditional White bone china set (placed on a stark black background) communicates the understated elegance of the classic crockery. It’s a revelation for someone who drinks Tim Hortons coffee out of a chipped I Hate Mondays mug.

While Phaidon Design Classics could have been a mere picture book for the flavoured martini set, the images are buttressed by well-researched text that helps place the objects in social and historical context, and only occasionally descends into meaningless design twaddle. The early volumes are especially fascinating, when we are told how the 18th-century design of the cast-iron Japanese Arare teapot was linked to a profound change in the social mores associated with the Japanese tea-ceremony — “a symbolic revolt against the more gilded Chanoya ceremony favoured by the ruling classes.” Dissected maps, a common 18th-century educational tool, morphed into design classic No. 005 — the jigsaw puzzle — which then became a popular form of entertainment during the Depression, mostly because they were inexpensive and took some time to complete.

Gibson Les Paul guitar, circa 1952. (Phaidon Publications)

Phaidon’s experts are sometimes whimsical. For example, they link the Garrods metal dustbin, still produced on ancient Victorian machines in a factory outside London, to Oscar the Grouch of Sesame Street fame. There is even the occasional flash of wit: “The textile chair is the ultimate labour-saving device — a machine for maximizing idleness.” The commentary never whittles down to mere factoids; it explains the reasoning behind intelligent, practical design. These books tell us that perfect products exceed their original applications — they become icons, conduits, even dreams. They become part of the fabric of life in the most surprising of ways.

In this, the Phaidon wonks have predominantly chosen objects from the treasure house of Western industrial design — or at least items that are ubiquitous to the billions in the West, rather than the billions in the East. Furthermore, these books seem inordinately impressed by branding. Early in Volume 1, there is the baffling inclusion of the Colman’s Mustard bull’s head brand, which appears to meet the stated design criteria in no way whatsoever. (Who is a brand useful to? Surely not the consumer.) The books often include ad campaigns alongside images of the objects, as though unable to detach the pure utility of a product from its marketing campaign.

This tendency leads to some dubious inclusions, especially in the concluding volume. No one is disputing the popularity or cultural cachet of the iPod, but by including Apple’s first iteration of its flagship MP3 player — a buggy device with a battery that lasted mere minutes — Phaidon betrays a rather slavish tendency for techno-hype rather than a sober adherence to its own selection criteria. Perhaps the iPod Nano, with a flash battery and much increased usability, would have been a more appropriate, if less iconic, inclusion.

Indeed, if Phaidon’s Design Classics books were sold separately, the final volume would be unnecessary. The notion of “classic” — something that withstands the test of time — has changed so radically in a manufacturing era where objects are designed to be obsolete shortly after hitting the shelves. As even a cursory visit to Best Buy will allow, modern consumers are far more interested in technology than utility. Later inclusions in the books — like the $25,000 Bang & Olufsen BeoVision Plasma screen (an increasingly discredited technology, and a stupidly expensive purchase) — display a chronic state of this particular myopia. In trying to posit so far ahead, Phaidon’s experts can’t see past their noses. They end up taking hype — or marketing — at its word. At its worst, Volume 3 of Design Classics is little more than a shopping catalogue for the ultra-hip.

Still, there’s at least 13 pounds of good reading in these volumes, and the cheerful yellow-and-black cover will make a fine ornament for your Aalto coffee table or your Billy bookshelf. They also provide an unexpected ego boost. At least they did for me. I counted at least five design classics in my apartment. Unfortunately, that includes safety pins, clothes pegs and an old Spiderman jigsaw puzzle.

Richard Poplak is a writer based in Toronto.

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