The Iconography of Business Cards
Since I’ll be heading to the CARL conference pretty soon - a great place to meet interesting library professionals and make new contacts - I thought it was a good time to get my own set of business cards. In the hopes that I’ll hand a few out, and a few of the recipients might find there way to this website, I thought I’d explain the images on the back of each card.
I used a printing service called Moo to make my cards, and one of the options they offer is to print a photograph on the reverse side (fantastic print quality, by the way - I’m very happy with the results).
I chose six different images, all taken by me.
The one in the upper left is a photo of the grand reading room of the New York Public Library, which was one of the first things I posted on this blog and the background image on my twitter feed.
The second image, upper right, is a little more personal to my family. In the late 1920s and early ’30s my grandfather was a marionetteer, and the image is a detail from the letterhead of his company, the Domino Marionettes. The surviving collection of his handcrafted wooden puppets - a mix of billy goats, characters from Greek myths, and Punch and Judy handpuppets - is one of our most treasured family possessions.
The third and fourth photos were both taken in the printing press room of UC-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. I find the iconography of print - both in its historical context and the newer, digital iterations - fascinating, so I took a few photos during a Lissten-sponsored tour and chose to use these two on my cards. One is the stack of type trays, the other is a page laid out ready for printing.
The fifth photo, on the lower left, is the first image I used in the ongoing Diptych project. It’s actually a photograph of the penguin tank at my erstwhile place of employment, the California Academy of Sciences. Obviously, there are no penguins in the photograph - it’s just an abstract image meant to capture the concept of “water”. The sixth photo, on the lower right, is a spinning sand table at San Francisco’s Exploratorium (I recommend going to their webpage and pressing the button. The one they tell you not to press).
Full size images - plus an uncropped version of my grandfather’s letterhead - are available on flickr.
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