Berlin textures

[imomus]

The first four pictures are the various and lovely wallpaper textures to be seen at Wohnzimmer, an elegantly tatty café-bar on the Helmholtz Platz in Prenzlauer Berg. The last three are the spines of books seen in the Antiquariat section of the Karl-Marx-Buchhandlung on Karl-Marx-Allee. Like kimonos, these jackets use generic patterns but wrap them with an identifying, individualising "obi" (in this case the book's title on a white label). I sometimes wish I'd packaged all my records this way, so they built into a clashing but harmonious set of patterns on the shelf.

For more Berlin textures, check the new pictures on my Flickr account. (Tip: choose "All Sizes" to see tons of detail in glorious high-res, and "More Properties" to see all the technical stuff about the picture.) If you're more in the mood for text than texture, there's a new piece up today on Design Observer, Paper Spends More Time With Its Family, which develops some of the ideas in my recent thoughts on the links between computers and paper.

Plus: One year ago on this blog: Slow Life and Semantic Architecture.

Comments

Insel-Bücherei

[(Anonymous)]

Those nice books are from the Insel-Bücherei series. I came upon one some time ago in Holland (where I live) and bought it. Then I started seeing them everywhere. I learned online that it's a rather respected literary series in Germany (and popular with collectors), spanning from 1912 to 1990 or so. The publisher's logo (a ship sailing in the waves) was redrawn by various big-name typographers, like Gill, Zapf and Tschichold. The covers are almost all lovely, like you saw. I was slightly disappointed to find out that each book didn't have a unique pattern, some were used multiple times. Ah well.

Enjoy,

Sam (sam[at]colorwash.nl)