Carried away

I have a thing for paper carrier bags.

Classic, plain and brown, unadorned, small and crisp from the local takeaway. Heavy, white and thoughtfully decorated or embossed with a special purchase inside. Colourfully wrapped around with an image that bespeaks a fashion moment or clever branding. Folded paper or string handles. Lovely things.

There is a utilitarian usefulness to them. Perfectly proportioned and fit for their purpose. I like the fact that they aren’t constantly re-usable in the way plastic bags are. They soon wilt and are over, like cut flowers. You could argue their eco-friendliness but I won’t. My interest is in their ephemerality and much more selfish.

The paper bag has re-entered the marketplace recently with the expansion of take-away food chains. Whether your fancy is coffee, sandwiches or sushi, it invariably comes to you in a small paper bag. Imparting a little down-home local deli ambience to a big business purchase.

If you are going to buy a coffee and a croissant, it is going to taste better out of a paper cup, carried in a paper bag. It is going to taste even better out of a nicely designed Pret A Manger paper bag. A grand and witty campaign has been running through their shop designs and packaging for some months now. Taking surrealism back to the streets – there is a house of toast on this one - the campaign is full of quirky visual puns, animals made from strange bits of food and rather ironic ‘make it at home’ recipes.

Someone has persuaded the company not to take marketing and publicity too seriously and made me a bag worth putting on a shelf.

Browsing a rare and free delight

Sometimes the internet delivers on its promise and you find a joyous, rare and free delight. I can’t remember where I found the link to Kodomo no kuni but I feel the need to pass it on.

Drawn from a Japanese magazine called Kodomo no kuni (Children’s Country or Children’s Land) for children that was published in the 1920s and 1930s, this website presents over 90 illustrations and you’d be hard pressed to find a bad one. These illustrations are so delicate, exquisitely drawn and coloured it makes my breath hitch to look at them.

There is something about illustration, when it is good, that takes you to a deeper place in your imagination. More intimate and self-effacing than painting, illustration is not about grand gestures; rather it plays a supportive role to the text, teasing-out narratives and possibilities. Words are good, words and images are better.

The images from Kodomo no kuni are very much of their time. The 1930s was the tail end of a reclamation of illustration-as-art that had begun in the late 19th century. From Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Rackham through to Eric Ravilious, England in particular had a fondness for colouring the pages of its books. Not being familiar with Japanese developments, it is interesting to me to see these illustrations of the same period. There are hints of Paul Klee and nods and winks to rarefied European fashion magazines like Gazette du Bon Ton with their flat, graphic imagery and block colouring.

The website itself is rather nice too, simple enough, with an emphasis on the images, reproduced nice and large. There is an English translation and some information on the artists. To top it off, there are even some children’s songs to listen to, completing the Blyton-esque experience. This can’t have been a magazine for your everyday urchin. So far (so good) away from Cbeebies.

How to judge a book by its cover

Allowing yourself the freedom to own something simply because you like the way it looks should be a simple matter. Yet for me it’s a constant inner dialogue, skittering between loaded thoughts of having too much stuff already, through to the epiphany that all books are educational - via bloody-minded acquisitiveness.

Breakfast, Lunch, Tea is my latest worry in this regard. I spotted it in a bookshop and huddled over it. Coveting is an intensely private matter, coming from all sorts of fetishised, curatorial and just plain weird inner urgings. I consulted briefly with my conscience, put the book down and walked away. Yet I knew I would get it. The internet is an enabler and soon the book arrived in a not quite plain brown wrapper.

The cover of this book is redolent of all the things that speed my pulse – sharp layouts, pre-war typefaces and colour palettes, shop graphics, cafes, domesticity. Designers Kerr Noble take the honours here. They have combined all these elements with a contemporary, yet knowing, freshness. I do love an adventurous design and this is mercifully free from publisher’s blurb and not-quite-striking cover imagery. The plain and restrained apple green fairly zings compared to all the busy covers out there. The very words - Breakfast, Lunch, Tea - are great to look at. Satisfying, evocative and intriguing when left to themselves and our imagination.

Phaidon have produced some tasty covers over the past few years, celebrating lettering and graphics. This is another, a book that is all the more of a visual joy for its restraint. Underselling, especially in a cookbook, is rare today - it has been subsumed in favour of pictures of slightly sweaty chefs. Yet, in the end, this is a cookbook from an art publisher and aimed at those sad sorts who never get much past the cover or the pretty pictures inside. Guilty as charged.

Content? A mere detail that.