Mid2Mod: Design Line

Showing posts with label Design Line. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Herman Miller weighs in

The question of who designed the jacks bookends...Bill Curry, George Nelson or someone as yet unnamed...comes up with a fair amount of regularity. In fact, Nick at Mid-Century Midwest posted about them just the other day and piqued my curiosity once again.

This time, I emailed Herman Miller to see if the good people there could shed any light on the subject. Kris received my contact form first and did a little research, sending me the comment in a Design Addict thread shown below...but wasn't sure of the accuracy.

Kris forwarded my question to Mark, who said he'd never heard of the design at all, and certainly not at Herman Miller, but he suggested that George Nelson's office might have designed them for another company. Mark forwarded my email to Gloria.

Gloria works in Herman Miller's Corporate Communications department as the Archives Lead, and she confirmed that there's nothing in the Herman Miller archives to indicate it was produced by their company, but she didn't rule out that Nelson might have designed the bookends for another company.

After seeing the picture below of Bill Curry with the jacks behind him on Nick's site and then reading the full story on Bill Curry & Design Line, there can be no question that Design Line manufactured them, but I still have some nagging questions about who designed what...and when. The picture shows him with Design Line Stemlite lamps that look almost identical to Laurel Mushrooms, but I have found nothing yet that tells me precisely when his lamps were produced and when the Laurel lamps came out...so, yet again, who copied whom? Did Laurel copy him? Or, if he copied the Laurel lamps, could he have copied the jacks bookends from someone else too?

The author of the comment below says he owns a Design Line jacks table by Bill Curry, and it's clearly marked "Design Line" and "Bill Curry," as are the Stemlite lamps. He says he's own several of the oversized jacks bookends and has never found one marked. He can't explain why Design Line would mark their other products but not the bookends, so his contention is that they were all knockoffs of the table design, but he says he'll concede if anyone can produce an ad or a catalog proving him wrong.

After doing my series on lookalikes and being surprised several times by the dates/creators of the original designs, I'm going a step further and saying I'll be satisfied when I find ads or catalogs with names and dates in them.

From an email to me from Herman Miller