Household Saints

It was a happy day yesterday. At approximately 2pm, the postman rang my doorbell and delivered my Ancient Industries order.

I've been wanting to order some items from this website for the longest time but forced myself to wait until my samplers were all completed so I could reward myself with a little something.

Ancient Industries is run by blogger/artist extraordinaire Megan Wilson, who has painstakingly culled together a collection of household goods from the British Isles, Europe and America that meet her strict standards of classic form and function. (I've posted about Megan before. If you need a refresher, click HERE.)

I tore open the beautifully wrapped packages with such fervor that I nearly forgot to take a photograph of them for posterity. Fortunately, when my hands closed in on the last box, I remembered. Darling, isn't it?

Inside, treasures awaited. Well, if you consider a bottle brush from Germany or a linen towel made from a grainsack to be treasures, which I certainly do. I haven't been so excited since the time I found a Dries Van Noten coat on sale at Jeffrey.

(From top left: Hunslet jug, bottle cleaner, dish washing brush,

wooden scoops, all resting on rustic linen towel)

It wasn't just the saintly, iconic beauty of those items that made me breathless to own them, it was the product descriptions.

Take, for example, the dish washing brush:

Very "Cold Comfort Farm" chic, this able brush would have been discarded by Flora Poste, which would have been her loss.

Have you read "Cold Comfort Farm" by Stella Gibbons? No? Well, then you'd best be ordering it because it's one of the funniest books ever.

If I had to describe it, I'd say, "Imagine Edina Monsoon from "Ab Fab" caught in a Christopher Guest remake of 'Straw Dogs.'"

But don't take it from me.

In the words of the inestimable Stuck-In-A-Book:

Flora Poste, the chic London 'heroine', finds herself orphaned and decides to live with a relative. She tries several, including the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, albeit reluctantly: "because highly sexed young men living on farms are always called Seth or Reuben, and it would be such a nuisance. And my cousin's name is Judith. That in itself is most ominous. Her husband is almost certain to be called Amos; and if he is, it will be a typical farm, and you know what they are like." She breezes into Cold Comfort Farm, and encounters every type of absurd, farcical and outlandish character imaginable.

Seriously. You will love.

And now back to my purchases. The tie for piéce de résistance was between the Cote Bastide rustic linen towel (pictured above) and the Ian Mankin red oven mitts, pictured below:

Of course they found an instant home draped on my Aga. Woven in Lancashire, they are made of heavy cotton and faced with towelling for extra thickness.

I gazed at them adoringly. All was right with the world.

And then it all went to pot.

My OCD took over and I became nervous that the male contingent in my house would drip coffee on them or touch them with greasy pizza hands or cause them in some way to become non-immaculate and so...

...I took them off the Aga...

...and hid them in the back of my linen drawer. My rationale was that if they were going to get sullied, they were going to get sullied by me so there would be no one to blame but myself.

I know, I'm absolutely terrible. I'm a recovering purist who's clearly having a relapse and needs to reread her own advice about the tragedy of perfection. But just let me live with the oven mitts being perfect for two days. And then I promise I'll return them to their perilous and risky life on the stove, come what may.

Naked Penguins

The world's most venerated paperback company has introduced design-it-yourself book covers. (Well, they've been out for a while...am I the only one who hasn't seen this?)

Knowing how highly I value a well-designed cover (see my post on Megan Wilson), I was initially taken aback. I prize vintage Penguins and have collected a stack over the years. But with good old self-deprecating charm, they actually address this very issue on their blog (yes, Penguin has a blog. Blogs are the new black.)

In their words:

According to consumer research conducted on what factors matter to people when they decide whether or not to pick up a book in a bookshop, the cover design comes out as most important. So this might be the stupidest thing we've ever done. 

According to the website, "the covers are art-quality paper and hold ink, paint, pencil and glue and come shrink-wrapped so the paper doesn't get dirty."

Apparently, it's all the rage with rock bands.

Beck drew a cover for "The Lost Estate" by Henri-Alain Fournier...

Ryan Adams painted Bram Stoker's "Dracula."

Dragonette illustrated "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll.

And Razorlight scribbled F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (it's a scribbled betting slip from a horse race in Tokyo.)

My initial hesitancy was soothed by the fact that Penguin clearly realizes their idea is slightly heretical, as evidenced by the following tongue-in-cheek comment: "Frame it, read it, give it as a gift or hide it away on a shelf at home" (italics mine). 

You can buy them here.

Yes, no or maybe so?

Cover Girl

Once in a while, you find someone so talented it takes your breath away.  I recently stumbled onto a blog called My Book Covers, a compilation of jacket designs by Random House designer Megan Wilson. I was absolutely gobsmacked by her utterly arresting visual style and had to find out more about her ASAP.

When I contacted her about doing this post, she wrote, "I will be blushing madly if you go ahead with this." (Blush away, Megan.) 

A selection of her book jackets is below. To see her complete collection of covers, click here.

Away we go...

I adore the stark simplicity of these two covers. The triangular motif adds a sharp tension to the delicacy of the artwork. 

(Vintage Classics. Photograph by Katherine Wolkoff.)

(Vintage Classics. Painting by Philip Taaffe.)

What does she add to an unforgettable photo like this? Restraint. Result? Perfection.

(Vintage Books. Photograph by Slim Aarons.)

I own this Beaton book and totally admit that I bought this edition because of the cover. It was a win-win situation as I also fell for the man inside.

(Alfred A. Knopf. Photograph by Cecil Beaton.)

I love how Megan chose to abut the soft, muted portrait up against the dramatic black border. It gives the cover a slight sense of unreality (and if you've read the book, you know that's exactly what the story's about).

(Vintage Books. Painting by Meredith Frampton.)

These next two covers kill me with their elegant fragility, so appropriate for Forster's novels.

(Vintage Classics. Wallpaper design by C. F. A. Voysey.)

(Vintage Classics. Design for woven silk by Anna Maria Garthwaite.)

Her style is wide-ranging... 

(Anchor Books.)

...and not without wit.

Oh, Noel. You're in good hands.

This one I find haunting.

This one feels very "Mad Men." 

The pink here reminds me of a Laduree macaroon.

(Vintage Books. Photograph by Cecil Beaton.)

I own this book in its plain gray Persephone cover; when I saw this new edition a few months ago, I almost bought it again just for that portrait. The colors! (But I didn't. Did you read my last post?)

(Persephone Books, London. Painting by Sir James Gunn.)

Megan also has another blog called Ancient Industries, of which I'm a huge fan. If you don't know it, you are in for a treat. (And it appears that her online shop is nearly up. Yippee.) 

The book covers whetted my appetite, but I still hankered to know about the woman behind the designs. Fortunately, Megan agreed to give me a bit of dish. It follows.

Megan, can you tell us a little about yourself? Start from the beginning.

If I can talk in terms of pop culture, my father was Don Draper, a Madison Avenue ad exec in the early 1960's...

...and by the time my (identical) twin and I came along in 1965, my mother was stuck in the suburbs with four children, crashing her station wagon into trees with us kids rolling around in the back. We had an old English sheepdog and all sorts of long-haired animals and my mother had a pash for decorating (cue "Please Don't Eat The Daisies.")

This then evolved into "The Ice Storm"...

...and my mother, in a fit of pique, looked at the NY Times real estate section and found two houses for rent far, far away. One was in Seville, Spain; the other in a little village near Henley-on-Thames, England.

How fabulous! Which one did she choose?

Well, she decided that learning a new language on top of everything else might be the final straw so she chose England. Because it was 1972 and you could move to a foreign country with four kids in tow and no visible means of support, she did just that.

Where did you live?

We moved to Holland Park which was still very shabby and bohemian. The houses in our square were pink, purple, orange, lime green, several abandoned, some lived in by squatters. I have strong memories of the dark insides of these houses and their overgrown gardens.

At this point, the story becomes more like "Hideous Kinky"...

...as my enterprising mother illegally sublet our house (with sheepdog thrown in) and took us off to Menorca, Spain for the entire summer, every summer. She was still young enough to enjoy herself, and we twins remember being dumped with strange non-English-speaking Catalans in the evenings, and hitchhiking to the beach during the day. 

Megan, that's quite an eccentric childhood!  I think you have enough material to fill up a book, not just the cover. Tell me some more. 

Well, my mother somehow managed to send us to quite posh schools (Putney High, followed by Godolphin and Latimer) all against the backdrop of imminent deportation and expulsion due to late fees. Occasionally, packages would arrive from Don Draper back in the States. Eventually, she managed to become much wealthier than my father by buying houses, getting them into glossy mags and then flogging them, but this was before the really big real estate money began. After that, I went to Chelsea, then St. Martins School of Art which was seriously good fun. The soundtrack to those days would be The Specials, The Smiths, Madonna and your friend Belinda.

And now you live in New York City.

After three years designing book covers -- my office was in the Michelin Building on Fulham Road (very nice) -- I came here to New York for two to five years...and that was back in 1991. Hence the constant harking back to England, where my twin still is as well as various family members. 

Any last words?

No, I don't draw the pictures (you'd be amazed how many people ask this) and yes, one should judge the book by its cover.