Excuse Our Appearance, We're—

The New Shelton wet/dry had a link to this piece about Saul Bellow Bass, who not only designed some of the great movie posters of the 20th century but also is responsible for logos like these—so simple and perfect* that even a brand-hater like me has got to clap his hands like a hypocrite:

Anyway, I'm posting not because I wish to praise the late Saul Bass and his catchy logos, but rather because they reminded me of the following bit from Mark Leyner's bizarre and largely excellent novel The Tetherballs of Bougainville—enjoy:

Most people...tend to disparage—or ignore altogether—the role of highly skilled copywriters in the creation of the text-driven signs that we see everywhere around us.

Len Gutman was not only considered technically virtuosic in his craft, he was deemed a visionary genius... His work is so ubiquitous and prototypical that it smacks of the primordial, as if it's somehow existed always, independent of human artifice.

Use Other Door—one of the very first signs that Gutman wrote as a young man—became an immediate classic. Gutman went on to write a stunning series of signs that fundamentally redefined our sense of public language, including: Out of Service, Visitors Must Sign In, and Push to Start. Then—in what is considered Gutman's annus mirabilis—an astonishing burst of creative activity in which masterpiece followed masterpiece in astonishing succession: Do Not Enclose or Obstruct Access to Meter, Turn Knob to Right Only, Right Lane Must Turn Right, and the sublime Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work. (That same year, Gutman also co-wrote We Deliver, Totally Nude, and Void Where Prohibited.)

There's an austere beauty to much of his work, pared down to its irreducible essence. In a famous television interview with Gutman late in his life, a critic is standing with him in front of a restaurant's lavatories, admiring what is indisputably Gutman's most popular, and arguably his finest, sign: Men.

They then move over to the distaff door

"You didn't write Women?" asks the critic.

"No, I wish I had," Gutman smiles wistfully...

Gutman was writing what would be his final and unfinished sign, Excuse Our Appearance, We're—, when he suffered a severe coronary...

* Or is it just that I'm like so many people in my generation, and we fetishize the æsthetic of our parents' earlier adulthood, presumably as a way of either returning to infancy or projecting ourselves into a world before our parents were parents and therefore a world in which our parents effectively do not exist, where we're therefore free to be entirely independent individuals without roots or chains (q.v. The Dead Father)...except that of course then what we're doing is escaping our parents by diving into our parents the way Patrick Swayze dived in Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost, which probably isn't the best strategy in the world. (Or should I be talking to my analyst about this?)