By Eckersley

OK, I do buy a lot of my books online these days. But there is nothing finer than finding a new-to-you second-hand bookshop and spending off-the-clock time browsing the shelves. Rows and rows of book spines suggesting tasty dust jackets and illustrated interiors. Sometimes the spines are illustrated as well, which is even better.

I am not sure London is the best place for this. There aren’t many bargains to be had here, it’s true. But more importantly I want a bookshop that is less mannered and somehow less curated than those in London.

I went into a crammed, vertically-challenged bookshop in Lewes the other week and all I could smell was wet dog; emanating from the hound snoozing by the till. It seemed right, somehow.

And a 50p box is something London bookshops don’t do so often. But that curled cardboard often contains those inter-war and post-war pamphlets that I hunger for - BBC music for schools leaflets or funny old V&A gallery guides in gay patterned-paper wrappers.

I have whittled my collecting down to almost nothing over the last few years. Books keep calling to me though. It’s somehow excusable to have lots of them. Educational, don’t you know? I do try to read most of them; from big picture books of fashion, to small histories of shopping in Oldham.

And on my regular jaunts to the grand bookshops in Southport, I always seem to turn up something. This beautiful Tom Eckersley cover being the last one. Those two gentlemen are classic Eckersley characters, almost typographical in form and witty in execution . His work positively sings to me - the colors, humour and illustrations are so happy. Oh, and the sense of restrained space and simplicity of message, too.

If I could go back in time, then I’d like to walk down a dirty tube platform in the late 1930s, when - paired with Eric Lombers - he was turning out real beauties for London Transport’s poster department.

Doll face

I don’t feel the need to add to the shower of congratulations raining down on the Viktor & Rolf exhibition at the Barbican in London. Other than to say the mannequins made me very happy.

And they got me thinking. I’ve always liked dolls faces. Whether a peg doll, a wax mannequin from the 1920s, plastic doll faces from haberdashery shops, a nested Russian doll or a Sasha doll – the educationally acceptable face of dolls, dressed in what could have been early Margaret Howell. I used to have a beloved set of Sashas.

The face pictured here is from a jointed wooden peg doll. These dolls were cheap and plentiful in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sold by street peddlers and often called Dutch dolls due to their more illustrious predecessors, the fashion dolls of the 17th and 18th centuries. These dolls became stars of their own (now politically questionable) book by Florence Upton: "Adventures Of Two Dutch Dolls " in 1895. Versions of the dolls in the book are still being made and photographer Tim Walker used the books as inspiration for a Vogue shoot recently.

But my doll came from Pollock’s Toy Theatre in the 1960s. Apparently part of a large case of the dolls the Pollocks' had discovered in a case in a barn in the Dolomites. The dolls were still packed in brown paper parcels for dispatch to pre-war toy shops and the Pollocks’ had bought them all to bring back to their shop / museum.

The Vicktor & Rolf mannequins have dolls faces. The intertwined history of dolls faces and mannequins’ faces, of fashion and image and the parallel story of cosmetics and how we paint ourselves, means that that made perfect sense to me.

The gloves are off

Cecil Beaton’s notion of Englishness has always held great appeal for me. It is most definitely the blowsy other-end of my taste spectrum from Ravilious and Bawden. Too many soft focus filters and roses really. But the story telling, the visual props and references, the colours, the drawings. It’s all so very fashion.

A man who carries a debt to Beaton - Tim Walker – has an exhibition at the Design Museum at the moment. Eagerly awaited by me, as I have plenty of torn-out spreads by Walker in my scrapbooks. His shoots, and the Shona Heath props and sets that often accompany them, have a beautiful other-worldliness to them. Nothing gritty or heroin-chic here.

But what holds my attention in a magazine doesn’t necessarily, it seems, hold it in a museum. Context, in this case, is most definitely everything. The quality of the images in the Walker exhibition just don’t stand up to close examination or large reproduction. It is as if the dreamy, drowsy story-book intimacy of his magazine shoots has had the door flung open and an unkind, over-strong sunlight has been let in on them.

It’s difficult for me to criticise this one, being a fan. The space Walker is showing in at the museum is a difficult white space and they have tried to give Walker a traditional hang for his work, which weakens the impact, I think. I know it is all part of being taken seriously in one’s career, your first big show in a major museum. But I didn’t feel any closer to Walker’s work after having seen this show, just disappointed.

The best bits of the exhibition were where the convention cracked and they showed some of the wonderful props from his shoots (see here a detail of a human-sized glove), his notebooks and a film of a Vogue shoot. But for the rest; it lacks a sense of discovery, wit and beauty of the unexpected. And those qualities are, for me, what Walker’s work is all about.

Flowers and the city

I seem to be seeing flowers everywhere. The City is full of shop window displays on a floral theme. Oasis (who do some of the better high street windows) have stacked waist-high plastic flowers in bright colours in theirs, to show-off the floral dresses. Prêt have a picnic graphic splashed on their windows, cups and carrier bags, although it’s not up to their usual snappy visual standards. Generally the message - seen through a drizzle of warm rain – is that summer is coming.

Patches of greenery across London are packed at lunchtimes, with workers looking for a bucolic pause to their day; forgetting hay fever, grass stains and SPF15. Supermarkets are stacking Geraniums high and selling them cheap. It feels like the thing to do, to get something growing somewhere. Sales of cut flowers must surely be higher in cities like London?

But for those who do have a space to plant in – a garden, back yard or window box – there can’t be a more curated gardening experience than Petersham Nurseries in Richmond. Olive trees, tables of potted herbs, neat alpines, blowsy annuals and Geraniums that put their supermarket sisters to shame..it all looks better here. Add in some fine food and wine, people-spotting opportunities...then tie it all with a tastefully printed tag. What more could you want?

And what does the urban man in his Trickers and Ralph Lauren raincoat buy for his window boxes? Vivid blue-lilac Hydrangeas served up in a crisp brown paper bag.

Nomenclature for the people

Museums are funny places. I should know - I work in them. They are constantly trying to redefine themselves in relation to contemporary material cultures. But by their very nature they are old-fashioned. Their weighty pasts - and often un-wieldy present - make them unsuitable for chasing the mode. A new gallery today will probably be there in 10 years time, and so become something of a museum piece itself.

A trip to the Horniman Museum in South London revealed a lovely example of an historical display. The museum itself is a super thing; an arts and craft castle perched over Forest Hill. Within the last few years it has had the ubiquitous extension and ‘revamp.’ For most lottery-funded projects that translated as fewer objects on show, more multi-media, a new café and a new shop.

But despite shiny new galleries, it was the old natural history gallery that fascinated and kept my attention for far longer. A large galleried room full of ponderous wooden display cases, chock-full of stuffed animals (including a rather disconcerting trophy-mounted, heads-of-pet-dogs display). All presided over by a grand stuffed Walrus on its giant fake iceberg. Glorious.

The predominant colour of these antique displays – pink – is unexpected. And the detailed interpretation throughout the cases is very beautifully wrought: labels of plaster letters, black with a white edge, in a 1930s font* in nicely measured layouts - stood proud of their textured ground. Smaller plaster-pink paper labels full of Latin nomenclature were the next level down of interpretation. And, every so often, a larger frame was slotted in - with strange and beautiful classifications charted across it.

Old school it may be. But there is a place for exhibitions of weird and wonderful objects beautifully displayed. And I think this gallery sits comfortably alongside its new neighbours. But realistically it might be an idea to get along to see it soon, as it's probably on someone's funding hit list.


* On this font, über graphic designer and sound northern chap Paul Hetherington comments:

‘The overall characteristic is of the font is deco, it looks like a cross between Futura and Gill, but it has quite a unique G. Therefore, an obscure font, probably1930s, an amalgamation of the look of the day and would have been designed and made in-house by a single, individual foundry. Certainly it’s no classic, or something that became widely used. Nor would it have made the leap out of metal into photo-typesetting.’

D-Bros on the shelf

I am a little bit in love with Japanese illustration, books and stationery. A few items are slowly slipping out of Japan onto the shelves of select shops in London. Happily, I am working near the new-ish Magma 'product' shop at the moment, which sells paper nonsense, amongst other things. And on paper shelves, which is nice.

Magma is all a bit designery and knowing but they like their graphics. And I’ve (almost) given up pretending I’m not like that. I regularly check the shop for new things. Picking amongst their latest Japanese bits and pieces today - I bought myself a nice D-Bros Happy Birthday card. Need I mention it is going on the shelf, not actually to be used?

The D-Bros website is all fur coat and no knickers – as the saying goes. But they do really lovely work. And it is nice to finally see as well as buy some of it over here. Especially after spying it on various Japanese websites. But surfing those many, many Japanese sites is a Catch-22 mouth-watering and frustrating undertaking - don’t know what it says, can’t buy it easily, but want it all.

They do paper so well in Japan. From the country that invented Origami you expect it. But this isn’t about printing on paper; it’s about cutting and forming crisp paper, exquisitely. And it’s about small things, details, quirky illustrations, nods to historical graphics and winks to some of the great designers and illustrators of the mid-20th century: Calder, Girard, Eksell, Munari, Rand…

A journey of delight

Hmm, I am rarely caught off-guard when surfing the internet these days. So much, so many, so seen it. But last week I was looking at a great image of stacking chairs on the design site Mocoloco and clicked through to the exhibition at MoMA in New York: Design and the Elastic Mind. Great name and what looks to be an interesting show, with many familiar names and designs, some new ones, but all gutsily curated. An exhibition with something to say.

But, never mind the exhibition (did I say THAT?) just look at the website... So much thought has gone into this; it is dripping with content, layers and has an intriguing interface. Definitely one of the best exhibition websites I’ve seen in a long time. The credits show the site to be the work of Yugo Nakamura and THA Ltd. His name sounded very familiar and a little bit of searching took me back to an old haunt of mine - when I first discovered surfing the net in a big way - MONO*crafts. Simple, beautiful and at the time, to me, revelatory.

Clicking through THA’s current site it is evident that Nakamura’s work is still simple, extraordinary and then some. Interface design taken to the limits yet so spotlessly executed it becomes seamless and joyful to interact with.

The Elastic Mind site isn’t desperately easy to navigate, but so interesting that I didn’t mind. The search function is lovely, scrolling across the pages, linking results visually. And it feels like a real virtual, curated exhibit, developed alongside the exhibition. Not the usual afterthought - consisting of photographs and visiting information.

It made me feel that athough I won’t see the physical exhibition, I have participated in the experience.