A Map of The Office, 1942 -&- On the Cusp of Color: Bringing Color to Packaging

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 564

An Occasion An Appreciation, a badly-titled but butterly-produced and broadly-illustrated work is a shiny, slippery and slick celebration of gummed paper.  It may well be the Gutenberg Bible of gummed paper celebration books. 

The book is a silver anniversary (1917-1942) of the Mid-States Gummed Paper Company of Chicago, makers of gummed,.flat, non-curling special gum gummed papers.  It was a company started by box makers, the logical extension of that business. ("Gummed cloth tapes completed the manufactured joint of corrugated boxes, and gummed kraft sealing tape close the box," Indeed. Also its a nicely-written sentence, and a well-written book.)  There is a continuous reference throughout the book to "flat, really flat" gummed tape, something that is lost on me if I don't think about it--the use of splashy color throughout the work, though, isn't. 

The company's color tapes washed over a wide spectrum, adding an artistic touch to a packaging world which was largely black and white. It also produced color gummed labels for  packaging and advertising, which made all the difference. (To appreciate this all you have to do is wind your way through a year or two of LIFE magazine from 1939/1940 and see the vanilla- and blandly-colored boxes of cereals and cans of  such and so spread across the issues.  People are much more convinced to buy something that has a colorful, pictorial image on the box than one that is a white box with black lettering. )*

Another very interesting bit about this book is that it published an indexed map of the offices of the headquarters staff--which is a very unusual map to my experience, very.  I've got a small collection of office layouts/maps from the 1900-1940 period, mainly because it belongs to a period long ago and far away, even though the tail end of office design like this creeps its way into my own life, showing up at places like "computer headquarters" in tv shows like the Rockford Files in 1980. It is a wonderful insight into the way business was done, and I can just about see the polished red linoleum floors, open transoms and abundant oak everything, all swirling in cigarette smoke, populated with people wearing real clothing.

Yet another oddity is the map of the locations of the company--it definitely belongs to the Blank and Empty Things category of this blog--showing the five cities where it  had offices.  The resulting map though is quite unusual, as it shows just the five point and leaves the rest of the country jet black in a deep blue background, everything else missing. 

I know I've had some fun with this book, but I've got to say that it was very well done, very well written, and about as interesting as its topic could allow. 

* I believe that the first mass-produced book illustrated with color photos was by Leica for its labs, published in Berlin in 1938 (?).  color printing in photography had been around by a laborious process since at least the 1890's, but that's a different story

Comments

[Joy Holland]

John, I am surprised that a man of your sensitivity, intelligence and most of all, your experience in packing books, cannot appreciate the importance of "flat, really flat gummed tape." We may have been spoiled by tape guns and scotch tape, but I for one I can easily imagine the irritation that must be caused by those curling edges of wet gummed tape. In future I hope you, as I do, will fully appreciate the importance of flatness in tape and take a moment out of your busy day to reflect on the gift of calm convenience it has added to your life.

[John Ptak]

Amen, Joy! I've already offered up some carbonized bits of that reinforced wet packing adhesive that the USPS demands for insured overseas parcels. I hate it so. SO you think I'd be more appreciative of the really flat gummed tape guys because I could never really ever get the wet reinforced adhesive *flat*. I don't know what I was thinking, but that happens. Maybe its happening now? I dunno. What I really liked was the dark pretty blue that these guys used in their publication...

[Joy]

Yes, it is a good color, and just look at all those guys in suits and Brylcreem--oh no, wait a minute, only one of them has enough hair for that. I love your description of their offices--you can just tell that was how it was. "Take a letter, Miss Moss..."

[John Ptak]

(Mansfield?) I wonder if it (the office complex in general) as quiet or noisy? I bet kinda quiet, or more quiet than we would expect. Phones of course but not as many as later; no carpeting I bet so a lot of heal clatter from wispy waifs blwoing their way down the halls with Urgent Papers; but no music. Some typewriters and with not much on the walls they were pretty clangy; Burroughs adding machines thundering away. A palce of business, the sound of business being done, a kind of reverence. Or not. I wonder if there are any recordings of general office sounds from this time? General sounds like this--like the sound inside a cab or the Battery at 10 am and so on--probably all lost to inifinity.

[Joy]

You know what else there would have been--cigarette smoke, lots of it.

[John Ptak]

Yes, lots of swirling lazy smoke. And those great, large, thik overoatds for the winter--those deep dark blue ones for the men. Offices in the past in movies don't look so bad/scary compared to the offices that are prmosied in movies for the future, I think ("Brazil").