Henry Dreyfuss on survival forms

The industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss:

By embodying a familiar pattern in an otherwise wholly new and possibly radical form, we can make the unusual acceptable to many people who would otherwise reject it.

A simple, practical example of this may be found in the unnecessary numerals that today adorn the faces of most clocks and watches. I call these numerals unnecessary because children as a rule learn to tell time before they can distinguish one number from another. They do this by memorizing the positions of the hands on the clock dial, and it doesn’t make any difference whether the numerals are Arabic or Roman or are represented by dots. Yet it has been demonstrated over and over again that popular-priced clocks and watches without numerals on their faces simply don’t sell in quantity. Unnecessary or not, the numbers constitute a survival form that most people demand. Things like electric toasters, coffeemakers, typewriters, and fountain pens often bear survival forms that manufacturers think are necessary or desirable. The chrome band on the base of a typewriter is, for instance, a modern version of an older molding, and the stylized decoration on the side of an electric toaster is a modern replacement for the rosebud or fleur-de-lis that appeared on some household article Grandfather used.

The purist is likely to throw up his hands at the thought of such a restriction and accuse the designer of artistic blasphemy. True, we are straying from the path of utter purity when we consider anything but pure form, proportion, line, and color, but we have larger horizons than the purist need consider. Ours is the ever-changing battleground of the department store rather than the Elysian fields of the museum.

Designing for People (1955)

The “survival form” seems to be more or less synonymous with the skeuomorph, and I would imagine that Dreyfuss’s reasoning here was of great interest to Apple in its work on iOS. I have no strong feelings about survival forms or skeuomorphs in general: they can be beautiful, charming, and witty (the now-gone microphone for iOS’s Voice Memos) or absurd (see below). The individual instance is all.


[The pebbled leather and ragged paper of the original iOS Notes, as seen on my first-generation iPad.]

Tiffany telephone dialer

Cooper-Hewitt’s Object of the Day: the Tiffany telephone dialer, a perfect mid-century gift, immortalized in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

If blogging is dead, I hope no one at Cooper-Hewitt finds out. I read Object of the Day daily and recommend it with enthusiasm.

Separated at birth?

The actor Myron McCormick and the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. We saw McCormick in an episode of Naked City the other night. Add a few inches of height and a soprano saxophone, and we might have been looking at Lacy.

If your idea of the soprano saxophone has been brought to you by the letter G, try the letters B, C, and L. With the first track, the soprano arrives at 1:55. It’s worth waiting for.

Related posts
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi
Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt
Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov
Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln
Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks
Joseph McCarthy and Ted Cruz

J. Logan Govers

[A logical sequel to the previous post. Click for a larger view.]

J. Logan Gover (1908–1986) was an east-central Illinois insurance agent, real estate broker, and civic leader. Many businesses used to give out calendars: I think it’s safe to assume that J. Logan Gover gave out glasses. I bought these three a few years ago at an estate sale. A strange and happy part of the story: Elaine’s quartet was to play for the wedding of a Gover granddaughter, a few days after the sale. Elaine told her about these glasses, and she and her fiancé came by and bought dozens.

An eBay seller has a J. Logan Gover glass with a fourth picture. I wonder how many J. Logan Govers there were.

[Snow is cheaper than Silk.]

Organization man?

[Click for a larger view.]

I found these photographs in a paperback copy of William H. Whyte’s 1956 book The Organization Man. The photographs, stamped April 6, 1960, were in an envelope bearing the name of a Lubbock, Texas, photography studio. Was the man in these photographs an organization man? Or was he playing the part? Did he buy the book looking for a way out?

Whyte’s book makes interesting reading in 2013. From the chapter “The Practical Curriculum”:

By default, the anti-intellectual sector of education has been allowed to usurp the word “democratic” to justify the denaturing of the curriculum, and while liberal arts people may win arguments on this score, the others won the war long ago. Once the uneducated could have the humility of ignorance. Now they are given degrees and put in charge, and this delusion of learning will produce consequences more critical than the absence of it.

I return to my pessimistic forecast. Look ahead to 1985. Those who will control a good part of the educational plant will be products themselves of the most stringently anti-intellectual training in the country. Nor will the laymen be out of tune with the vocationalists; to judge by the new suburbia the bulk of middle-class parents of 1985 will know no other standards to evaluate education of their children than those of the social-adjustment type of schooling. And who will be picking the schools to endow and sitting on the boards of trustees? More and more it will be the man of The Organization, the graduate of the business school — the “modern man,” in sum, that his education was so effectively designed to bring about.

A related post
A list found in an old paperback

Canned Heat and Cooper-Hewitt

Cooper-Hewitt’s Object of the Day today: a 1968 concert poster for Canned Heat at the Fillmore West. The artist is Lee Conklin.

Related reading
All Canned Heat posts (Pinboard)

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, December 16, 2013.]


[Hi and Lois corrected, December 16, 2013.]

Good answer, Hi. But I had to do something about the faulty mirror — or is that a vampire bracelet?

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

[All Hi and Lois repairs made with OEM parts and Seashore, an open-source image editor for Mac.]

A Naked City Mongol

[“Goodbye, My Lady Love,” Naked City, January 27, 1959. Click for a larger view.]

That’s Detective Jimmy Halloran (James Franciscus) and a Mongol pencil. It’s the ferrule that gives it away. Here’s another Naked City Mongol.

Yes, there are all kinds of ways to enjoy television. This post involves a highly specific application of the studies-in-material-culture approach.

Related reading
All Mongol pencil posts
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[There are eight million pencils in the Naked City. This has been one of them.]

Growing optimism

I have sometimes described myself as “cautiously pessimistic.” Ha. But I am an optimist at heart.

Last night, my daughter Rachel told me that she thinks I’ve grown more optimistic over the years. I sure hope she’s right!

An Aldine House title page

[Illustration by R. W. A. Rouse. Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. (London: Aldine House, 1898.]

From a page about Everyman’s Library: “Aldine House, the offices of J. M. Dent and Sons, was located on Bedford Street in the Covent Garden district of London,” named of course after the great Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, founder of the Aldine Press.

Aldine has another meaning for me, as a joking adjective that described my great friend Aldo Carrasco. Yes, we knew about Aldus Manutius. We were Renaissance humanists, all the way.

[Gray’s poem is here. As for Robert William Arthur Rouse, one auction page gives his dates as 1867–1951. Another describes him as flourishing between 1882 and 1929. The image is from the British Library’s Flickr pages.]