We’re deep in the store rooms underneath San Francisco institution William Stout Architectural Books, and Erik Heywood, the Senior Director of Retail at the Eames Institute, holds up a box of very old chocolates to show off their immaculate typography and product design. He sets it back down among the other tchotchkes — cigarette packets, candy wrappers, and detergent labels — that constituted, somewhat improbably, the working archive of inspiration of the late graphic designer Paul Rand, who designed the logos of IBM and UPS among many others.
These are actual objects from Rand's personal collection, sent over by a friend who'd been given access to his estate. “It's so hard to do this kind of design well,” Erik says. “To make these everyday products so full of charm, colour, interest, proportion, consideration, beauty, intention. You'll never beat that.”
Stout Books is full of these kinds of treasures. It's the type of store you can get lost in, especially when given a tour of the archives and basements, which are overflowing with rarities waiting to be processed for the shop floor. It’s a maze of books, magazines, new and old, rare and common. Erik has been part of the team running Stout Book since 2022, when his other employer in SF, the Eames Institute, took over the bookshop after the eponymous William Stout, its founder, retired.
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