We looted the basement of the Smithsonian Institution Archives by posing as doctoral researchers interested in the preservation techniques of really old flags. Our unpaid interns made us fake badges to gain entry to the cryogenic room—next to the Smithsonian staff sauna—where they keep the good stuff. They then helped us digitally smuggle out some […]
While we here at the Department of Information have successfully stamped out many attempts over the decades at unionization from within our own ranks—sometimes through illegal, quasi-legal, and morally dubious methods—we still know how to appreciate good union branding when we see it.
While some of the objects in Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects are actually very much still around, it is true that all of them more fully belong to a now distant period of time that appreciated them more. Advertised by the University of Chicago Press as a “visual tour through futures past via the […]
Ruben Pater and Amsterdam-based Valiz Publishers’ CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape From It is an extensive (552 pages) but very engaging, accessible, and portable account of graphic design’s current and historical relationship with capitalism (and theories on how, as a designer, to potentially decouple the inextricably-linked duo). […]
The Miami-based Islandia Journal offers a refreshing and strange look at some of Florida’s more eccentric angles and anomalies through the hazy, sun-drenched, and mysterious lenses of local visual artists and writers. It is focused around the paranormal, weird, historical, and uniquely Floridian. The 8 ½’’ x 5 ½’’ limited-run journal’s first issue was published […]
Mark Twain once said something along the lines of, “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A government logo who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” And over the years since our countrymen first started drawing circles with eagles inside of them, many logos–along with their organizing bodies–did die. […]
Eindhoven, Netherlands’ Onomatopee Projects, with Nicolas Nova and Dislocation.org, use reflective silver ink on 255 pages of matte black paper to illustrate and explain to us what kinds of strange, wonderful, and terrifying things we might expect to encounter in the latest epoch of geological time. The A5 size publication, while quite thick, feels accessible […]
James E. Lawrence would have been about 25 years old when he was assigned to survey the wild deer population outside of Brookhaven National Laboratory, a top-secret government research center full of particle physicists and experimental happenings, where said deer were running amok scaling the 12ft tall fence to eat radioactive plants. Was this the […]
Extrapolation Factory Operator’s Manual by Elliott P. Montgomery and Chris Woebken is a dual-language guide full of beautiful photos, thoughtful typesetting, curious illustrated diagrams, and words you have never seen before. The Factory itself is a design-based research studio in Brooklyn founded by the two authors. It is here they develop “experimental methods for collaboratively […]
Hamilton Morris, chemist and indie zine hobbyist, took it upon himself to update and republish the cult classic “ethnoherpetological”* pamphlet, Bufo Alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert, from 1983. A notable addition to the new version includes Mr. Morris’ untold history of how the original author, Ken Nelson, who had published under a […]
MY BODY FEELS AMAZING is a meditation on space, the body, and form. Originally printed in 2019, this latest edition was recently re-printed via risograph with a thermographic cover and saddle stitch binding. The heat-printed method creates this raised, rubbery effect, making gliding your hands over the the cover and back page a pleasant tactile […]
Mushrooms & Friends 3 is an 8.5” x 11” staple-bound high-fidelity celebration of wild mushrooms, their friends, imagination, and the color spectrum. It is not necessary to know that Cantharellus cinnabarinus–commonly known as a chanterelle–is edible, or that it’s Greek name refers to it’s cup-like shape, to appreciate that the mushroom looks really cool and […]
Can you own the airwaves? Probably not. This didn’t stop William Howard Taft, then president of the United States, from declaring war on unregulated frequencies in 1912, according to an article headlined “President Moves to Stop Mob Rule of Wireless.” Since the early 1900s there have been numerous unlicensed, unwarranted, or quasi-legal radio stations operating […]
What may be an example of one of the greatest celebrations of cataloguing, edible nature, and art as a means of production civilization has ever realized exists in its entirety in the probable basement of the United States National Agricultural Library. Yes, we have one of those. Luckily for us it also exists on a […]