As many of you know, Container Corporation of America makes a product which, in its essence, is totally common – a paperboard package. Each of us uses, touches, and needs this product virtually every day of our lives. Yet, unless we see it as garbage or litter, we are seldom aware of it. Even though our lifestyle depends so heavily on the conveniences made possible by the paperboard package, it seems to have no reality. Or rather, its reality is entirely subsumed in the products which it transports, protects and displays. In that sense, the paperboard package – the entire production of this billion dollar company, is not real. Of itself, it has no reality. However, looked at with a mirror that reflects it and the world around it, the paperboard package becomes part of an abstraction, and in that abstraction, is found the ultimate reality.
— John Massey, “Abstractions on Candles, Mirrors and Reality,” speech given in Aspen in 1977
The condensed milk, which they spread like jelly on saltines.
— Darcey Steinke reading from Sister Golden Hair
You can hear human breathing in the cockpit up until the moment of impact.
— New York Times
I can write an imitation of a Michael Dickman poem in five minutes.
— Michael Dickman
Does the world need another font? Of course not.
— “Writ Small,” Smithsonian Magazine
Phone.
— MK
I thought it might interest you, as a ski enthusiast and lover of beautiful things (cf. Joella).
— Walter Paepcke, Letter to Herbert Bayer, May 22, 1945.
Come out, your friends are here!
— Sheila to Sleepy (cat)
When a bottle of bubbly is not festive enough, the Champagne Sabre will certainly get the party started. Aim towards where the vertical seam of the bottle meets the top lip, and strike away from the base. The pressure inside the bottle automatically ensures a clean, shards cut. Made of stainless steel.
— Item Tag, “NEW, Champagne Sabre, Karim Rashid, 2013,″ MOMA Store
Sandy!
— Christopher, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time”
Bayer, despite his frequent melancholy, was the one artist who caused Paepcke no discomfort in the shared company of businessmen.
— James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture
One thing I don’t need is furniture. I live alone in an 8 room house.
— Old woman at Skillman Furniture
A book of this nature inevitably contains misspellings, incorrections and discrepancies.
— Herbert Bayer, World Geo-Graphic Atlas
I like the message that you are conveying with this series of pictures. We should devour books like we devour our food. With salt and Tabasco sauce.
— Kathleen
project for exhibition pavilion at an industrial fair 1924. toothpaste for sale inside.
— Herbert Bayer, herbert bayer: painter, designer, architect
How do they keep that clean? If I were a bird I’d shit that place up!
— Lily
Just as a visiting player is about to shoot a free throw, two students pull apart two big black curtains to reveal a new five-second act in a continuing theater of the absurd.
— Justin Wolfers, “How Arizona State Reinvented Free-Throw Distraction,” The New York Times
I love that you say you have empathy for caviar.
— Nathan Carter
What’s the ambition?
— Joe Scanlan
All supposedly ventures of capitalists in the thick of thinking about profit margins and returns on investment, their buildings do have an obvious bottom-line logic-they can be occupied and rented-the landscape expanses can only be looked at. They seemingly do not square, at least not in a straightforward financial sort of way.
— Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism