Swastikas on a Square

Back in the 1960s, on the south-west corner of the square in my little hometown of Lewistown, PA there was a restaurant called The Diana Shop, and to the right of it was a dark seedy-looking bar called The Hofbrau. Today, it is all one spot, Nettie’s Cafe.

As a young child shopping downtown with my mother, we would often walk by this building on our way from G.C. Murphy’s to Montgomery Wards or to the lobby of the taxi business to get a ride back home on North Walnut Street.

I remember seeing the tile work, and was fascinated by all of the symbols. It wasn’t until I was a bit older that I spent much time examining them. My best guess is that building probably dates sometime around the 1920s. [As a bit of trivia, in the mid 1980s my wife and I loved meeting for lunch at The Diana Shop. We even had our tiny 4-person wedding reception there, which consisted of flavored lemon and cherry Cokes. The older waitresses there were so very friendly to us, and later on, to our newborn son.]

I knew that with the age of the building that the swastika symbol, along with all of the other ornaments, were just decoration and did not carry the meaning of Nazi Germany and WWII. Yet, there they were, and immediately upon seeing the swastika, that is all I could think of. Our culture — from comic books, TV cartoons and drama shows, movies, and history books — has burned this association together forever in our collective minds.

Years later I read a great article by Steven Heller called “Symbol of the Century” in the January / February 1992 issue of Print Magazine. I still have that issue saved in my collection of graphic design resources.

Heller recently wrote “Swastika Guilt” in Imprint, and reading it reminded me of these tiles again. Slowly, time is eroding the past, and it wouldn’t surprise me if suddenly one day this building is torn down to be replaced with a vacant lot or mini-strip mall. I made a mental note that the next time we were in town visiting our parents, that I needed to take some photos of the tiles before they were gone forever, This past weekend I had that opportunity; below are some of the images I captured.

On the way into the main entrance to the cafe, someone has even
tried to scratch away the swastika; my guess is with their car keys.

The cafe was closed late on a Saturday afternoon;
the scratched swastika can be seen in the upper right.

Despite decades of pollution and grime, the rich indigo-blue glaze
is still vibrant.

Oliver Sacks: New Cover Designs

via howmagazine
These covers were designed in-house at Vintage by Cardon Webb and make me fall in love with the Oliver Sacks books anew.

Keep Our Secrets

via brain pickings
“Keep Our Secrets by Jordan Crane isn’t merely a charmingly illustrated treat, it’s also an admirable piece of publishing innovation — the book is printed with thermally-activated color-changing ink that lets you discover a wealth of delightful surprises and hidden illustrations as you rub the pages and the heat from your fingers causes some ink layers to become transparent. This kind of playful, tactile interactivity in what’s still a printed, physical book is challenges our assumptions about what it means to build truly “interactive” reading experiences, showing it doesn’t necessarily have to mean device-centricity…”
Read the rest here.

Rudolf Brazda, 98, Dies; Survived Pink Triangle

via nytimes
“Rudolf Brazda, believed to be the last surviving man to wear the pink triangle — the emblem sewn onto the striped uniforms of the thousands of homosexuals sent to Nazi concentration camps, most of them to their deaths — died on Wednesday in Bantzenheim, in Alsace, France…”
Read the rest here.

QR Stenciler & Hobo Codes

Vegans Beware

via make
“The QR_STENCILER is a free, fully-automated utility which converts QR codes into vector-based stencil patterns suitable for laser-cutting. Additionally, we present QR_HOBO_CODES, a series of one hundred QR stencil designs which, covertly marked in urban spaces, may be used to warn people about danger or clue them into good situations...”
Read the rest here. The hobo codes make me smile!

Image of the Day: Shepard Fairey

Image of the Day: Bird Bomb

Spotted near Double Wide Diner in Pittsburgh

Image of the Day: Time

Spotted near Quite Storm in Pittsburgh, attached to a telephone pole

Image of the Day: Going Up?

Spotted near Quite Storm in Pittsburgh, screwed into a telephone pole

Upper/lowercase Living

Spotted on the trip back from Pittsburgh. I understand that they think the name “uppercase living” set in lower case letters is cute, but it it is jarring when trying to make sense of the phrase, and understanding the history behind what uppercase and lowercase means in typographic terms. This business is just one of the many other pyramid-type-schemes to make money off of others holding vinyl ‘decor’ parties.

trueindigo did a great job taking this photo in a moving vehicle, and nabbing Bondi Printing Center in the background to boot!

1942: Marg Printing & Engraving

via retronaut
At the Corner of Pearl St., NYC, from the Charles Cushman Collection
See more images here, and visit the Charles Cushman Collection here.

Sea of Cephalopods Octopus Necktie

via thrilllist
“A writhing sea of cephalopods creates a striking pattern on this unique necktie…”
Visit the Thrill List site here. Makes me smile...

Image of the Day: HighVoltage

Reynolds Stone’s Press

via letterology
“Reynolds Stone (1909 - 1979) was a very distinguished British wood engraver, letter cutter and painter who lived in rural Dorset, England. His wife, Janet was a skilled photographer and took these two and a quarter square format photos of him and his presses in the mid-1960s. The negatives were found recently by his son-in-law and artist, Ian Beck who scanned and posted them here.”

Suffragette Banners

via mary evens picture library
“The Women’s Library, part of London Metropolitan University, hold the most extensive collection of women’s history in the UK. The latest selection includes a large number of designs for suffrage banners by renowned stained-glass and poster artist Mary Lowndes. Deeply committed to the suffragette cause, in 1907 Lowndes formed the Artists’ Suffrage League which went on to create much of the promotional material for the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. As chair, Lowndes contributed many designs for posters, banners and cards. Her watercolour banner sketches are notable for their use of luminous colour revealing the influence of Lowndes’s training in stained-glass. We also have images of a number of finished, sewn banners based on Lowndes’s designs.”
Please click here to view these images.

Caren Alpert’s Microscopic Photography

Life Saver, 17X Magnification

via a friend
Read Caren Alpert’s artistic statement here, and visit her gallery here.

Chicago Brewery Goes for Zero Waste

via utne reader
“A growing number of beer makers are incorporating green practices in their brewing operations, but a couple of brothers setting up a brewery in Chicago are setting their sights even higher, reports the Chicago Reader: They’re aiming for a zero-waste facility. The key is that the New Chicago Brewing Company is not a freestanding operation but part of The Plant, a former meatpacking facility that is being renovated to house a bunch of symbiotic businesses under one roof. One makes pickles, one makes kombucha tea, and one is an aquaponics operation that will produce tilapia, greens, mushrooms, and herbs…”
Read more here and here.

Our food varieties are dwindling. So why should you care?

via writesforfood
“…Most of us in the well-fed world give little thought to where our food comes from or how it’s grown. We steer our shopping carts down supermarket aisles without realizing that the apparent bounty is a shiny stage set held up by increasingly shaky scaffolding. We’ve been hearing for some time about the loss of flora and fauna in our rain forests. Very little, by contrast, is being said or done about the parallel erosion in the genetic diversity of the foods we eat. Food varieties extinction is happening all over the world—and it’s happening fast. In the United States an estimated 90 percent of our historic fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished. Of the 7,000 apple varieties that were grown in the 1800s, fewer than a hundred remain. In the Philippines thousands of varieties of rice once thrived; now only up to a hundred are grown there. In China 90 percent of the wheat varieties cultivated just a century ago have disappeared. Experts estimate that we have lost more than half of the world’s food varieties over the past century. As for the 8,000 known livestock breeds, 1,600 are endangered or already extinct…”
Read the rest here.

Graphic Nothing’s Mona Lisa Remix

via retronaut
“Leonardo da Vinci's The Mona Lisa reduced and remixed down into 140 exact circles of colour. Makes no sense close up. Makes every sense from the other side of the room.”
More about it here. Print from your own hi-res quality from files here. Be sure to look through the Galleries section for some interesting discoveries, like Abbey Road Remix.

Tinnitus: When The Ringing Won’t Stop, Clear Your Mind

via npr
Two recent stories on NPR, Rethinking Tinnitus: When The Ringing Won’t Stop, Clear Your Mind and Tinnitus: Why Won’t My Ears Stop Ringing?