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Nomadic Furniture 1 and 2

Contributed by Robert Beatty on May 5th, 2019. Artwork published in .
Nomadic Furniture 1 and 2 1
Source: www.amazon.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Cover designs for the books Nomadic Furniture (1973) and Nomadic Furniture 2 (1974) by James Hennessey and Victor Papanek. The first volume shows caps from Harry (VGC, 1966). The follow-up features Baker Sans, another VGC face which had been issued shortly before, in 1973.

Nomadic Furniture 1 and 2 2
Source: www.highvalleybooks.com Photo: High Valley Books. License: All Rights Reserved.
Nomadic Furniture 1 and 2 3
Source: www.ebay.com License: All Rights Reserved.

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  • Baker Sans
  • Harry

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6 Comments on “Nomadic Furniture 1 and 2

  1. Very nice, thank you, Robert!

    See also Victor Papanek’s previous book, Design For The Real World from 1971 on Fonts In Use.

    The smaller text – “How to build and where to buy lightweight furniture that folds, inflates, knocks down, stacks, or is disposable and can be recycled … with many easy to follow illustrations” – is Papanek’s handwriting. Nick Sherman made a digital interpretation of these energetic letterforms, see the Papanek typeface on HEX Projects.

    Some of the interior pages with more of his handwriting are reproduced in a 2015 article for Core77. Rain Noe mentions that “in 2008, ten years after Papanek’s death, the two books were combined and re-released as Nomadic Furniture: D-I-Y Projects That Are Lightweight and Light on the Environment.” In 2013, the MAK in Vienna organized an exhibition titled Nomadic Furniture 3.0, curated by Martina Fineder together with Sebastian Hackenschmidt and Thomas Geisler.

  2. Thanks for posting this.

    I read these and other Papanek (& Hennesey) books (Design for the Real World and How Things Don’t Work) back in the seventies. They had a big effect on how I thought about design, and still do. I was even inspired to make some of my own furniture out of simple materials.

  3. Here’s the cover of How Things Don’t Work (1977) by Papanek & Hennessey, which features ITC Ronda Bold and Permanent Semibold:

  4. Here’s the back cover, set in Antique Olive:

  5. Thanks for your comments, Mark! The images warrant a separate post: How Things Don’t Work by Victor Papanek & James Hennessey.

  6. Michael Hennessey says:
    Jun 12th, 2024 4:54 pm

    What a fun surprise to run across this. My dad was the co-author James Hennessey. I’m the young boy pictured on the cover of Nomadic Furniture 2.

    I’m grateful for this inclusion especially as I got to discover another person who created a “Papanek” typeface besides myself! For Al Gowan, no less, who was my mentor at MassArt back in the mid-1990s. My version of “Papanek” was cobbled together quickly for potential use at the MAK show in Vienna (mentioned earlier) Nomadic Furniture 3.0. It wasn’t needed in the end.

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