IKEA – Design och Identitet

I don’t know Swedish. There tends to be a lot of intimidating debris sitting on top of perfectly reasonable letters like å and ö. In fact, most of my assumptions about Swedish I learned from the Chef:

That is, that their meatballs bounce. However, Google translator is a delightful thing, chopping off umlauts and turning this, from a Swedish blogger writing about the new Swedish coffee-table book on the history of IKEA:

Jag är en sådan som samlar på IKEA-kataloger men Eva Atle Bjarnestam har gått ett steg längre:
-”Ikeas kataloger är som fotoalbum av det svenska hemmet. Här speglas samtiden i allt från 70-talets bruna manchestersoffor och lackade furuköksbord till dagens moderna design i PS-kollektionen av högsta internationella klass. Det är retro, nostalgi, nutid och framtidsvision.”

Into, roughly, this:

I’m one of those who collect the IKEA catalogs but Eva Atle Bjarne Herd has gone one step further:  “Ikea catalogs is that photo album of the Swedish home. This reflected the present in everything from 70’s brown corduroy couches and lacquered pine kitchen table to the modern design of the PS collection of top international class. It’s retro, nostalgia, present and future vision.”

What’s really neat about this is that the book includes a ton of vintage IKEA catalog covers, and it’s kind of neat to see how little their style changes over the years. I wouldn’t be surprised to see most of the stuff in the 1963 catalog in one of their stores today. Check it out:

For comparison, here is the 2009 IKEA cover. In Hebrew. 2010 catalog should be out in July, and just in time; lord knows my bathroom needs some more reading material, the New Yorker subscription my parents got for my birthday is generally way more involved than I want to get.