I love George Nelson My favorite designer, even more than Eames and Sarrine although i love their stuff too.
I have two large stainless steel Jack bookends from the 1960's.
I always see on ebay that these are attributed and designed by George Nelson.
I bought into I had to have a set , but does any of the smart ones out there have any idea if this is true. did he really design these ?
Were they sold...
through George Nelson's company though? I was under the impression from my research that Nelson didn't 'design' all the works that have been sold under his name. I've read in more than one place that one of his designers Irving Harper actually desinged both the marshmallow sofa and the ball clock...two of George Nelson's iconic pieces. Still love Nelson to bits, but just because someone name is attached to it doesn't mean they did the actual design of it.
rfid
could you please tell us were you read this or heard about it, I have never seen anything that Sarraine had anything to do with Jack bookends
Cloudburst2000 I knew that Harper did the ball clock and marshmallow sofa i actually posted that last month, do you know if he did any thing else for George Nelson?
The more i read and find research Nelson let most of the Team do the design work, Mulhouser the Coconut, Cherner the Prestzel,
I think these guys being not only great designers,and architects, I think they must have gotten their egos bruised as it seems that they moved on very quickly after their product came to market, Still need the origin of the Jacks
Another myth
That Nelson (or the Nelson office) had anything to do with those "Jack" bookends -- nice enough, don't get me wrong -- is pure myth. At least I've never seen any documentation or similar proof of the link.
My guess is that this myth originated the same way as most of the same sort: Some unscrupulous (or ignorant) person (or auction house) "said" somewhere (usually on the internet) that this was true (with no proof), and people subsequently repeated it as gospel (again, either out of ignorance or unscrupulousness). Many items said to be designed by Paul McCobb are the result of such contagion.
It has really gotten bad ...
It has really gotten bad with Karl Springer the 70's and 80's designer who made Lucite a household must.
On ebay that poor guys stuff gets so bastardized it is not funny , anybody that goes and finds a Lucite lamp, made
mostly by Royal lamps, runs to ebay and claims it is made by Karl Springer,. and 99% percent are not.
I guess we could start coining the phrase the "Myth series" that is anything that No one has any idea who made it and where it came from. So much could be thrown into this category
rather than make it up.
With Eames,Sarraine, Nelson and several others there are enough books
out there that these items can be referecnced rather easy with miminal
research. It is interesting how these items get attributed to these designers.
I've read
that he was the desinger for several George Nelson clocks...which ones outside of the ball clock I'm not sure. He also created the Herman Miller logo(just a little factoid of interest). I've read that Nelson did not mind if the actual desinger got credit in trade publications, but to the general public he wanted all the works to be attributed to the company name. And Harper apparently wasn't that much into the limelight anyway so he didn't really have much a problem with it.
I actually have a quote from Nelson about the origins of the ball clock. He wasn't even sure who invented it. It was apparently designed on a night when a group of them (Noguchi, Fuller, and Harper) had been drinking and no one would take credit for it the next morning. Nelson just says that he knows it wasn't his idea, he thought it was likely either Harper's or Noguchi's design. The quote is as follows:
"At some point we left- we were suddenly all tired, and we?d had a little bit too much to drink- and the next morning I came back, and here was this roll (of drafting paper), and Irving and I looked at it, and somewhere in this roll there was a ball clock. I don?t know to this day who cooked it up. I know it wasn?t me. It might have been Irving, but he didn?t think so?(we) both guessed that Isamu had probably done it because (he) has a genius for doing two stupid things and making something extraordinary?out of the combination?.(or) it could have been an additive thing, but, anyway, we never knew."
It wasn't until years later that Harper admitted being the one to actually design it
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