https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/arts/2018-05-07/coffee-lids-book-at-bookpeople-tonight/

Coffee Lids Book at BookPeople Tonight

By Wayne Alan Brenner, May 7, 2018, 9:30am, All Over Creation

“If you’re one of the billions of people worldwide who begin the day with a cup of take-out coffee,” goes the press release, “you may have marveled at the ubiquitous plastic coffee cup lid.”

Well, yes.

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But, hell, even if you usually begin the day with coffee that you’ve personally ground the recently roasted beans of and have then brewed via automatic drip or French press or whatever, and subsequently slurped from a ceramic mug handthrown by the likes of Nic Wibbelsman … you may still have “marveled” at any of those lids.

Because everybody gets a disposable to-go cup of coffee eventually, right? And, thus, an accompanying lid affixed to the top of the cup.

Which, if you notice little things about the world in general, those lids, too, can’t have entirely eluded your attention.

Of course, you may not have become as highly appreciative of disposable plastic coffee lids as architects Louise Harpman and Scott Specht have.

But, if you possess any shred of curiosity about the objects at all – about the myriad varieties of design shaping the things, about the ways in which they’re functional and/or elegant, about the manner in which they interact with the personal mouth-level distribution of the hot liquid they help to contain … then you’ll want to get this book.

Because this book by Harpman and Specht – Coffee Lids, newly published by Princeton Architectural Press – this book will tell you all you want to know. Plus, a bunch of stuff you didn’t even realize you wanted to know until it was revealed. An example or two of patent applications, even. We mean: This book defines "coffee cup lids" and what's best meant by the word "informative."

And you’ll want to get this book, anyway, because it – an approximately 5-by-6-inch near-square of a 256-page volume that costs just $20 – doesn’t tell you or reveal to you in words alone, but also contains page after page of full-size images of lids and lids and lids and lids in all their permutations, one lid per sweet glossy page, in a stunning sequence of photographs that will be at home nowhere as much as on – yes – your coffee table.

And Harpman won’t be at BookPeople presenting the volume tonight – she’s probably back in New York right now, architecting up something that supports the health of an ecosystem – but Specht will be there in Austin’s favorite bookstore at Sixth & Lamar, and he’ll be glad to share your coffee-lid enthusiasms or answer any other questions you might have.

But do make note, citizen, if only for irony’s sake, and only if he’s not kidding us in his biographical blurb: Specht is forbidden by doctor’s order from ingesting caffeine.