As an industrial designer, one of those skills in which one should have achieved a certain amount of fluency is the ability to create a three-dimensional object out of a series of two-dimensional shapes…and vice versa. This is something I have yet to master. So, is it any wonder that my attention is fixed on these drawings of disassembled objects? Just from looking at them, I can guess at what their final shapes are. But in order to be sure, I’d have to cut and fold. Of course, from Agence Eureka.

Agence Eureka has such an amazing and extensive collection of ephemera that I could probably post something from their archive every day for the next year and still have plenty to spare. Scrabble anyone?

I love this little image. It’s a cigarette card (1.375″ x 2.675″) which I bought a couple of years ago while in San Francisco. Almost nightly when I was little, my mother used to read us The Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. One of my favorites was about how the Armadillo came to be. According to Kipling, these odd little creatures were formed out of an alliance between a turtle and a hedgehog. Click here if you would like to see the entire NYPL collection of Animalloy cigarette cards.

So, what the hell? I found this little “toy” at the local farm and garden center amid hundreds of small scale replicas of tractors, wagons, hay balers, combines and a whole array of farm animals. This piece (with the John Deere label affixed to the price tag) is part of a huge collection of precision cast miniatures of farm and construction equipment manufactured by Ertl Toys, a company that’s been around since 1945. This particular tanker is labeled anhydrous ammonia, which is a broadly applied and inexpensive source of nitrogen fertilizer used in farming. That said, it is also highly toxic and crazy dangerous to handle. And, as it happens, drug dealers now use it in the manufacture of methamphetamines. Hmmnnn, I’m not sure that inculcating our youngsters with this type of approach to growing food is the best way forward. Would a truck full of chicken poop be a better alternative? Anyway, maybe skip the chemicals and stick with the tractors and the cows.

Another typographical treasure from Agence Eureka. I can’t get enough of her collection.