As most of you are probably aware by now, I’m very fond of midcentury salesman sample catalogs. In addition to enjoying the catalogs themselves, I also like thinking about how they were used. I usually picture a suit-clad salesman marching into a retail shop, briefcase in hand, and then pulling his company’s latest catalog out of the briefcase and going over the new product line with the shop owner.

Ah, but what if the briefcase is the catalog?

That’s the situation with a remarkable artifact that was recently given to me by a longtime reader. It’s a salesman sample catalog for the Monarch Match Company, which made matchbooks (or, as they say in the industry, “book matches”). But instead of being housed in a conventional loose-leaf binder, the catalog pages are in a briefcase with a seven-ring binder mechanism built into the interior of the case itself!

As you can see on that first page, the Monarch Match Company was headquartered in San Jose. The company operated for a relatively short period, from 1946 through 1966. This catalog appears to be from 1956, with a few updates from 1957 through the early 1960s.

That was a peak time for matches in America — pre-Surgeon General’s Report, pre-disposable lighters (those would come in 1964 and 1973, respectively). The matchbook, which had been patented in 1892, had emerged in the 20th century as an inexpensive vehicle for advertising, with all sorts of businesses giving away freebie matchbooks emblazoned with their name, logo, phone number, and so on. So match manufacturers like Monarch weren’t really in the match biz; they were in the advertising biz. As a result, the Monarch catalog has almost nothing to say about the quality of the company’s matches and instead has lots of chatter about how a well-designed matchbook can be “your silent salesman” and serve as “your own ad right in the customer’s pocket.” The catalog’s introductory text actually goes so far as to say, “The matches themselves are incidental, being merely the MEDIUM whereby you make certain the message you wish to convey is read by the folks you want to reach.”

So let’s imagine a Monarch salesman striding into a store in his sales territory while carrying this briefcase. The case is truly brief, measuring 10½ inches high by 12 inches wide — smaller than the standard 12-by-18-inch attaché size — and has the company name and location printed on the cover in gold lettering. It appears that the salesman’s name was also printed, but that line of type, sadly, has been removed.

Also of note: The briefcase’s plastic handle is imprinted with faux stitching, to simulate the look of a leather handle — a design trend I wrote about last year. Interesting to see that this phenomenon dates back at least to the mid-1950s.

But enough about the case — let’s talk about the catalog, which is spectacular. It features dozens of real matchbook covers, complete with striking surfaces, glued onto the catalog pages. Here are some typical two-page spreads, showing various designs on white, yellow, and “Colorama” backgrounds (note also that the catalog page numbers are shown in little matchbook icons at the lower-outside corner of each page):

These are the most basic options offered in the catalog. Here are some other specialty design elements that Monarch’s customers could choose from:

Metallic Colors

You say you want something flashier than the standard colors? Try putting your ad on a metallic background, or have it printed in metallic ink:

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Earlier this week I wrote about “Lexi,” the woman who lived in New Lexington, Ohio, about 100 years ago and kept a journal in which she obsessively logged every piece of mail she sent or received over a 10-year period.

It’s not clear why Lexi felt the need to maintain a record of her postal activities, but her story struck a chord with Inconspicuous Consumption reader Bob Andrews, who posted the following comment on that article:

[T]hanks to Lexi, I don’t feel so bad about keeping car gas fill-up journals for the last 40+ years — journals that I’ve never once had the need to refer to but have kept anyway.

I was intrigued, so I emailed Bob and asked if he could send a few photos. That’s him in the photo shown above, holding his current gas journal. Here are some representative pages:

As you can see, each entry consists of four data points: the date, the odometer reading at the time of the fill-up, the total price, and the number of gallons purchased. It’s a collection of sorts!

I had questions, so I asked Bob for an interview. Here’s a transcript of our discussion, edited for length and clarity:

Inconspicuous Consumption: Do you recall when you started doing this?

Bob Andrews: I do. The first vehicle I bought that was mine — not something handed down from my dad or something like that — was an ’81 Corolla in ’81. So I started then.

IC: Whoa — that’s 45 years ago!

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Exactly 101 years ago today — April 21st, 1925 — a woman who lived in or around the town of New Lexington, Ohio, received three pieces of mail. One was a card from a woman named Merle; she also received a letter from Mary W. and another letter from Marjorie W.

That same day, the New Lexington woman — let’s call her Lexi — mailed a letter to Clare McD. The following day, April 22nd, she sent a letter to Kim. The day after that, April 23rd, she sent a letter to Mary Wilson and also sent a letter and some flower seeds to Marjorie (presumably the same “Mary W.” and “Marjorie W.” from whom she’d received letters two days earlier) .

We know all this because Lexi kept a logbook, running almost 200 pages long, in which she meticulously recorded every piece of mail she received and sent from the start of 1917 through August of 1926, creating a nearly decade-long archival record of her postal activity. A quick flip-through video of the book is shown above, and here’s the two-page spread that shows the letters I just mentioned:

As you can see, the pages are headed “Received” on the left and “I sent” on the right. The numbered arrows correspond to the following entries:

1. “A card from Merle Apr. 21”

2. “A letter from Mary W. Apr. 21”

3. “A letter from Marjorie W. Apr. 21”

4. “A letter to Clare McD Apr 21”

5. “A letter to Kim Apr. 22”

6. “A letter to Mary Wilson Apr. 23”

7. “A letter and flower seeds to Marjorie Apr 23”

It’s one of the most brilliantly obsessive artifacts I’ve ever encountered. Lots of people save letters, but maintaining a record of your letters really takes things to the next level. I mean, I’ve written before about how I love mail, but Lexi must have really loved mail.

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When I was growing up in a small town on Long Island, I would wait for the school bus each morning at a street corner near my family’s house. There was a telephone pole installed at that corner, and the pole was a popular spot for people to post signs about upcoming yard sales, “Lost Dog” flyers, “Handyman Available” notices, and the like. As a result, a portion of the pole’s surface was completely encrusted with nails, tacks, and heavy-duty staples, sort of like the industrial version of an everything bagel.

Once I noticed this phenomenon, I became fascinated by it. I didn’t really have the language for this as a child, but I think I saw the array of hardware on the pole as a form of accidental abstract art. I also thought about how each nail or staple represented a sign that had been affixed to the pole, and how each one had been affixed by someone who was probably one of my neighbors. In short, each metal fastener represented a potential story.

That street corner is shown above. There’s still a pole there (it might even be the same one I grew up with1), and if you zoom in on the photo you’ll see that it’s still covered in nails and staples.

I hadn’t thought about any of that that in many years, probably because I’ve lived my entire adult life in New York City, most of which doesn’t have utility poles because our phone lines, power lines, and so on are mostly buried underground (and even in the neighborhoods that do have old-fashioned utility poles, the poles tend to be positioned along property lines in people’s backyards, not on the street), so flyers tend to be taped to metal lampposts, not nailed or stapled to wooden poles.

But my interest in utility pole surfaces was recently rekindled by IC reader Kurt Rozek (who you may remember from his improvised fix of a street sign typo, which I wrote about a few months ago). He’s spent more than a decade documenting the nails and other hardware on a pole in Allouez, Wisconsin. Here’s the pole in its natural habitat, at the northeast corner of Webster Avenue and Hoffman Road:

Although you can’t see it in that long view, the pole’s surface is full of nails, screws, and staples, and Kurt’s reaction to it was similar to my childhood response. “I was intrigued by all of the different nails and screws, the different sizes, nail heads, textures, etc.,” he recently told me. “I thought it looked really neat, almost artsy as opposed to being an eyesore.”

That led Kurt to take his first photo of the pole, on January 10th, 2014:

“I then became curious to see if much changed over time,” says Kurt. So almost exactly four years later — on January 17th, 2018 — he returned to take another photo of the same spot on the pole:

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I really enjoy seeing how things are made, so it makes sense that I’ve always loved factory tours. Over the years, I’ve toured facilities that make candy bars, pretzels, potato chips, Tabasco sauce, ice cream cones, maple syrup, beer, whiskey, farm equipment, baseball bats, footballs, cigarettes, glass, musical instruments, Brannock Devices, Barbicide, New York City street signs, and probably a bunch of other things I can’t remember at the moment.

Those are all fairly mainstream products. But I recently toured a factory that makes something a bit more specialized — something I’d never even thought about until a few months ago: fabric flowers.

Fabric flowers, which are most often made from silk (although sometimes from cotton, wool, or other textiles), are used by dressmakers, milliners, film and theater costume designers, wedding planners, event planers, visual merchandisers, and pretty much anyone else who needs durable, lifelike flowers that won’t wilt and die. Hundreds of American companies used to make them, primarily in New York City, but the industry is now based largely in Asia. One U.S. manufacturer remains, however: M&S Schmalberg, which has been operating in New York since 1916 and is still headquartered in what remains of Manhattan’s garment district.

I became aware of M&S Schmalberg (and of fabric flowers in general) last October, when I saw that they were offering a factory tour. I wasn’t able to attend that one, but I jumped at the chance when they offered another one last month. And in a lucky break, there was only one other person in my tour “group,” so the two of us had a very personal tour experience with company co-owner Adam Brand, whose great-great-uncle founded M&S over a century ago.

Brand spent a good 40 minutes or so just sitting down with us in the company’s reception area, giving us the M&S backstory, answering our many questions, and getting to know us a bit. Then he brought us into the inventory area, which was filled with stacks of boxes, each containing various flowers that had already been made.

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Note: This post is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul

The German movie director Werner Herzog is deservedly famous for his filmmaking prowess. But if you’ve ever heard him narrate one of his documentaries (Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, many others), you know that he also has one of the world’s most compelling voices — a voice that’s at once otherworldly, theatrical, severe, and hypnotic.

I recently got to hear that voice in person, because Herzog was a speaker at the Brooklyn Public Library’s “Night in the Library,” an annual program of presentations based on a specific theme. This year’s theme was math (or, more specifically, “The Philosophy of Mathematics”). And via machinations that I can only imagine, they somehow managed to get Herzog to deliver the keynote address.

It’s a cliché to say that certain people have such amazing speaking voices that you’d gladly listen to them recite the multiplication tables. Herzog is definitely one of those people for me, and there he was, maybe 20 feet away from me, literally talking about multiplication tables:

I’ve mentioned before that I’m particularly fond of prime numbers, so it was fun to learn that Herzog feels similarly:

At one point Herzog addressed the quasi-mathematical topic of numerology (i.e., astrology, tarot, etc.), which was probably the funniest and most Herzogian part of the speech. I started filming just after he said, “Now we must talk about numerology”:

The official title of the speech was “Mathematics and the Sublime.” Here’s the part where he addressed that subject directly:

Herzog’s full speech lasted about 35 minutes. Here’s how he wrapped it up:

Okay, so he didn’t quite stick the landing with that “Dismissed!,” but it was still a really fun capper.

People, I have to tell you: Watching the one and only Werner freaking Herzog hold forth on the subject of mathematics — in the lobby of a library in Brooklyn! — was a positively surreal experience. It’s almost certainly going to rank as the best live performance of any kind that I’ll see this year. Hope you got as big a kick out of it as I did.

Inconspicuous News Roundup

• A French architecture studio has installed four unconventional table tennis tables at a school as a way of encouraging children to come up with their own rules and strategies. Details here. (From Audrey Kalman)

• Here’s a good article by a British guy who collects mailboxes from around the world. (From Elizabeth Fox)

• Speaking of niche-specificity, there’s a blog devoted to sightings of barometers in movies and TV shows. (From The Art of Noticing’s Rob Walker)

• Did you know that some people in New Zealand live without their stomachs? It’s true!

• My friend Nina has been traveling in Taiwan, where she spotted these excellent stick figures in peril:

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

Note: This post includes a small grouping of photographs that are NSFW. — Paul

A little over a year ago, I drove up to Old Greenwich, Connecticut, for the Ephemera Society of America’s annual Ephemera Fair, where I saw loads of cool vintage stuff. I was looking forward to going back for this year’s edition of the Fair, especially once I learned that it would be taking place on March 21st, which happens to be my birthday. Perfect!

Just to clarify our terms here: In the collectibles world, ephemera usually refers to paper artifacts. That can mean postcards, print ads, books, magazines, catalogs, scrapbooks, diaries, brochures, ticket stubs, photographs, matchbook covers, stock certificates, report cards, menus, marriage licenses, business ledgers, passports, matchbook covers, receipts, wills, maps, and a lot more.

Just like last year, I saw loads of interesting items. Here are some of them:

Animal-Based Matchbox Label Collection

One of the first things that caught my eye was a scrapbook filled with vintage matchbox labels — with each page featuring a different animal! The photo above shows the “lion page,” and there were similar pages for elephants, reindeer, horses, and more (you can click on the thumbnails to see larger versions):

Horse Hair Scrapbook

Speaking of animals, I was blown away by this scrapbook featuring locks of hair from various horses — with beautifully handwritten notations to boot. What an interesting obsession to have! Here are some additional pics:

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Collection Agency, a series in which I interview unusual collectors, is an occasional feature of Inconspicuous Consumption. You can see previous installments here.

This post is not paywalled. It includes lots of photos of relatively small items; if possible, try to read it on a computer instead of a phone. Enjoy! — Paul

I recently became aware of a guy named Michael Horvich. That’s him in the photo above, posing in the bedroom of his condo in Evanston, Illinois. As you can see, the bookshelves behind him hold a lot more than just books. Here’s a better view, so you can see everything Horvich has displayed on those shelves:

There are lots of collections there: hands, elephants, trolls, teddy bears, Jesuses, Buddhas, bead strings, and more. But that doesn’t tell the full story, because Horvich — a retired elementary school teacher who turns 81 today (happy birthday, Michael!) — is a serious collector, and no single image can capture the scope of his stuff. He refers to his home as Michael’s Museum, and every bit of it is filled with things he’s collected over the past half-century. I suspect you have to be there in person to get the full effect, but here are some additional photos that at least provide a sense of the layout (click on any thumbnail to see full-size versions):

And that’s just the home version of Michael’s Museum. Since 2011, the Chicago Children’s Museum has had a permanent exhibit called “Michael’s Museum: A Curious Collection of Tiny Treasures,” which consists of 105 collections — totaling tens or even hundreds of thousands of individual objects — that Horvich donated.

In short, Horvich is no ordinary collector. Nor is he just a collector — he’s also a poet, a writer, a photographer, a bookbinder, and a lot more. His website announces itself as the home of “Michael A. Horvich Creativity Ltd.,” which sums up his approach to life. But collecting seems to be the cornerstone of his creative enterprise.

I like interviewing collectors, so of course I wanted to talk to Horvich. But instead of talking about his collections, which I figured he’d already done countless times, I thought he’d be the ideal person for a conversation about the larger phenomenon of collecting. Here’s the transcript of a video call we recently had, edited for length and clarity:

Inconspicuous Consumption: You are obviously a formidable collector. Do you consider yourself to be a professional collector?

Michael Horvich: No, it’s just what I do. It’s who I am and part of my life.

IC: What are some of the things you collect?

Horvich: Bakelite pieces, Indigenous people miniatures, bowling pin sets, books — distinguishing between teeny books, small books, and little books, all those distinctions. Hmmm, I’m thinking. I have an urban dollhouse. It’s like a high-rise presentation of the dollhouse. There’s game piece movers…

IC: Like the race car in Monopoly, or something like that?

Horvich: Right, right. But there’s like about 300 of them — different colors, shapes, textures, purpose.

IC: Your collections aren’t just about you — some of them also touch other people’s lives because they’re exhibited publicly, like at the Chicago Children’s Museum.

Horvich: Yes. They get about a half a million visitors a year, and they tell me that Michael’s Museum is one of their most popular exhibits.

IC: Why do you think your collections are of interest to so many other people?

Horvich: I think part of it is because it’s a collection of collections, where any one object or even one collection doesn’t hold too much importance, so people can make of it what they want. It’s not like going in the water-play area and pretending that you’re in the water, or going in the store area and letting the kids pretend they’re running a grocery store. Michael’s Museum just is.

IC: What do you think is the value of children learning about collecting?

Horvich: I think everybody collects, including children. Even if you can imagine some of the poorest children with the most difficult life, you’ll find that they collect interesting rocks off the street, or things that are important to them.

IC: And do you think that’s some sort of pattern-recognition thing that we have as a species, or an instinct to impose order and systems onto the world around us?

Horvich: I think it’s intellectual, cognitive, emotional, and visceral. And so for kids, classifying, categorizing, labeling, sorting, those are all very important activities of learning.

And that never really stops. One morning when I was at the Children’s Museum, I saw an eight-month-old little girl, not even a year old. She was leaning against the glass of one of the display cabinets and pointing at each item in the display. There was something about them that intrigued her. Later that afternoon, I came back from lunch, same cabinet, and there was an 80-year-old woman doing the exact same thing.

IC: How many of something do you need to have for you to consider it a collection?

Horvich: Two. Around the museum, there are “Michael’s Quotes,” and one of those is that it takes two items to make a collection.

IC: In addition to being a collector, do you think of yourself as a curator? And if so, what’s the distinction?

Horvich: Definitely, definitely. My collections are not just helter-skelter — they’re all curated, their arrangement is carefully thought out, how they look when you first see them, how you can interact with them. People have said that it’s not just a collection of stuff, but it’s more like a small shrine that’s in honor of that stuff.

IC: What do you consider to be the difference between a collector and a hoarder?

Horvich: Oh, that’s easy, because I’ve written about that. In some ways, collecting and hoarding have nothing to do with each other, except maybe the volume of items. With a collector, the items are important. They have meaning, they have purpose. It’s not about being afraid of being hungry; it’s not because of being afraid of having less. It’s a healthy way of looking at things.

Whereas hoarding starts to border on unhealthy and in many cases can actually be dangerous, health-wise and physical-wise, to the person who’s hoarding. There is such an emotional attachment to things that, much like alcoholism, it starts to inhibit and slow down the person’s ability to exist in a healthy, normal fashion.

And again, it has to do with the respect and the reason for the items. I have a lot of stuff, but I don’t have 15, 20 toasters that I ordered from Amazon and haven’t opened yet. Almost every surface is in my condo is covered, but people tell me it’s calm, it’s tranquil, it’s peaceful, it’s meditative, even though there’s all this stuff around.

IC: When did you begin to have the urge to collect? Does it go back to your childhood, or was there a specific incident that triggered your collecting instinct?

Horvich: Ever since I was a little boy, I collected. My earliest memory is that a friend and I would sit on a stairway that led to his apartment and look through a cigar box filled with things that his mother helped him collect: sparkly things, broken jewelry, rhinestones, gems. Not worth anything, but I remember thinking how wonderful that collection was. I think that had a big influence on me.

At a certain point, maybe when I was 30, 35, I did a mental exercise and said, “Okay, what if there was a fire and I had to save just one thing?” So I put together a cigar box with my most important things in it. And again, that reminded me of that childhood experience. Today, what would happen if there was a fire? I would probably just grab the cat and leave, because in some ways it would be easier to lose everything than to try and choose.

IC: Why do you think some people are drawn to collecting, as you were from an early age, and others aren’t? Is it almost like a genetic thing? Why do you think some people sort of have that button waiting to be pushed and others don’t?

Horvich: That’s interesting — I don’t know. I mean, it might be fun to think about it being somewhat genetic. It might also be interesting to think about it being like nurture versus nature. Maybe your mom and dad helped keep you busy with all these things you could play with, so in adulthood maybe it’s a way of holding onto your youth. Or maybe it’s a fear of mortality — if I have a lot of things, then I can hold onto them as I’m being taken away by the angel of death. I don’t know.

But as I mentioned earlier, one thing I believe — and some people might argue with me about this — is that everyone collects, even if not everyone does it the same way. One time I was giving a talk to a group of about 25 people, and I asked, “How many of you collect?” Some people raised their hands and some didn’t. And I told them, “By the time we’re done here, when I ask that question again, I’m going to guess that everybody will raise their hand.” I said, “How many of you collect memories that you can tell stories about? How many of you collect photographs from vacations? If you you like to cook, do you collect recipes or cookbooks?” It doesn’t have to be a lot of little things, it doesn’t have to be things that you were given or that you purchased. You might say, “Oh no, I don’t collect anything,” and I’d look at your desk and say, “Well, what are all those pens?” “Oh, those are just different pens that I use — sometimes I like a thicker pen or a finer-line pen.” And I’d say, “Collection.”

IC: That’s interesting, because my next question was going to be “Do you get along with people who aren’t collectors?” But your answer to that is that everyone’s a collector.

Horvich: Yes.

IC: Can collecting be an art form, or at least be a form of creativity? And do you consider it that for yourself?

Horvich: Definitely. In many ways, my home is my studio. It’s my museum, but it’s also my studio. I consider it my art, the art of display, the art of collecting and curating.

Now, maybe you could go to school to become a curator, or take a course in display, design, and layout. I’ve never done any of that — it just comes to me kind of naturally. That’s more of a passion. Maybe it’s my way of still playing with things, like a child. I have a couple other friends who are avid collectors and we talk about playing with our things.

IC: That’s funny. Just last night I had drinks with a friend, and I brought along this little tin can I’d recently acquired, and I said, “I brought something for show and tell,” which of course is a children’s activity. Years ago I even hosted a monthly object-based live event called Show & Tell. So I definitely relate to that notion of childlike delight coming from our relationship with objects.

But here’s a question: Until about 30 years ago, the only way to really collect old things was to go to yard sales, garage sales, flea markets, estate sales, antiques shops, and so on, and you’d piece together a collection one or two items at a time. Nowadays, you can go on eBay, search on “vintage beer tray” or whatever, and boom, you can have an instant collection. In your mind, does the ease of finding things in a digitally connected world devalue the resulting collection, or even devalue the very practice of collecting, or is it just another example of people adapting to changes in technology?

Horvich: Getting a full collection of something all at once is not something I’d do myself — I like the search, the excitement, the uniqueness, the scarcity — but that doesn’t make it less important. If that’s what someone wants to do, that’s fine.

But for me — well, I have several jars full of beach glass, and I found each piece of glass myself on the beach, one at a time. And there was this garage sale I went to where they had two or three jars full of beach glass. I was half-tempted, but then I thought, no, it’s not the same.

IC: We live in a very materialist culture — so much so that people sometimes refer to shopping as “retail therapy.” And that has led to the rise of certain anti-materialist counter-movements, like the decluttering movement or Marie Kondo-style minimalism — which is also sometimes described as therapy. I also keep hearing the phrase that people should seek experiences, not things. What is your response to all that?

Horvich: I think everything you said is true. I consider myself a Buddhist, and so I have given a lot of thought to the idea that you’re not supposed to become attached to things. Acquiring stuff, shopping just to shop, is not collecting. It’s not attributing or respecting or understanding or learning about the objects that you’re getting. That’s on the continuum towards not normal or healthy, like hoarding.

IC: Some people might say it’s very normal. I mean, it is literally the cultural norm in our society.

Horvich: Yeah. Maybe the definition should be argued over, but shopping just to cheer yourself up is on the continuum toward hoarding, whether the person wants to admit that or not.

IC: Do you ever get something new for one of your collections to cheer yourself up?

Horvich: Sure, but I also have a huge list of other things that cheer me up — I don’t need to shop. Sometimes I’ll go to an antiques shop and leave without anything. And there are other times where I’m thinking, “Well, I don’t want to go to the antiques shop today because I don’t really want or need anything.” So I’ll stay home and read a book or cook something or do something else to cheer myself up.

IC: When I mentioned that phrase about people embracing experiences, not things, you rolled your eyes. Why did you do that?

Horvich: I think people should experience everything. So to me, it’s not an “either or” situation. Collecting, curating, displaying — that’s an experience, too. So I reject “experiences vs. things” as a false choice.

IC: You’ve mentioned going to an antiques shop. Do you only look for collectibles at brick-and-mortar shops, or do you also poke around on websites like eBay and Etsy?

Horvich: I love to touch. I love to be at the shop. I love to discover. I don’t like as much to use eBay or the internet, but I’ll do it if there’s a particular item I’m seeking that I haven’t been able to find.

IC: I don’t mean to bring up an unpleasant topic, but as you get older, have you made plans or arrangements for what will happen to your collections after you’re gone? After all, as the cliché goes, you can’t take it with you.

Horvich: Yes, I definitely have made arrangements. My niece and nephew are the curators of my estate and will get my condo and its contents. We’ve talked about it — sometimes we’ll do what we call the “death walk,” where I’ll tell the stories and say, “This is a one-of-a-kind thing, it was $500 when I bought it, today it’s probably worth $5,000,” just so they know.

But I’ve told them that I don’t expect them to turn the condo into a mausoleum in my name. I said, “If there are things that you value, keep them; if not, get rid of them, sell them.” Since they’ll own the condo, they’ll have plenty of time to get antiques dealers and people who will offer them good prices.

They’ll also be approaching the Children’s Museum to see if they’d like to add to their collections, and I’ve already had conversations about that with the museum administration. So everything will be accounted for. In some ways, having everything go back into the stream and being available to other people for other reasons is kind of exciting.

Paul here. I have to say, I love that last comment from Horvich about other people getting to enjoy his stuff. And that’s on top of all the stuff he donated to the Children’s Museum! Some collectors can be very selfish — like, “Mine, mine, mine!” — but Horvich, for all his possessions, clearly has a strong spirit of generosity. As a collector myself, I find that pretty inspiring.

Big thanks (and happy birthday!) to Michael Horvich for sharing his story with us. You can learn more about him on his website.

Inconspicuous News Roundup

• Here’s a nice tribute to the restaurant guest check, which has become an increasingly endangered species in the digital era.

• Reader Matthew Algeo notes that there’s something very strange going on with the center ice design at the NCAA men’s hockey tournament. Check out this wayward comma:

• New stick figure in peril! Reader Janet Joachim spotted this one on a snow blower:

• Here’s another stick figure — not necessarily in peril, but still worth sharing:

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

Note: This article includes several video clips that are essential to the story, so I strongly urge you to read the web version of the article, not the emailed version. — Paul

It’s hard to express how much I love the amazing artwork shown above. The colors, the textures, the geometry, the symmetry — so good! Even better, it’s made from the simplest of everyday objects: toothpicks, paper clips, and Q-tips. Better still, those objects rhyme: picks, clips, and tips!

Here’s a short but informative time-lapse video showing how the artwork was made:

The artist who made this piece is named Adam Hillman. I just became aware of him (he was featured in an article I recently read), but he’s been creating similar works for a long time, most of which lean heavily on those same elements — color, texture, geometry, symmetry, and everyday objects. Here are some additional examples:

Lollipops

Toothpicks

Bendy Straws

Gummy Bears

Cereal

Colored Pencils

Pins

Obviously, Hillman gets a lot of mileage out of food and small implements. But his range is wider than that. This next piece, made from phone charging cords, is basically all-white but is loaded with palpable texture:

Imagine how much obsessive precision it must have taken for Hillman to cut all those cords to just the right length and then get everything laid out just so. (I think we can safely say that he does not have a cat in his studio.) Similarly, it must have been a seriously painstaking task to burn all the matchsticks to the exact specifications needed for this next piece:

This next one might be my favorite. Think about how many pennies Hillman must have sorted through in order to find the right patinas for this color gradation:

The more I look at Hillman’s work, the more I think that the common theme isn’t actually geometry or colors or anything like that. Instead, I think the throughline here is the obsessive drive to organize things. When presented with a bunch of stuff, most of us just see, you know, a bunch of stuff. But Hillman sees a pattern waiting to happen. And once he envisions it, he feels the need to create it.

I don’t have Hillman’s visual talent (or patience), but I can relate to the organizing imperative. Think of some of the things I’m particularly enthusiastic about: uniforms, catalogs, style guides, collecting. All of those are about the satisfaction that comes from creating programmatic order out of chaos. I suspect many IC readers can relate to that as well.

You can see more of Hillman’s work on Facebook, on Instagram, and in this video:

Once I started looking at a lot of Hillman’s work, a bunch of other obsession-oriented artists started showing up in my Facebook feed. One who appears to be somewhat famous, although I wasn’t previously familiar with him, is a British painter named Noj Barker. He’s a bit of a specialist: He just paints dots. Like, lots and lots of dots:

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Return of the Calcuphile

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And here’s the thing: If it can happen to Frank Lloyd Wright, it can happen to anyone. It turns out that there are lots of other buildings out there with inverted letters, so I want to take a look at some of those today.

Let’s start with this photo, sent in by reader Alan Rutherford, showing an apartment building on Northeast Glisan Street in Portland, Oregon:

Yipes! The large-scale lettering makes that inverted “N” seem particularly egregious. You’d think it would be hard to miss, and yet the work crew that was installing the lettering somehow managed to bungle it. (If you’ve always wanted to live in a building with a huge upside-down “N,” look here.)

As it happens, upside-down “N”s, with the telltale serif at lower right instead of upper left, are among the most common inverted letters, and they sometimes end up in surprisingly prominent places. For 26 years there was one on a sign welcoming drivers on Interstate 25 to the city of Colorado Springs:

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Note: This post is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul

As you all know, I’m a big fan of good design. But I recently learned of a project devoted to bad design, and I can’t get enough of it.

Welcome to The Uncomfortable, the brilliantly named brainchild of a Greek architect named Katerina Kamprani, who specializes in designing “deliberately inconvenient everyday objects.” My favorite is a fork with a chain handle (shown above), but almost all of her creations are clever, funny, and thought-provoking. Sometimes you have to see examples of bad design to make you appreciate how much we take for granted about good design.

Although I didn’t learn about The Uncomfortable until about a month ago (a reference to it showed up in my Facebook feed, a rare instance of the algorithm enhancing my life), Kamprani began the project back in 2011 and has gotten a fair amount of attention for it in Europe, where she’s had over a dozen museum and gallery exhibitions. The impetus for this success, oddly enough, was a series of failures: Prior to launching The Uncomfortable, Kamprani had dropped out of a master’s program and been fired from a job at an ad agency. She wanted to do something that involved humor but was finding architecture, which she’d studied as an undergrad, to be too stuffy and serious.

“Then I thought, what if objects were actually designed for a bad user experience, instead of a good one?” she recalled in a 2018 TED talk. “That was my ‘eureka’ moment. I finally found something smart and funny that has no responsibility to be practical. That was the core idea: to not be practical.” As she later said in a video interview with the website Culture Trip, “Basically, the project is a rebellious act. Whatever I learned in design school, I went and did exactly the opposite.”

The Uncomfortable has its own website, where you can see dozens of the farcically impractical objects Kamprani has designed. Some exist only as 3D renderings (most of them strikingly realistic), while others have been brought to life as real-world prototypes. Because they’re all based on familiar forms — a fork, a wine glass, a watering can — they feel oddly subversive, as if Kamprani had mischievously scrambled their DNA to create a world of mutant products. Many of them, despite their functional deficits, are undeniably beautiful, providing a good reminder that aesthetics and utility don’t always align.

I wanted to interview Kamprani, but I figured she was probably tired of repeatedly talking about The Uncomfortable’s origins (having done a jillion interviews about Uni Watch over the years, I can relate), so I tried to come up with questions about how she and the project have evolved over the course of 15 years. Here’s a transcript of a video conversation we recently had, edited for length and clarity:

Inconspicuous Consumption: Do you still consider this to be an active project? Are you still creating inconvenient designs?

Katerina Kamprani: I mean, sparsely. I do still create these things — I created something like this the past new year — so yeah, it’s active, but not at the same pace as it once was.

IC: Are you surprised that the project is still going after so many years? Did you ever expect or plan for it to have such a long life?

Kamprani: I had no idea. As each success was happening, I was surprised by every step. Now I’m no longer surprised if I get an invitation for an exhibition or a request for an article or an interview. But when it was first getting started, I was like, oh, wow. I just started it for fun, so I didn’t expect for it to still be going on, to still have so much success.

IC: How many of these designs have you created so far?

Kamprani: Maybe 50 or 60. I’m not sure. I’m not counting, really.

IC: How many of those are digital renderings, and how many have resulted in real-world prototypes?

Kamprani: I would say it’s about half and half. For the first few years, I did only digital renders, and I was very hesitant about actually making objects. I thought the renders were nice, so why do we need objects that are useless? There was no point.

Then, in 2015, were the first physical products, which was very limited for three objects through collaboration with an ad agency. And then in 2017, I think, was my first exhibition, so I produced as many as I could with as much money as I had for that exhibition. Since then, I haven’t made many more.

IC: Are there any that have been produced in larger quantities than just the one single prototype?

Kamprani: Most of them are just one, but there are a few where I’ve done up to five pieces. Some mugs I did maybe two or three. The only bigger productions were for that first collaboration with the ad agency — they produced 20 of each object. It was the wine glass, the forks with a chain. And it was part of a mailing ad campaign, something like that. I don’t know what happened to the objects.

IC: What’s your typical creative process for these designs? Like, do you see an object like a fork or a glass and think to yourself, “Hmm, how would I make an uncomfortable version of that?”

Kamprani: Yeah, basically. When the project started, I would just pick an object and I would imagine what would be the different scenarios of it being uncomfortable. Brainstorming, mostly. And then I would just pick an idea that I liked best and I would do a 3D render. I usually dismissed the first, second, third ideas. Anything that was very obvious, I just wouldn’t do it. I would try and go deeper and deeper into just deconstructing the objects.

Kamprani [continued]: There were lots of discussions with friends, sometimes when we were out for drinks, because I thought it was funny, and they would give me feedback to let me know if I was on the right track.

Now I don’t really brainstorm — the ideas just come. Like, “Oh, that would be fun.” It’s not like analytical thing; it just comes like that.

IC: With AI getting bigger and more controversial and so on, have you used AI to create any of these designs?

Kamprani: No, no, no. Basically, one reason I’ve lost a lot of will to do anything is because of AI’s existence, and I don’t want to use it. Because I have zero personal time, zero time whatsoever to do anything, so sometimes I’m thinking, “Oh, I could do this task or that task so much faster if I used AI,” but I don’t want to use AI, so then I don’t want to do the task at all. So I don’t have the time to sit down and model something because I know there is a faster way, but I don’t want to use the faster way, so the thing doesn’t get done.

IC: It’s like a catch-22, if you know that phrase in English.

Kamprani: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I don’t want to use AI. [Pause.] But that might change.

IC: Oh, so you’re open to that possibility?

Kamprani [after another pause]: I’ve been thinking that maybe if it is like a very local setup AI, and if I use it only for certain kinds of animation, like let’s say liquid animation. So maybe that, at some point. But for now it’s a hard no.

IC: What was your goal for this project at the beginning, and would you say you’ve achieved that goal?

Kamprani: There was no goal, really. Well, the goal was personal — what I wanted personally was to amuse myself. I think I was achieving self-expression without fully realizing it. I was just expressing something that I had in me, like being an artist, but not recognizing that I am an artist. I feel like there’s a very weird psychology behind it.

Basically, the goals were communication with other people, and having fun with showing a humorous side of me and people accepting it. That’s what I was achieving and what kept me going.

IC: Aside from the project’s longevity, which we already mentioned, what are the most surprising or unexpected things you’ve learned from the project, both in terms of what you’ve learned about design and what you’ve learned about yourself?

Kamprani: For one thing, I’ve learned more about how design can work, or not work, for people with disabilities. Because a lot of the products that we take for granted can be very challenging — very uncomfortable and inconvenient — for disabled people. So I’ve received messages from disabled people, telling me that the things I’ve created remind them of how they feel about regular design

I didn’t create the designs for that reason, but hearing from these people has opened up a whole different world to me. It’s helped me understand practical things that have to do with actual production — different processes, different materials, everything.

As for what the project has taught me about myself, having success was very weird with my day-to-day life. It’s very confusing, and it can be kind of like a weird burden, let’s say. I learned that about myself, and I’m still trying to cope with it. Now I’m coping better, but for the first few years, when I wasn’t expecting this success and it was happening, I had much difficulty taking it in.

IC: Following up on that, you mentioned earlier that you didn’t expect the project to go on for so long, and also that you don’t have enough free time in your day-to-day life. So do you ever find yourself almost resenting the project, or wishing that it didn’t define you so much in other people’s eyes?

Kamprani: No, no, no. I don’t resent it, because it’s actually given me a lot of good things. But what I’ve realized over the years is that this project is my way of avoiding doing something else. There was a point when I thought that I would just dedicate myself to this project, and it didn’t work because the creative process only comes when I procrastinate creatively, avoiding something else. If I’m happy, if I’m comfortable, I cannot do it.

IC: So if you’re comfortable, you can’t do The Uncomfortable. It lives up to its name!

Kamprani: Right.

IC: I think those are all my questions. Is there anything I haven’t asked that you want me to know about?

Kamprani: Very interesting questions! But there is a burning question that people ask me all the time, and you haven’t asked it.

IC: Oooh, what is it?

Kamprani: It’s “Why don’t you sell them?” Like, why don’t I put these things into production and sell them? I’m always getting asked that. So I can answer if you want.

IC: Yes, please.

Kamprani: When I did that first exhibition in 2017, people were wanting to buy the objects — “Oh, I want to buy this for my girlfriend.” A lot of people thought they’d be good as small knickknacks, like as presents. But if I do that, I will go from being an artist to a small business owner, and that’s something I don’t want.

IC: Why not?

Kamprani: I am a freelancer, an architect, I provide services. But I don’t want to ship stuff all over, I don’t want to be dealing with manufacturing logistics, things like that. And also it would be wasteful — like, a small knickknack isn’t the kind of thing I want to create.

IC: Are you also concerned that it would change your creative process, because you would start thinking about what would sell rather than what delights you?

Kamprani: Well, yes, I guess that’s what I’m saying. I would have to be someone who’s more concerned with sales.

And there you have it. Aside from the knickknack possibilities (which I think would be fun, although I totally understand Kamprani’s reasons for not wanting to go that route), I think these creations could also serve as educational tools for young children, teaching them about the importance of functional design.

But whatever — even without the objects being put into large-scale production, I love this project so much! If you feel similarly, check out The Uncomfortable’s website, keep up with Kamprani’s latest creations on The Uncomfortable’s Facebook page, and watch her excellent TED talk in the video below:

(Special thanks to Katerina Kamprani for sharing her time, expertise, and photos.)

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

I love quirky museums with oddball themes, so I was excited when I recently heard about the International Museum of Dinnerware Design. The appealingly niche-specific facility opened in Kingston, New York, in the fall of 2024, but I didn’t learn of its existence until about a month ago, when I read a short item about its current featured exhibit, which is devoted to ashtrays.

I was already planning a trip to Kingston at the end of February to see some bands and catch up with friends who live in that region, so I made sure to carve out some time to visit the museum. It’s run by the husband/wife team of Margaret Carney and Bill Walker, who both have deep professional backgrounds in ceramics. They’d been showcasing their huge dinnerware collection by running pop-up exhibits around the midwest for over a decade before recently deciding to open a permanent museum. They looked at a bunch of locations around the country and ultimately chose Kingston, which is a little more than two hours north of New York City. (You can learn more about the museum’s backstory here.)

Although the museum is technically devoted to “dinnerware,” it takes a fairly expansive view of that term. A recent exhibition, for example, was all about picnicware (with most of the objects displayed on little Astroturf patches on the floor!). I was out of the loop for that one, unfortunately, but I was excited to check out the ashtray show, which I saw last Saturday.

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Like many people, I routinely purchase one-pound boxes of salted and unsalted butter. I know there are lots of fancy-shmancy butters out there — premium, organic, cultured, grass-fed, sea-salted, boutique, imported, and more — but I’m fine with standard American supermarket butter, and I usually get whichever brand is least expensive. That means I often buy the store brand, which at my local ShopRite supermarket is called Bowl & Basket.

As you can see in the photo above, there’s a pleasing chromatic consistency to Bowl & Basket’s butter packaging. The salted variety, on the left, comes in a blue-lettered box and the individual sticks are in blue-lettered wrappers, while the box and wrapper graphics for the unsalted variety are red. As a result, I’ve come to associate blue with salted butter and red with unsalted, which is handy when I’m reaching for some butter in the midst of a cooking project.

Sometimes, however, ShopRite has Breakstone’s or Hotel Bar butter on sale at a lower price point than Bowl & Basket. Conveniently, Breakstone’s and Hotel Bar use that same color-coding system for their boxes and wrappers — blue for salted, red for unsalted:

But the other day I went shopping and saw that Keller’s butter was on sale. And that’s where the system began to break down:

There are several things to process here. First, Keller’s has chosen to reverse the usual color protocol on its boxes, using red for salted and blue for unsalted. Even more confounding, the wrappers have the usual blue for salted and red for unsalted, which is (a) somewhat comforting, since it matches what we’ve seen with all the other brands, but is also (b) completely unacceptable because the wrapper colors don’t match the box colors.

Also of note: The three brand-name butters — Breakstone’s, Hotel Bar, and Keller’s — are using identical generic wrappers, which seems surprising. In a world where practically everything is now branded, wouldn’t you expect a dairy company to plaster its logo on the butter stick wrappers? Moreover, if you look closely at the fine print, you can see that the wrappers for those three brands all say, “Plant #48-0943,” suggesting that these three butters were all processed and packed at the same manufacturing facility. Some quick Googling reveals that plant 48-0943 is a Keller’s Creamery facility in Winnsboro, Texas, which makes the Keller’s box/wrapper color mismatch all the more surprising. Hmmmm.

Land O’Lakes butter, the industry leader, is almost never on sale, so I rarely buy it, but I wanted to see how they handle all of this, so I splurged on a couple of boxes. Here’s what I found:

Whoa! Land O’Lakes has charted its own color course — green for salted, blue for unsalted. But maybe the most surprising thing is the sudden appearance of branded wrappers, emblazoned not only with the Land O’Lakes logo but also with the trademarked term “Flavor Protect® Wrapper.” (According to this article, the company’s wrapper really is coated with a “special wax blend” to preserve the product’s freshness.)

My supermarket has sometimes carried butter from the Vermont-based Cabot Creamery brand. It wasn’t available during my recent visits, but photos from the Cabot website indicate that they adhere to the standard blue/red color coding, with branded wrappers to boot:

There’s another supermarket in my neighborhood — a CTown (a regional chain). They carry the same name-brand butters as my ShopRite, but their store brand, which is called Krasdale (a local grocery wholesaler), turned out to have the weirdest system of all: The boxes follow the standard blue/red color coding, but the wrappers are blue for both the salted and unsalted varieties! Check this out:

This one is highly problematic. For starters, it’s upsetting to have the box and label colors match for one variety and not match for the other. Moreover, these wrappers don’t even say “Salted” and “Unsalted,” so there’s no way to know which is which once the sticks are removed from their boxes. Note to self: Never buy this butter again!

So that covers the basic supermarket butters available in my neighborhood. Here’s a table that summarizes the situation:

That’s a fair amount of information to process, but trust me — we’re just getting started. What I’ve shown you so far is just the tip of the smooth, creamy iceberg.

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Yesterday I wrote about the history of the metal lettering at Unity Temple, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building in Oak Park, Illinois, and how some of those letters have inadvertently been positioned upside-down at various points over the past 115 years. Today we’re going to learn more about the letters, from an architect who worked with them.

Remember how most of Unity Temple’s lettering was stolen in 2010? I learned during my reporting that the replacement lettering was created and installed by the Chicago architecture firm Harboe Architects. A few years later, that same firm handled Unity Temple’s $25 million restoration, during which the replacement letters were taken down and then reinstalled. And that in turn means Harboe Architects is responsible for the current upside-down “H” above Unity Temple’s western entrance — the one that got us started on this topic when typographer Jonathan Hoefler recently spotted it during a tour of the site.

Harboe Architects is run by Gunny Harboe. Naturally, I wanted to ask him about the upside-down “H,” but I also wanted to learn more about the lettering itself. Here’s the transcript of a Zoom call we had last month, edited for length and clarity.

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Note: This is the first part of a two-article series. Also, it is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul

The photo above, taken about two and a half months ago, shows the entrance to Unity Temple, a Unitarian Universalist church in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. Designed by the renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright (himself a lifelong Unitarian), it opened in 1908 and is sometimes referred to as the world’s first modern building. Wright later said that the Unity Temple project was when he stopped being an “architect of structure” and instead became an “architect of space.”

Despite all of that, Unity Temple includes a surprising flaw. Can you spot it in that header photo?

Let’s zoom in on a section of the bronze lettering above the doors:

Now do you see the error? The “H” on the top line is upside-down! It’s particularly apparent because the crossbar of the “H” doesn’t align with the middle arm of the “E.” Compare that to the second line, where those two strokes do align. (If you look back at the header photo, you can see that the sign includes a third “H,” in the word “WORSHIP,” but that one is properly oriented.)

If this mistake sounds familiar, it’s because last summer I wrote about how the familiar blue “H” road signs indicating a nearby hospital are often upside-down. The person who alerted me to that “H”-driven phenomenon is the same one who spotted and photographed Unity Temple’s inverted “H”: my friend Jonathan Hoefler. He’s a famous typographer, so his radar is super-attuned to this stuff (plus his surname starts with an “H,” so he might be particularly sensitive to issues involving that letter). He let me know about the Unity Temple “H” after spotting it during a recent visit to Chicago.

I asked Jonathan if he said anything to the Unity Temple staff about the upside-down letter. “I didn’t have the heart,” he said. “Also, what could be done?”

That might have been the end of the story. I imagined writing a short post that concluded with something like “Hey, even Frank Lloyd Wright made mistakes!”

But then Jonathan added this: “The audio tour at the temple mentioned that the exterior was sprayed with gunite in the 1970s, making me wonder if the original lettering was removed and reinstalled, either introducing the error or preserving it.”

That was an intriguing thought, so I figured I’d try to find out if the letters had been temporarily removed as part of the 1970s gunite treatment. That was the start of what eventually became a lengthy research and reporting process. Along the way, I turned up a bunch of relevant information, including the following:

• Unity Temple has two separate entrances, one at the east and one at the west. Each entrance is adorned with identical metal lettering spelling out the same phrase: “For the Worship of God and the Service of Man.” (Jonathan’s photos are of the western entrance, and he didn’t realize there’s an identical sign on the eastern side. If he had known, he would have checked the eastern “H” situation.)

• Both signs were indeed removed for the gunite treatment and then reinstalled, just as Jonathan suspected. That was in 1973.

• Both signs were badly vandalized in the fall of 2010, when thieves stole 58 of the 72 original letters, apparently intending to sell them for scrap. The remaining 14 letters were removed and new lettering was installed over both entrances about 20 months later, in the spring of 2012.

• The new lettering was taken down in 2014, when Unity Temple closed for a $25 million restoration. It reopened, with the lettering back in place, in mid-2017.

This information cast Jonathan’s observation in a different light, because it means Unity Temple’s lettering — which is rendered in a custom typeface that Wright designed — has gone through at least four distinct eras:

Era One runs from the temple’s 1908 opening to the 1973 gunite treatment.

Era Two runs from the 1973 gunite treatment to the 2010 lettering theft.

Era Three runs from the 2012 installation of replacement lettering to the start of the 2014 restoration.

Era Four runs from 2017, when the temple reopened after the restoration, to the present.

Multiply each of the four eras by the three “H”s that appear in the slogan, and then again by the two separate entrances, and you have 24 distinct opportunities for an upside-down “H” to be installed! (And there could be even more eras, and thus more opportunities for inverted “H”s, if the letters were ever taken down and then reinstalled for some other reason that didn’t turn up in my research.)

So had the misoriented “H” that Jonathan recently spotted on the western sign been introduced as part of the recent restoration? Or maybe after the theft? Or maybe that “H” had been upside-down all along, and they just kept it that way with each reinstallation for the sake of consistency? Meanwhile, what about the lettering for the eastern entrance?

And most intriguingly: Had Frank Lloyd Wright himself ever been responsible for an upside-down “H”? Wright died in 1959, so he had nothing to do with the most recent iterations of the lettering, but what about the earlier time periods?

My hope was to answer those questions by creating a comprehensive visual timeline of the lettering over both entrances, so I ended up doing a lot of photo research. Recent-ish photos of the building are fairly easy to find, especially on Flickr (a godsend, because Flickr pics are date-tagged). But older images — basically, anything earlier than 2005 — were surprisingly difficult to source. I ended up having to engage quite a bit with what I’ve come to think of as the Frank Lloyd Wright industrial complex — a dense bureaucracy of foundations, libraries, museums, and research institutions that control access to anything Wright-related.

While I didn’t achieve my original goal of producing a comprehensive visual record of the lettering, I did come up with a fair number of data points. Let’s start here:

Wright’s Original Conception

Wright’s original drawings for Unity Temple, shown above, include depictions of the lettering. Let’s zoom in to get a closer look at the key area:

The drawing clearly shows that the crossbar of the “H” should be slightly north of the equator, so to speak, thus aligning with the center arm of the “E.” That’s not surprising, but it’s good to establish this as our baseline of Wright’s intent.

1930s–1940s

Unfortunately, I was not able to find any photos from Unity Temple’s 1908 opening, or even from its first few decades. The earliest archival photo I came up with is this one, which is frustratingly dated by the Oak Park Library as being from “1930s-40s”:

Based on the shadows, that is the eastern entrance. The lettering isn’t easy to make out, so let’s zoom in again:

Although the image quality isn’t great, it’s good enough to confirm that each “H” is oriented correctly. For now, this is the earliest document we have.

May 1956

This is where things get interesting. The photo above, taken in May of 1956, shows the western entrance, and all three of the “H”s are upside-down! Again, let’s zoom in for a closer look:

So were these inverted “H”s at the western entrance always upside-down (which would mean Frank Lloyd Wright installed them that way), or were they originally positioned correctly and then got changed at some point? We can’t yet answer that question, because this 1956 photo is the earliest document we have of that entrance (at least for now).

1956 to 1978

The photo above once again shows the western entrance, and there are two significant changes. The good news is that all of the “H”s are now properly oriented. To see the bad news, look at the “S” in “WORSHIP” — now that is upside-down! (The other “S,” in “SERVICE,” is properly oriented.)

Here’s a closer look:

So when was this photo taken? In another case of frustrating dating, the Chicago History Museum’s archive lists the date as “1956-1978.” Although we can’t know for sure, I’m thinking this image was probably taken after the 1973 gunite treatment, which would explain the letter orientation changes.

2005 to 2010

Jumping ahead to the 2000s — shortly prior to the 2010 theft — Flickr photos show no changes to the western sign, which was still fully “H”-compliant and still had the upside-down “S.” Here are two representative examples, with the dates noted on each photo:

Photos of the eastern entrance from this period were harder to come by, in part because a tree was obscuring part of the sign. But in this 2007 shot, it appears that the “S” in “WORSHIP” is upside-down, as is the “H” on the second line (plus the “V” in “SERVICE” is missing, but that’s a separate issue):

That last photo doesn’t show the “THE” in the top line. But the full slogan is visible in this 2008 shot:

So that confirms it: Shortly prior to the 2010 theft, the eastern sign had two upside-down letters — an “H” and an “S.”

The 2010 Theft

Vandals took most of the letters sometime during the night of September 28th, 2010. Here’s a photo showing how the denuded western entrance looked about nine and a half months later:

If we zoom in, the ghosted letters seem to confirm that each “H” was properly oriented and that the “S” on the top line was not:

I was not able to find a corresponding photo for the eastern sign.

2012 to 2014

Shiny new bronze lettering was unveiled in late May of 2012. How did it look? Let’s start with the western entrance:

Everything looks shipshape there — no glitches.

But what about the eastern entrance, which previously had an inverted “H” and an inverted “S”? Let’s take a look:

They fixed both of the letters! (Looks like they also got rid of the tree, or at least pared it back significantly.)

So during this period — after the 2010 theft, but before the 2014-17 restoration — both signs were A-OK (or, if you prefer, H-OK).

That leads us to…

2017 to the Present

Unity Temple was closed from mid-2014 to mid-2017 for a $25 million restoration that covered, according to one report I read, “every inch” of the facility. Did that include the lettering above the two entrances? Let’s start with the western side:

Oopsie. This error — the upside-down “H” on the first “THE” — is the same glitch that Jonathan Hoefler recently spotted. So now we know when that mistake was introduced: as part of the 2014-17 restoration.

The eastern entrance, however, appears to have escaped unscathed:

Everything there looks good.

Did you follow all of that? Here’s a table summarizing what we have and haven’t learned:

I feel like that’s a good start on this project, although there’s a lot we still don’t know. Most crucially, it’s not clear whether Frank Lloyd Wright himself oversaw the installation of any upside-down letters, although several other architectural professionals clearly did.

As it happens, I spoke to one of those professionals as part of my reporting. I’ll have some thoughts from that person — the man responsible for the current upside-down “H” that started us down this rabbit hole — tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Update: You can read the second part of this story here.

(Right-side-up thanks to Jonathan Hoefler for getting the ball rolling on this one.)

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

Obsessive flights of fancy can be triggered by the most unlikely things — including, as it turns out, a pizza at Nancy’s Townehouse, an old-school Italian restaurant that my friend Adriene and I visited on Saturday. Nancy’s, which has been operating since 1943 in Rahway, New Jersey, specializes in thin-crust pizza, so we ordered a pepperoni pie (which was very good). When the pizza arrived, I immediately noticed that it had one particularly intriguing detail. Can you spot it in the photo shown above?

The thing that caught my attention was the slice of pepperoni that’s situated almost at the exact center of the pie. Because of its location, it got sliced into six different pieces, each one located at the tip of a different pizza slice. If only it had been truly dead-center, it could have been cut into eight pieces, just like the pizza itself, something like this:

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Also: This post is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul

By Scott Teplin

My family and I recently vacationed in Mexico City. Nestled in the heart of the city’s vibrant Roma Norte neighborhood is a hidden gem that nearly escaped our itinerary: The Object Museum (or MODO, short for Museo del Objeto del Objeto, or “the Object of the Object”).

To be honest, I was initially hesitant to step inside. Having grown up in Wisconsin, I developed a healthy distaste for the cluttered crap heaps featured in the infamous tourist trap the House on the Rock, and I worried that MODO might be more of the same. However, curiosity eventually won out, and I wandered in one afternoon to discover what turned out to be one of the most delightful museum experiences I’ve ever had.

The museum is a dedicated homage to the “object (i.e., the point) of the object,” showcasing vast collections of everyday items. Originally conceived as the private obsession of the mansion’s resident, Bruno Newman, who spent over 40 years collecting packaging and advertising, it has evolved into something of a localized record of material culture. Plus it’s just a well-curated collection of cool stuff.

Here’s a short video that pans around one of the museum’s rooms, which is packed with interesting displays:

As you might expect, many of the items are based on Mexican culture, like this display of toy figurine heads based on lucha libre masks:

On the other hand, these matchboxes, despite having text in Spanish, were produced in Sweden:

There are several displays featuring items on a given theme, like this showcase of shoehorns and shoe polish tins:

I love the way the text on the shoe polish tins is arranged. These will definitely will serve as inspiration for some new faux fireworks I plan to make!

There are lots of great old advertising pieces, like this one that says, “La mejor ropa de mescilla” (“The best denim clothing”):

I also loved this old toothpaste ad [which might be of interest to toothpaste collector Tucker Viemeister — Paul]:

Speaking of teeth, these next three photos show a salesman’s case of “steel tooth-forms” that were apparently marketed to dentists:

Next up is a display of things related to writing — steel pens, nibs, pencil boxes, and typewriter ribbon tins. I still draw with these types of nibs:

Check out the gorgeous “MEPHISTO” box in that last photo. That shadow — it’s so obviously hand-drawn!

A stairwell featured this wall of oversized advertising objects. I included myself in the second shot, for scale:

If you’re into car culture, you’ll love this display of vintage automotive hood ornaments:

There’s also a section of the museum devoted to lightbulbs and batteries, as seen in these next few photos:

Here are some additional photos I took. The product categories are pretty self-explanatory:

Seeing these rare physical examples of historical graphic design was a real treat. The bold colors, imperfect yet inventive lettering, and intricate hand-made illustrations provided an endless stream of inspiration, and the photographs I took that day will undoubtedly serve as source material for my own lettering and drawings for years to come.

Paul here. Please join me in thanking Scott for sharing this experience with us. Looks like an amazing place! If you want to learn more, here’s the museum’s website and Wikipedia entry.

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

Ever since I launched Inconspicuous Consumption in the summer of 2024, I’ve had this notion in the back of my head that I’d periodically do some audio posts. I initially thought the “Little Stories” series would be a good fit for that, because those posts tend to be short, first-person anecdotes without any photos or links, which would make them well-suited for audio. But for whatever reason, I never took the step of recording any of them as spoken-word narratives.

But yesterday I found myself working on a different kind of short, anecdotal post without any photos or links (about an interesting experience I had while watching the new movie Send Help), and I suddenly realized, “Hey, maybe this should be IC’s first audio post!” So I took what I’d written, rejiggered the text slightly (certain phrases work better in print than when spoken, and vicey-versey), and then sat down to record the story, which you can listen to at the top of this page.

The audio is only three minutes long, so it’s not a big commitment. But if you’d rather read a transcript, that’s available here.

I’m treating this audio format as an experiment. It will never become the main thing around here, but it might become an occasional thing or a semi-regular thing — at least if people like it. So please use the comments section to give me some feedback. Let me know what you like or don’t like about this inaugural audio post, any suggestions you might have, and so on. Of course, comments about the post’s topic are also welcome. Thanks!

(Special shout-out to The Art of Noticing’s Rob Walker, whose own excellent audio posts helped inspire me to finally take this step.)

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

Inconspicuous Consumption reader Kurt Rozek lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and works in the neighboring village of Allouez, where he’s a longtime employee of the Allouez Street Department. His duties include driving a dump truck, picking up furniture that people leave at the curb, plowing snow, repairing potholes, and — of particular interest to us today — installing street signs like the ones he’s holding in the photo shown above, which are slated to be positioned at the corner of Park Drive and St. Francis Drive.

Allouez, which has a population of about 14,000, is too small to have its own sign factory, so the village orders its signs from a nearby vendor. Whenever a new batch of signs arrives, Kurt gives them a quick once-over, just to make sure there are no typos or other mistakes. “Sometimes they’ll have ‘Lane’ instead of ‘Street,’ or something like that,” he says. “So I just check to see that everything looks right.”

But when he recently checked the new signs for the intersection of Park and St. Francis, he noticed something odd: On one side of the St. Francis sign, the “i” in “Francis” was missing its dot (or tittle, as it’s sometimes called). Kurt couldn’t recall having seen that particular glitch before, and he figured it was the kind of thing that might be of interest to Inconspicuous Consumption readers, so he took a photo of it:

We’ve all heard the line about dotting every “i” and crossing every “t,” and now fate had provided Kurt with the chance to become a literal embodiment of that maxim. He got himself some reflective tape, cut out a new dot, and applied it to the sign. But he had to engage in a bit of artistic license, because the Street Department didn’t have any white tape on hand, so he substituted silver. Here are two photos that show the factory-applied white dot on one side of the sign and Kurt’s silver dot on the other side:

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