INTERIORS + INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
May 1948
Francis de N. Schroeder [Editor],
Rai Komai [Cover Designer]
Francis de N. Schroeder [Editor]: INTERIORS + INDUSTRIAL DESIGN. New York: Whitney Publications [Volume 107, no. 10] May 1948. Quarto. Perfect bound and sewn printed illustrated wrappers. 170 pp. Illustrated articles and trade advertisements. Wrappers lightly worn. Interior unmarked and clean. Cover by Rai Komai. A very good or better copy.
8.125 x 11.25 magazine with 170 pages of black and white examples of the best modern American interior and industrial design, circa 1948 -- offering a magnificent snapshot of the blossoming modern movement after World War II. A very desirable, vintage publication in terms of form and content: high quality printing and clean, functional design and typography and excellent photographic reproduction make this a spectacular addition to a midcentury design collection. Highly recommended.
Contents
- Cover Artists: Biographies and head shots of Robert Sivard, George Nelson and Albe Steiner.
- Interiors' editorial: Very Hot for May
- A matter of form, by Warren Nardin: photographs and notes from Ceylon
- Problems of design: Ends and means, by George Nelson
- Moholy took pen in hand: Parker Pen offices in Manhattan. 4 pages and 8 photographs. Completed a few months before his death, the Parker Company retail service department was one of a handful of American interior design commissions by László Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy also designed a machine-age pen and letter holder whilst working as the artistic advisor to the Parker Pen Company (1944 -46). Once a month he left family and school in Chicago to spend two days with the company in Janesville, Wisconsin. Sybil Moholy-Nagy, in the first edition of her book Moholy- Nagy: Experiment in Totality, used a photograph of this desk set to illustrate her husband’s industrial design (Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, New York, 1950, pg. 211, fig. 74). The desk set then disappeared from public knowledge until 2013 when it was re-discovered in Wisconsin by Susan Wirth, a renowned pen collector, and subsequently included in the recent travelling retrospective and catalogue ‘Moholy-Nagy: Future Present’. The desk set is a unique object that contains two industrially produced elements. What is unique is the base: a chromium-plated rectangular platform that is buttressed by a repetition of six cut-out shapes serving as letter holders. A second part of the desk set is the penholder, which is inserted into the end of the base. It is made up of a magnet ball and socket enabling the pen to pivot in all directions. The rotating penholder was designed by Moholy-Nagy and copyrighted by him in collaboration with the Parker Pen Company. In the patent Moholy-Nagy lists one of the objectives of his penholder is, ‘to provide a structure which is well adapted to the effectuation of novel and artistically attractive desk set designs.’Moholy wrote that the Parker 51 pen is ‘one of the most successful and harmonious designs of small utilitarian objects’ (László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, Chicago, 1947, p. 57, fig. 40) . The same could be said for his 1946 desk set in which intersecting forms on a horizontal and vertical axis synthesise three independent functional components into a harmonious whole.
- Robert Heller covers ground for Alexander Smith
- New light on forensic interiors: law offices by Marie Frommer
- Designers in a loft: Olson offices
- Interiors' paint pot: a dictionary of color: the grays, including Pussy Willow, Squirrel Gray, Baby Mouse, Mist, Tattle Tale Gray, Five O'Clock Shadow.
- From Burslem to Barleston: the Wedgwood exhibition
- Blinds
- Industrial Design: from England sans curlicues [includes work by G. B. Leather, Robert Gutman and Arthur Thilo, Robin Day, Kenneth Holmes and N. R. G. Poynton, Sadie Speight, Victor Skellern and H. G. Hammond
- Full page ads for the Herman Miller Furniture Company, Saul Steinberg for House & Garden and Herbert Matter for Knoll Associates.
- Departments include Letters to the editors, Interiors' cover artists, For your information, Interiors' bookshelf, A sampling of magazines from abroad, Newsreel: merchandise cues, people, address book
George Nelson famously served as Editorial contributor to Interiors, where he used the magazine as his bully pulpit for bringing modernism to middle-class America. Interiors was a hard-core interior design publication, as shown by their publishing credo: "Published for the Interior Designers Group which includes: interior designers, architects who do interior work, industrial designers who specialize in interior furnishings, the interior decorating departments of retail stores, and all concerned with the creation and production of interiors-- both residential and commercial."