Day-Glo® : a moniker describing shades of orange, pink, green, blue, and yellow so bright they seem almost incandescent. The Day-Glo® Designer’s Guide, a trade catalogue in the Cooper Hewitt National Design Library, was published in 1969 at the height of the psychedelic era. The catalogue celebrates Day-Glo® colors at the peak of their popularity with the...

Authors: Stephen Van Dyk and Adrienne Meyer This early 20th century trade catalog in the Cooper Hewitt Library includes furniture, lighting, and decorative objects in the art nouveau style created by the French firm of Majorelle. Louis Majorelle (1859-1926), an important French furniture manufacturer, took over his father Auguste’s cabinet making workshop in Nancy in...

In 1935, visionary fragrance pioneers Armand Petitjean and Guillaume d’Ornano opened a luxury boutique, selling a small selection of perfumes and beauty products, manufactured just outside of Paris.  This French perfume company was called Lancôme, its name inspired by the ruins of the castle Le Château de Lancosme near the region of La Brenne in the...

This 1937 Czech tubular steel trade catalog Kovový nábytek //Vichr a Spol  is a recent addition to the Cooper Hewitt Library’s extensive collection of furniture trade literature. The library collects these invaluable primary resource materials from all periods, styles, designs and countries. This is a photogravure catalog issued by Vichr, one of the major Czech...

I have always loved looking at old advertisements in magazines; many of the people that come and use the Cooper Hewitt Library come for that specific reason. Advertisements are designed to establish a connection between the person seeing it, and the product or idea the ad is selling. Typefaces, colors, styles of portraying an object-...

Rockwell Kent is famous as an early American modernist painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, sailor and adventurer. Like many artists he did commercial and decorative work in order to earn money and pay the bills. The Cooper Hewitt Library has some examples of this commercial work – designing dinnerware, murals, bookplates, and this interior design and...