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A review by kirabug
Adventures in Stationery: A Journey Through Your Pencil Case by James Ward
4.0
There's something about the perfectly-balanced pen in your hand, or the feel of a smooth sheet of writing paper. There's something about the smell of a freshly-sharpened pencil or the fwip of a Post-it note coming off the pad. We start using stationary supplies (such a generic name) when we're in elementary school or younger, and no matter how old we become or how much technology we use, they're always with us.
James Ward provides an interesting and often humorous look at the history and design of our stationary supplies, from erasers to paper clips to the Rolodex. The book is from the UK so the humor is generally of the dry British sort. I consider this a plus. The products similarly aren't focused only on the US (a nice change) but cover UK and European inventions as well.
The history of the design decisions made - from the flat cone of a highlighter to the different shapes a stapler can produce, provides insight into the world we live in. That sounds trite, but really, it takes a special kind of person two years to create the right kind of ink in a pen, and most of us don't put any thought into it past "the line keeps skipping" or "eew ink blobs". James Ward is interested in how these decisions are made, and he makes those decisions interesting to the rest of us, thus sneakily teaching us design skills we'd otherwise lack. (You'll give your spiral bound notepad a second look when you're done this book.)
This is the kind of book I enjoyed reading, and will keep, not so much for its reread-ability but because the little facts of interest will be great fun to quote back to designers and developers at work (where I do web design) for quite a lot of time to come.
James Ward provides an interesting and often humorous look at the history and design of our stationary supplies, from erasers to paper clips to the Rolodex. The book is from the UK so the humor is generally of the dry British sort. I consider this a plus. The products similarly aren't focused only on the US (a nice change) but cover UK and European inventions as well.
The history of the design decisions made - from the flat cone of a highlighter to the different shapes a stapler can produce, provides insight into the world we live in. That sounds trite, but really, it takes a special kind of person two years to create the right kind of ink in a pen, and most of us don't put any thought into it past "the line keeps skipping" or "eew ink blobs". James Ward is interested in how these decisions are made, and he makes those decisions interesting to the rest of us, thus sneakily teaching us design skills we'd otherwise lack. (You'll give your spiral bound notepad a second look when you're done this book.)
This is the kind of book I enjoyed reading, and will keep, not so much for its reread-ability but because the little facts of interest will be great fun to quote back to designers and developers at work (where I do web design) for quite a lot of time to come.