On the Dinosaurs + Robots post about the Hermès X Leica M7 camera, Mister Jalopy paraphrased "the merchant prince" Mickey Drexler, who "cited Hermès as being the only luxury brand that delivers the promise."

So true, I thought, as I decided to click over to the Hermès webstore where, holy smokes, there is an Hermès coloring book: Les 4 Mondes, "12 pages with 24 designs for you to fill with color! Measures 15" x 11""

I assume Hermès has a bespoke department where artisans will then translate the kid's chef d'oeuvre into a 20-screen printed silk carré. Right? Deliver the promise?

Hermès Coloring Book, $130 [hermes.com]
Previously: Delivering the promise for baby gifts apparently takes time
Or maybe they just go through phases

When I saw the first shot, I'm thinking, "weird and looks kinda homemade." And since it's an actual 1986 Saab product, I'm not really that far off.

A Hemmings correspondent hit the Saab Fall Festival in Albany and came back with this rather awesome, Saab Turbo 006, a pun on the classic 900 Turbo. Only 75 were built in Oy, Finland, in both coupe and convertible bodystyles, and they were offered through Saab dealers for $1,900. [Or about one tenth the price of FAO Schwarz's still-mythical Range Rover go-kart.]

Power comes from a 3.5hp Honda four-stroke engine with "optional electric start." Which, inexplicably, looks like it was not located somewhere between the seats.

Oh, to be a kid again, and big kid toys [hemmings blog via dt reader dt]

Whether you're a parenting advice expert or a momblogger, a filmmaker, a comedian, a hipster memoirist, a singer or a Kardashian--hell, it probably even happened to Erma Bombeck--there's that moment anyone who makes money off his kids dreads:

Hahahaha, no, that's not it. It's when your kid stops coming up with good material. Here, check this out:

via @jonathancoulton

In 1983, with a couple of kids of his own running around, Andy Warhol's longtime Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger asked him to create a show of small paintings for children. The show, "Paintings for Children," featured The Toy Series silkscreened paintings of images taken from toy packages and ads Warhol had collected over the years. There was a boardbook, which I bought in 2004.

At the time, I thought there were 12 paintings in the series, but Christopher Turner, writing in both Tate Magazine and the exhibition cataloge for the Museo Picasso Malaga's exhibition, "Toys of the Avant-Garde," says there were actually 128. At this point, though, I'm getting pretty used to the fact that no matter what I thought I knew about Andy, it turns out I don't know jack. Here's Bruno:

Warhol designed wallpaper of silver fish swimming on a blue background which made the gallery look like an aquarium, and the paintings were hung at eye level for three- to five-year-old children. Adults had to squat to examine the paintings closely, the opposite of me having to lift up my little children when looking at paintings in museums. We even went so far as to charge an entry fee for adults not accompanied by children under six, the proceeds being donated to a Swiss children's charity.

"Through the eyes of a child," by Christopher Turner, Tate, Etc. Summer 2010 [tate.org.uk]
image: bruno bischofberger via tate

I don't ask for much, really. I'm not one of those swaghound bloggers mucking around for free samples. Or blackmailing companies with the threats of negative posts because baby needs a new pair of Crocs. And though I mock the truly awful ones and don't do anything with most of the rest, I don't mind getting press releases.

But still, it hurts a bit that after all the ground game and esoteric digging into the--let's face it--the largely ignored history of modernist children's design, no one at the Museo Picasso Malaga bothered to send me a press release for their new show--open since October 4th!--titled, Toys Of The Avant-Garde.

And in fact, I had to learn about it the same way the common masses did, by cracking open my just-arrived copy of Artforum, and seeing nothing less than Ladislav Sutnar's Build The Town blocks staring out at me from an ad. An ad!

If I knew where Malaga was, I would march right over to the Museo Picasso they apparently have there and demand to know why they haven't added me to their mailing list. And also why they don't have any more pictures or checklists or webstreams or whatever for their surely groundbreaking show.

Toys of the Avant-Garde, 4 Oct - 30 Jan [museopicassomalaga.org]

Wow, has it really been four years and two weeks since I first posted about Czech emigre designer [and area code parentheses inventor!] Ladislav Sutnar's beautiful-but-unproduced Build The Town block set?

Well then, I'm only two weeks late in posting these two awesome, promotional posters Sutnar silkscreened for himself but never published, because the blocks set never went into production.

Hopefully, four years and two weeks from now, I'll be posting about how I scored a box of Build The Town prototypes and paraphernalia at a stoop sale in Murray Hill. Of course, that'd entail going to Murray Hill, which is pretty damn unlikely.

Ladislav Sutnar Build The Town block set silkscreen prints, 1940-43 [thisisdisplay.org via draplin]
Previously: Czech out these insane Factory Town [sic?] blocks by Ladislav Sutnar

Admiral Robert Peary's wife Josephine accompanied him on several of his early expeditions to Greenland, including the one where he pretty much swiped Ahnighto, the massive meteorite fragment which had been the Inuit's primary source of iron for centuries, and sold it to the American Museum of Natural History.

Anyway, in 1893, Josephine gave birth to the couple's daughter Marie Ahnighto Peary, who became famous locally for being pink--the Inuit called her Snow Baby--and who became famous internationally for being born in the friggin' frozen tundra of Greenland.

Snow Baby spawned a worldwide merchandising craze of mostly porcelain figurines, but in 1901 Mrs. Peary decided to get in on the action. She published a photo storybook of Marie's Inuit childhood titled, obviously, The Snow Baby: A True Story With True Pictures. If someone can guarantee that the photo up top of a slightly freaked out Snow Baby in a sealskin-covered high chair is in the book, I just might have to spring for the $100+ price tag.

Meanwhile, what's not in the book: Josephine's story of running into her husband's various Inuit baby mamas while her husband was out pretending to discover the North Pole or whatever. True Story!

Hmm. Since I first discovered this, someone haspublished a print-on-demand scanned version of The Snow Baby for just $14. [amazon]

The Real Snow Baby [zianet]
About Peary [pearyeagleisland.com]

Just the fleeting impression of a guy who knows a thing or two about inordinately severe crib design and plexi...

And in completely unrelated news, Nurseryworks previewed their new all-acrylic Hollis crib at the ABC Kids Expo in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, and whaddya know, the real life version looks exactly like its promotional photo! Congratulations!

[images via babesta and ohdeedoh, respectively. thanks, sven from kleinraum.de]

Amazing Joshua Tree-by-way-of-Heber-Utah wood artist Alma Pearce carved a containerload of biomorphic reclaimed wood stools for Japan, built a house by hand, and tossed his kid into the air 100 times before you even made your first pot of chicory root tea. Try stirring that with a cinnamon stick.

Allen Pearce [allenpearce.com]

Here at DTHQ, we've been inundated with stinkbugs, so I've been climbing on our Via Boxes a lot lately to squash them on the ceiling. Even so, I'm a bit surprised that John, chief Via Boxer, drove his car over them. [note: we are happy repeat retail customers of Via Box, and the company has advertised on Daddy Types.]

Whether it's a couple of years of intensive parentblogging, or the shifting economy, finding the right research, or whatever, the NY Times' Lisa Belkin is finally seeing work-family balance issues as a parents' problem, not just a moms' problem. From a column in this weekend's Times Magazine:

Men today are at the turning point women reached several decades ago, when the joint demands of work and home first intensified. In her new book, "Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter , Joan C. Williams describes how men find themselves caught between meeting cultural expectations and a growing dissatisfaction with the constricted roles shaped by those expectations. "You have to ask why, if women are asking men to change, and if men say they want change, it hasn't happened," she says. "Either they are all lazy, or they are under tremendous gender pressures of their own."

And from my experience writing for the Times, I will assume that the retrograde headline was not Belkin's choice, and that if it was, she'll come around on that, eventually, too.

Calling Mr. Mom? [nyt]

Some folks are stoked by the news that a previously unknown, unfinished Dr. Seuss manuscript came onto the market. [It sold at auction for $42,000.] Ted Geisel had begun it in the late 60s and shelved it, and then in 1983, when his former assistant suggested he polish it up, Geisel declined because, obviously, it sucked.

But it's his letter to his assistant, though, that caught my eye. Geisel wrote,

I may be wrong of course...so why not send it to Harper and Row who do very good brat books and several times have made best sellers out of properties that I've rejected.

On Nov. 27, 1960, Geisel wrote a column for the LA Times titled, "Writing for Children: A Mission." I haven't found it yet in its entirety, but Henry Jenkins quotes from it in his chapter on Seussian politics in Hop on Pop:

Children's Reading and Children's Thinking are the rock bottom base upon with the future of this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to reliase that Books for Children have a greater potential for good, or evil, than any other form of literature on earth. They realize that the new generations must group up to be more intelligent than ours.

1960 was the year Green Eggs and Ham was published, and after Geisel had written almost all his best books. Did he know he was on the edge of a nearly uninterrupted, three decades-long streak of cranking out brat books?

By the time Geisel turned down his crappy, old sports manuscript in 1983, he'd already phoned in crap like The Tooth Book (1981, as Theo LeSieg), and his Random House imprint Beginner Books had already inflicted The Berenstain Bears upon the world. Which is fine, I suppose, as long as I don't have to buy them. Or read them to my kid.

I'm interested to see more about where this brat book concept comes from, though, and where it's been. Because it certainly kept Geisel warm at night.

BoingBoing links to someone else's traffic-jacking copy, but I think the clip above is the original Greek baby in a watermelon video AS SEEN ON ELLEN IN JULY.

Seriously, why do I even try anymore?

It has been Bono's plan all along to be the elected king-for-life of a unified Europe. And for a brief moment there in 1991, when the Berlin Wall fell, it looked like he'd have his chance. U2 brought in Brian Eno to write a new EU anthem, and legendary Ikea bib designer Hans Hartmann to be their Minister of Propaganda.

From the International Vintage Poster Dealers Show's asymmetrically titled exhibition, "Posters With Children: From Victorian To Skateboards," comes this extraordinarily rare mockup poster for the album that has still not been finished.

"Posters with Children: From Victorian to Skateboard." [ivpda.com via bibliodyssey]

"Lob in a play hand grenade, and finish off the rest with the submachine gun."

Look, I didn't have one of those violin lessons & mufflers childhoods; I played my war in the ditches and woods like the rest of 'em.

But even on a level of bald-faced survival, I cannot see how training a kid in 1964 to go out on bike patrol, and perhaps ambush his dad in the backyard, his dad the Korean War vet with undiagnosed PTSD, could be a good idea.

16-inch Camo Patrol Bike, $19.95, from Sears, c. 1964 [1964.posterous.com via dt reader sara]

Oh, hi, crazy/awesome Chihuly VC mom who finagled a long-term lease on the caretaker's apartment in the pyramid of the Smith Tower in Seattle and installed acres of salvaged marble slabs and a tire swing zipline!

Making a Home in a Pyramid, 462 Feet Above Seattle [nyt]

This just in from DT's senior Dutch moppetwear bankruptcy correspondent Jan: Oilily is back, its global boomer hippie founder family is in charge, and it's business as usual. Which I assume means knocking off independent Portuguese crafters and, well the commenter on this Telegraaf article says it best:

"Four hundred euros for a jacket that my daughter has outgrown by next year. I wish them every success with their next bankruptcy."

Oilily terug van weggeweest / Oilily back with a vengeance [telegraaf.nl via jan]

Ozoo 0600 desk, 1971, image via form.de

We've seen some of designer Marc Berthier's kids furniture before, and we'd probably see more of it if the mid-70s oil crisis didn't wreak havoc on the economics of plastic. Or if we were in France, where a fair number of his old Prisunic pieces turn up.

But In 1967, Berthier designed the Ozoo collection for Roche Bobois, the first all fiberglass furniture made in France. [That put him out of the running for first molded fiberglass furniture made anywhere, a claim which Walter Papst fiercely defended.] Oddly, it wasn't until 1971 that Form Magazine got around to featuring the Ozoo collection, and without a mention of Roche Bobois. Maybe Berthier had gone indie by then? qui sait, pas moi!

Ozoo 0600 en classe, image via ribambins

The Ozoo 0600 desk has enough plastic to start an oil crisis all by itself. Ribambins says that these were deployed in French schools, which seems impractical. [Ribambins also has great vintage photos of the rest of the Ozoo collection, including a more normal-looking, contour-top 0700 writing table. Very nice.]

Ozoo 0200 bed, 1971, image via form.de

What caught my eye in Form, though, was this bed, the Ozoo 0200. [Or maybe 0200 is a typo for Ozoo. Never noticed that.] Anyway, if you remove the giant heat lamp, it's kind of mod, slick, lowslung and generally awesome. And not terribly expensive, either. The Paris [!] Marseille auction house Leclere sold a pair of yellow 0200's in 2008 for just EUR450.

Though somehow they were dated 1965. I hope Walter Papst doesn't hear about this.

Paire de lits, Ozoo 0200, Marc Berthier, c. 1965, est ER600/800, sold EUR 450 [liveauctioneers]
Les écoliers équipés par Marc Berthier. [ribambins]
Avril 68, to the Prisunic catalogue, citoyens!

Yes, even if there weren't a clock right there on the nightstand, measuring the passage of time in Goodnight Moon by the distance the moon travels across the sky IS overanalytical.

And our in-house astrophysicist is asleep, so I'm going out on a limb a bit to say so, but I would think calculating and tracking lunar orbit is actually "The Astronomy of Bedtime," or "The Cosmology of Bedtime."

The Astrophysics of Bedtime Stories [scienceblogs.com via, um,]

God Bless America, land that I love. Stand beside her, and guide her, while ignorant authoritarian religious zealots and their Alaska Birther husbands treat her as a high school cafeteria, and make taunts about the president's balls, which prompts the same smart-ass hack toy company who made a Michaele Salahi action figure [!?] to roll out a pair of talking plush nutz, just in time for Christmas.

And God bless AOL News's Monica Garske, who handles the cojones beat like a pro, and who knows exactly who to call for a quote: the inventor of the original [?!] Bull's Balls. Did you know that Truck Nutz are knockoffs? They are the Robeez to Bull's Balls' Bobux Which, come to think of it, look a helluvalot more like nutsacs than this ridiculous plush mess. If these really are Sarah Palin's cojones, she's better off without.

Quirky Toymaker Creates Cojones for Sarah Palin [aolnews.com]

Sweet, unattributed, vintage, slot-together ply kids chair goodness this weekend at Mondo Blogo's favorite dealer, Jere Barnard. There are a couple of other kid design oddities in MB's post, so check it out.

My Favorite Dealer, Jere Barnard [mondo-blogo]

Thanks to Pennsylvania's mandatory drug testing of mothers about to give birth, state officials took custody of a newborn after her mother tested positive for poppy seed bagels.

In lieu of any information about what other states might require drug tests before giving birth, ABC News opted to show an extended clip from that one episode of Seinfeld.

The Baby and The Bagel [abc via yahoo, thanks dt sr freakout correspondent sara]

On the bright side, if the Friday Freakout doesn't come out until Sunday night, maybe it only ruins my weekend. Here are some devastating headlines from the worlds of science, education, safety, and parenting:

• Sleep positioners have been implicated in at least 12 infant deaths over the last 13 years, which prompted the FDA and CPSC to issue a joint warning against their use. [cpsc via scocca]


• Personally, I think it'd be awesome if everyone stopped drinking during pregnancy because they all became Mormon, but whatever. This has been bugging me since I heard some smug Mocha Mom on NPR hem and haw and avoid acknowledging the results of this pair of wideranging, longterm European studies, but neither light nor moderate drinking during pregnancy shows any negative effects on kids. [bbc]


• A healthy kid was born in May from an embryo that had been in deep freeze storage for 19.5 years, then donated. [hamptonroads]


• In related news, if there really are 500,000 embryos in storage in the US right now at, say, an average annual storage fee of $300, that's...holy smokes, $150 million/year. [data via spermbankcalifornia.com]


• Australian researchers can identify the healthiest embryos for IVF by monitoring their glucose uptake. This also helps identify the gender of embryos before implantation--as if anyone would use it for that. [eurekalert]


• Can't improve on this headline: "Prenatal treatment of congenital toxoplasmosis could reduce the risk of brain damage" [eurekalert]


• Call me old-fashioned, but if you're buying $50 Spa Fantasy Aromatherapy Kits for your kid at Sam's Club, exploding lids and projectile bath bombs are the least of her problems. [cpsc]

Dear Expectant Parent,

While pairing pop songs with his celebrity-rewrites of Anton Chekhov stories, including Bonnie Tyler's immortal classic, "Holding Out For A Hero," New Yorker editor Ben Greenman makes expectant parents an offer they'd be crazy to refuse:

Sing along with me: "Where's the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?"If anyone names a band (or, better, a child) "Streetwise Hercules," I will send that person one hundred dollars.

If you're unconvinced, here are some video clips to make the case. The tractor chicken scene in Footloose:

The Footloose version of the music video:

Good googly moogly, the original Bonnie Tyler music video? If you don't name your kid Streetwise Hercules after watching this, I'm gonna come over there and take $100 from you, straight up:

Related: a list of character names from Footloose which, while awesome, will not earn you $100 or $10:

Boys: Ren, Willard, Rusty, Woody, Chuck, Burlington, Wes, Travis, Rich, Jeff, Herb, Harvey, Bernie, Elvis

Girls: Ariel, Vi, Wendy Jo, Ethel, Lulu, Edna, Sarah, Amy, Virginia

[nyt]

It's been a long, black & white streak here at Daddy Types the last day or two. But this story has some international color.

That grey beach those two darling British moppets are frolicking on is actually an artwork, 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds, installed by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.

In the moppet-filled slideshow accompanying Adrian Searle's ecstatic review Monday, the Guardian wrote, " Visitors will be encouraged to walk across the installation and pick the seeds up - but not to steal them...They will even be allowed to lie down, should they choose ..."

Making the piece took years, during which time Ai employed some 300 skilled craftsmen in Jingdezhen, the "porcelain capital" of China for almost 2,000 years.

Which is adorable to remember, now that Tate Modern and British health officials have closed off the carpet of sunflower seeds because walking on it produces a "greater than expected level" of ceramic dust, which *cough cough* "could be damaging to health following repeated inhalation over a long period of time."

Update: So it turns out the NY Times--or at least Times art critic Roberta Smith--totally knew this would happen, and yet they kept quiet. Why?

I merely commented to my husband, as we looked down from the bridge a few days earlier, that the piece looked like an upper-respiratory disaster waiting to happen.

Tate Modern's sunflower seeds: the world in the palm of your hand [guardian.co.uk]
Tate Modern Closes Access to 'Sunflower Seeds' [nyt]

Next time you see a 50-something year-old Frenchman, ask him if he wore short-shorts and a skull cap and had the merde scared out of him by the St George and the Dragon puppet show in the Tuileries when he was a kid, too.

Sale 2226 Lot 331: EISENSTAEDT, ALFRED, "Children at a Puppet Theatre II, Paris." 1963, printed 1994, est. $10-15,000, this weekend [swanngalleries.com]
Seems like there's always a steady supply of Eisenstaedt prints. [artnet]

And if you make it back alive, will you please tell me his name?

This desk/closet/loft bed combination called the MONOBLOC was exhibited at the 7th International Furniture Expo in Paris in 1973. It is credited in Form Magazine to a French company I can't find out anything about, Cazaud, S.A.

Which is interesting because the date given for the Rappelkiste, Luigi Colani's all-in-one desk/closet/loft bed, supposedly manufactured by Elbro, a German company about which I can find out nothing, is 1975.

It's a rough photo, but we can compare some details. It does look like there's a row of pegs running down the front left edge, doesn't it? For rungs? The desk and seat, meanwhile, are different. And the cutout up top. And the placement of the closet.

I mean, it's not impossible that this is the same design, just evolved. And transferred to another country. Under a different name. Except that by 1973, Luigi Colani is already very well-known, and I get the sense, shall we say, that he's not the type who would let himself go uncredited.

So what's going on here? Was this the Alsace-Lorraine of the Oil Embargo era? Did we narrowly avert a NATO fracture of epic proportions over cross-border loftbed knockoffery?

Aud den Hallen von Paris und Koeln (1973) [form.de]
Previously: Luigi Colani's Rappelkiste kid unit

We all know about Nanna Ditzel's Toadstool tables and chairs. And her high chair. And her cradle. [Right? We do?]

But how is it possible that I can't find any reference besides an 1963 issue of Form Magazine to Ditzel's convertible crib?

Since it was made, like all of Ditzel's furniture at the time, by Kolds Savværk [Kolds Lumber Mill] in Kerteminde, I'll assume it, too, was made of Oregon Pine.

It reminds me a bit of the more recently lamented Trofast cradle/rocker Erika Pekkari designed for Ikea. And they both remind of the picture of "crib" in the dictionary.

Nanna Ditzel kinderbett, Form 028 (1964) [form.de]

Seriously, I like Stokke, and I like the Hippo. And it's totally their call if they decide not to produce or carry it anymore. ergo:design in Germany picked it up, and it still rocks.

But Wolfgang Rebentisch, the man who designed the Hippo in 1993--or at least who won a bunch of design awards for it in 1993, including a Best In Show at the Nurenburg Furniture Expo, which, oddly, included 800 Marks and an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris to meet Philippe Starck--really deserves to be known for more than inadvertently saving Bugaboo from giving its double stroller an even more off-the-wall name 17 years later.

Nurenburg Preisewinners, Form 143 (1993) [form.de]

The Gouvernement Canadian Government had proposé adding BPA to the list liste of toxic substances toxique in 2008 deux mille huit. And yesterday they made it official officielle.

BPA will now be subject sujet to regulations and restrictions under CEPA 1999, some law loi that will limit limite and eventually eventuellement ban banne the use of BPA in consumer products produits consommé and whatever.

This affects us south of the border because, dude, NAFTA, just look at your Gillette disposable razor blade rasoirs jettable package! Soon enough you'll just have to start smuggling BPA-enriched baby bottles and stuff in from China. Or dollar stores.

Also on the toxic substances toxique list: C.I. Dye Red 104, which, if I remember my 3rd grade school bus rides correctly, is the main ingredient of red Sprees.

Government of Canada Takes Further Action to Protect Canadians from Risks Posed by Bisphenol A [ec.gc.ca via dt rdr s. la r.]
Final Order Adding Bisphenol A, a Substance in Batch 2 of the Challenge, to Schedule 1 to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999 [chemicalsubstanceschimiques.gc.ca]