In 1958 Henry Wolf, newly appointed art director for Harper’s Bazaar, was tapped by the Advertising Typographers Association to write an essay on magazine typography for their bulletin.

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Ten years before the rise of the supermarket generic brand, Champion Papers produced these colorful generic packaging designs for a series of print advertisements.

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Comment was a promotional periodical produced by consortium of printers in the early sixties. Issue 200 included contributions from Saul Bass, Will Burtin, and Henry Wolf.

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The Henry Wolf Collection: Box 1, Folder 41

Henry Wolf art directed and photographed “Toys of a Decade” for the October 1960 Esquire. The text was full of familiar connoisseur’s details about an eclectic range of 1940s bric-a-brac. But it was presented in classic sixties prose style: partial acknowledgment of excess clothed in mock-rapturous anaphora:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! While the world was impoverished, America rejoiced in its material goods, and honest goods they were. Lionel trains had a third rail down the middle, and telephones came in any color, if it was black … Johnny hawked his Philip Morris cigarettes (in plain brown wrappers) on the airwaves. Charles Eames’s plywood chair, built to sustain the bottom, has lasted until today, while brain food like Collier’s and Flash Gordon became period pieces. God, we were content! The only subversive voice was Baby Snooks every Friday night, she would ask, all feigned innocence, “Why, Daddy?” … Then, suddenly, it was 1950. North Korea invaded South Korea; and next spring Baby Snooks was dead.

(Esquire casually omits Ray Eames’ credit on the DCM.)

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Pentagram Partners’ Feedback, five volumes, London 1976–1996

Among the ephemera in the Henry Wolf Collection are five early editions of Pentagram’s Feedback — guidebooks for globetrotting designers. Excerpts from David Hockney, Olivier Morgue and Bob Gill follow.

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