The Learners: The Book After "The Cheese Monkeys"

by Chip Kidd

Overview

Fresh out of college in the summer of 1961, Happy lands his first job as a graphic designer (okay, art assistant) at a small Connecticut advertising agency populated by a cast of endearing eccentrics. Life for Happy seems to be — well, happy. But when he's assigned to design a newspaper ad recruiting participants for an experiment in the Yale Psychology Department, Happy can't resist responding to the ad himself. Little does he know that the experience will devastate him, forcing a reexamination of his past, his soul, and the nature of human cruelty — chiefly, his own. Written in sharp, witty prose and peppered with absorbing ruminations on graphic design, The Learners again shows that Chip Kidd's writing is every bit as original, stunning, and memorable as his celebrated book jackets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061673245
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/03/2009
Series:	P.S. Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	1,131,523
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Chip Kidd was born in Reading, PA in 1964. He lives in New York City and Stonington, CT.

Read an Excerpt

The Learners

A Novel

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By Chip Kidd

Scribner

Copyright © 2008 Chip Kidd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780743255240

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1961

August.

When Tip is standing in the doorway as he is right now, it can only mean one thing. I brace myself. He shouts, eyes pleading:

"Milk!"

After two and a half months, I'm starting to get used to it. Very jarring at first, but now I'm practically a pro. I counter, with excellent timing:

"Paint!"

Aha. Got him. He wasn't ready for that.

"Paint?"

I raise my head from the potato chip coupon I've been laying out with blue pencil for the past ten minutes and arch my right eyebrow, which is all he needs. Sketchy ignores us, as always.

"Faaassssssssinating." It's like a gas leak from Tip's mouth and he darts back down to his office.

And I am reminded, grateful: This can be a pretty fun place to work.

* * *

June.

Who am I? I am Happy.

Not in any descriptive way, God knows -- it's my name. A nickname, to be more precise, which I acquired relatively late in life, as those things go. From a teacher of mine in college, freshman year. And because of that it will always be who -- not what -- I am.

I wear it proudly, my sleeve's own Purple Heart.

Me: twenty-one years old,Caucasian male of mixed Anglo-Italian origin, olive-skinned, round tortoise-shell horn-rimmed glasses, hair sort of like Brandon De Wilde's in Shane, otherwise not interesting to look at. Or at least that's what the evidence would suggest.

Which is fine by me, because I'm the one doing the looking. I'm a graphic designer -- I pretty much see the world as one great big problem to solve; one typeface, one drawing, one image at a time. Life is a life-long assignment that must be constantly analyzed, clarified, figured out, and responded to appropriately.

I am inquisitive, though I hope not in any obnoxious way; and while I'm wary of any sort of unfamiliarity I am also quickly and easily bored by routine. I grew up in the eastern mid-Atlantic region of the United States, raised Protestant -- the United Church of Christ -- but have become very much of the "religion is the opiate of the people" school (the sole piece of common sense I gleaned from a course on Marxist theory, senior year), which of course I have elected to keep from my roundly nice, doting parents, lest they call the police. But I am close to my family, the way you are close to other people in a small crowded elevator that has temporarily stalled but will be moving any minute now. And as far as I was concerned, that minute was almost here.

Let's see, what else. I am convinced that ALL sports are a sanctioned form of mass-demonic worship, that cathedrals and museums have traded roles in the greater culture, and that Eve Arden is woefully underappreciated by society at large -- as are comic books, malted milk, cracking your neck, secret decoder rings, glass tea kettles, whoopie pies, and television test patterns. And -- ahem -- graphic designers. That should do for now.

Wait, I'm forgetting something. Oh.

I do not write poetry.

But most of all: I am eager to start my career as a newly certified Bachelor of the Arts in Graphic Design, with a very specific goal -- acquiring a job at the advertising agency of Spear, Rakoff & Ware; two states away, up in New Haven, Connecticut.

Why? Simple.

It's where Winter Sorbeck started. Long ago.

Now, yes -- Winter, the teacher in question who christened me, my GD instructor during my first year at State -- is a whole other story. And certainly one with no small amount of pain. But however bullying, severe, terror-inducing, and unnerving he was (and boy, was he), he was equal parts mesmerizing, eye-opening, inspiring, and brilliant. He was unlike any teacher I'd had, before or since. By the end of that spring semester he abruptly quit the faculty and vanished. I would have gladly dropped out to follow him anywhere, but no amount of amateur detective work revealed where that might be. So I bided my time, worked for the next three years to get my degree, and upon graduation decided: If I couldn't be where Winter was now, I'd go where he'd been. In the course of solving one of his earlier assignments I discovered that he started his career at Spear, Rakoff & Ware, and if that was good enough for him, it would be good enough for me.

Mandatory, actually.

And proving difficult. No surprise there -- if Winter was anything, he was difficult, as would be anyplace associated with him. But no doubt worth the trouble. I approached the firm early, in March, three months before graduation. My initial inquiry went unanswered, as did my résumé (which could have won the Collegian's annual First Fiction award), and the letter of recommendation I'd extorted from the dean's secretary. By May I was desperate, so I telephoned. The voice that greeted me hummed with the same welcome slow tone I knew from three years earlier, when I'd called for help on that gum wrapper label design problem for Winter. It was Milburne "Sketchy" Spear -- the head of the art department. He didn't remember me and I didn't remind him -- I wanted a clean start. The years had not changed his enthusiasm:

"Oh, you don't want to work here."

"Um, yes sir, I do."

"Really?"

"Yes sir."

Silence.

"Hello?"

"Sorry, I'm inking. Mind's a porch screen when I'm inking. I'm trying to do a crowd scene with a Number 5 Pedigree pen tip. Should be using a Radio 914. Doesn't really matter -- can't draw anymore anyway, never could. God, I stink. Wouldn't you rather work someplace else? Where people didn't stink?"

What? "No sir, I'd like to work for your firm. You know, to sort of get my feet wet." Dreadful. Why did I say that?

"Heh." He sounded like a lawnmower trying to start. "Heh. That's what I thought. I mean, that's what I thought when I got here. You know when that was?"

"No. I -- "

"You know dirt?"

"Dirt?"

"Dirt."

"Um, yes. Dirt."

"Well, I started here the year before they discovered it."

"I see."

"Heh."

"At least...it must have been spotless when you arrived."

"Heh-heh. Can you airbrush?"

"Yes, but -- "

"Operate a photo-stat machine?"

"Did you receive my résu -- "

"Do you know what I'm doing right now?"

"Uh, drawing a crowd scene with a...Number 5 Pedigree pen tip?"

"No, that's done. Now I'm trying to decide what kind of face the potato chip should have. That's always the question. Everything's a question."

"Pardon?"

"For this newspaper ad. A whole half-pager, due by five. Everyone signed off on it yesterday -- the crowd, see, they've all filed out into the street to worship a giant potato chip."

"I see."

"Because it's a Krinkle Kutt. One of our biggest accounts."

"Right."

"Six stories tall." His tone was casual, as if he was telling me about his brother-in-law. "So, exactly what sort of expression should it have on its face? Because obviously, it's a very happy potato chip, to be a Krinkly Kollosus, and looked up to by all these tiny people, who adore it so."

"Well...it's obvious to me."

"That right?"

"It should look chipper."

"Heh."

"So to speak." Boy, was I making this up. Pure hokum. "You know, not so smug. He doesn't want to frighten everyone. I mean, I'd be wary of a protean jagged slab of tuber towering over my fellow citizens, our fate in his many, many eyes. Especially if he's been fried in lard. Which he has, I hope?"

"Heh. You still want to work here?"

"Definitely."

Copyright © 2008 by Charles Kidd.

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Learners by Chip Kidd Copyright © 2008 by Chip Kidd. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents1961 (October.)We'll be right back, after this. 1961I. Before. (August, June.)II. During. (September.)III. After. (September-November.)

Editorial Reviews

[The Learners] offers an enjoyable introduction to another world and a major writing talent....genuinely interesting...sympathetic characters, funny lines, a firm grasp of time and place, and a plot that makes surprising shifts without ever losing its way....[Chip Kidd is] an author to watch.” — USA Today

“Iconic graphic designer Kidd coins a new genre—stylized sentimentalism (think AMC’s Mad Men without the bile)—to tell this tale of a creative naif’s aesthetic and emotional coming of age. . . . Grade: A” — Washington Post

“Snappy....Kidd invents a banter-filled workplace worthy of Howard Hawks, gleefully tweaks the old-guard panic of the Mad Men-era ad world, and even throws in a few typographic bells and whistles...A-” — Entertainment Weekly

“Chip Kidd, in his second novel, The Learners, repeats and evolves the typographical high jinks he gave us in The Cheese Monkeys....Kidd’s quirky approach to life is endearingly recognizable in its expression.” — Los Angeles Times

“Arresting and hip....captivating.” — Christian Science Monitor

“The advertising business and the [Milgram psychology] experiment are linked in this swift, often funny and always intelligent book.” — Hartford Courant

“Amusing and thought-provoking.” — New York Newsday

“Kidd smoothly mixes the reality of Milgram’s rather sinister work with the fiction of Happy’s new life in advertising....Even more impressive than the blend of fiction and fact is the way that “The Learners” shifts from raucous ad office comedy to the tragic repercussions of the Yale experiments.” — Connecticut Post Online

“Like “The Cheese Monkeys,” “The Learners” is about learning—again under duress—to see everything, including oneself, differently....[In] Kidd’s attempt to blend the satirical and serious...he modulates the mix just right in the novel’s redemptive climax, which is both wild and winning, funny and moving.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“Required reading.” — New York Post

“Funny, insightful and even educational...quite witty.” — The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo)

“Kidd captures the predigital art department just right....[He] seamlessly weaves real-world detail into his fiction—brushed-aluminum office furniture, Jackie O. ensembles—while offering primers in typography and design tools.” — Newsweek

‘’The Learners is witty and well observed as an office comedy, as a meditation on art and as a story of self-discovery...the book is packed with sharp insights....Kidd ultimately is a brilliant, self-aware designer and a clever writer.” — New York Times Book Review

“Kidd’s novel is slyly funny as well as starkly emotional, and never overwritten or melodramatic. He has a Dickensian flair for giving his characters names that somehow suit them, and yet gives them a depth and poignancy that resonates long after the last page.” — Wichita Eagle

“Always intriguing, this is a strange mixture of the frivolous and the disturbing.” — Financial Times (London)

“[Chip Kidd’s] fiction is just as smart and lively as the covers, typography and layout of the books he designs...swift, often funny and always intelligent.” — Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

“The book as an object is beautiful, a testament to its subject matter...charming, heart-wrenching and funny....An enjoyable read.” — Lincoln Star Journal (Nebraska)

“Kidd uses his fiction to explore the roots and broader implications of his work in the modern industry of persuasion....Kidd has held up an engrossing, distorting mirror to a time when marketplace language we all now speak was only just being coined.” — Calgary Herald (Alberta)

“A fascinating study of the shape and texture of words....Kidd’s transition from artist to author is natural and seamless....[The Learners is] humorous and insightful and full of amusingly accurate scenes from the early 1960s—right down to the three-martini lunches and pillbox hats.” — The Sunday Oregonian

“[Chip Kidd’s] fiction is just as smart and lively as the covers, typography and layout of the books he designs, which include this one.” — Newport News Daily Press

“Ingenious....The Learners seduces the reader through a deceptive manipulation of form and content: It’s a matryoshka, or stacking doll, that hides a startling, dark content. By the time we get to the end of the first of its three parts, we are dropped into a creepy, disturbing, sociopolitical satire.” — Philadelphia Inquirer

“The novel stays firmly comic: quick and droll and sly. And, like Kidd’s previous novel, the most sparkling pages are when Happy and his colleagues discuss how to draw a straight line, or the ironically invisible power of typography.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Kidd shares his deep knowledge of graphic design with his readers in inventive and generally delightful ways....His wit, astute observation, and compassion make The Learners that rarest of offerings—[an] immensely enjoyable novel.” — Boston Globe

“Kidd uses his narrative to investigate the relationships between form and content, authority and advertising....pointed observations on design and mass culture make this short novel a compelling read.” — Chicago Reader

From the Publisher

[The Learners] offers an enjoyable introduction to another world and a major writing talent....genuinely interesting...sympathetic characters, funny lines, a firm grasp of time and place, and a plot that makes surprising shifts without ever losing its way....[Chip Kidd is] an author to watch.

USA Today

Amusing and thought-provoking.

New York Newsday

Snappy....Kidd invents a banter-filled workplace worthy of Howard Hawks, gleefully tweaks the old-guard panic of the Mad Men-era ad world, and even throws in a few typographic bells and whistles...A-

Entertainment Weekly

Chip Kidd, in his second novel, The Learners, repeats and evolves the typographical high jinks he gave us in The Cheese Monkeys....Kidd’s quirky approach to life is endearingly recognizable in its expression.

|Los Angeles Times

The advertising business and the [Milgram psychology] experiment are linked in this swift, often funny and always intelligent book.

Hartford Courant

Arresting and hip....captivating.

Christian Science Monitor

Like “The Cheese Monkeys,” “The Learners” is about learning—again under duress—to see everything, including oneself, differently....[In] Kidd’s attempt to blend the satirical and serious...he modulates the mix just right in the novel’s redemptive climax, which is both wild and winning, funny and moving.

San Francisco Chronicle

Kidd smoothly mixes the reality of Milgram’s rather sinister work with the fiction of Happy’s new life in advertising....Even more impressive than the blend of fiction and fact is the way that “The Learners” shifts from raucous ad office comedy to the tragic repercussions of the Yale experiments.

Connecticut Post Online

Iconic graphic designer Kidd coins a new genre—stylized sentimentalism (think AMC’s Mad Men without the bile)—to tell this tale of a creative naif’s aesthetic and emotional coming of age. . . . Grade: A

Washington Post

Required reading.

New York Post

Funny, insightful and even educational...quite witty.

The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo)

The book as an object is beautiful, a testament to its subject matter...charming, heart-wrenching and funny....An enjoyable read.

Lincoln Star Journal (Nebraska)

Always intriguing, this is a strange mixture of the frivolous and the disturbing.

Financial Times (London)

‘’The Learners is witty and well observed as an office comedy, as a meditation on art and as a story of self-discovery...the book is packed with sharp insights....Kidd ultimately is a brilliant, self-aware designer and a clever writer.

New York Times Book Review

[Chip Kidd’s] fiction is just as smart and lively as the covers, typography and layout of the books he designs, which include this one.

Newport News Daily Press

Ingenious....The Learners seduces the reader through a deceptive manipulation of form and content: It’s a matryoshka, or stacking doll, that hides a startling, dark content. By the time we get to the end of the first of its three parts, we are dropped into a creepy, disturbing, sociopolitical satire.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Kidd shares his deep knowledge of graphic design with his readers in inventive and generally delightful ways....His wit, astute observation, and compassion make The Learners that rarest of offerings—[an] immensely enjoyable novel.

Boston Globe

Kidd uses his fiction to explore the roots and broader implications of his work in the modern industry of persuasion....Kidd has held up an engrossing, distorting mirror to a time when marketplace language we all now speak was only just being coined.

Calgary Herald (Alberta)

The novel stays firmly comic: quick and droll and sly. And, like Kidd’s previous novel, the most sparkling pages are when Happy and his colleagues discuss how to draw a straight line, or the ironically invisible power of typography.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Kidd’s novel is slyly funny as well as starkly emotional, and never overwritten or melodramatic. He has a Dickensian flair for giving his characters names that somehow suit them, and yet gives them a depth and poignancy that resonates long after the last page.

Wichita Eagle

Kidd captures the predigital art department just right....[He] seamlessly weaves real-world detail into his fiction—brushed-aluminum office furniture, Jackie O. ensembles—while offering primers in typography and design tools.

Newsweek

Kidd uses his narrative to investigate the relationships between form and content, authority and advertising....pointed observations on design and mass culture make this short novel a compelling read.

Chicago Reader

[Chip Kidd’s] fiction is just as smart and lively as the covers, typography and layout of the books he designs...swift, often funny and always intelligent.

Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

A fascinating study of the shape and texture of words....Kidd’s transition from artist to author is natural and seamless....[The Learners is] humorous and insightful and full of amusingly accurate scenes from the early 1960s—right down to the three-martini lunches and pillbox hats.

The Sunday Oregonian

Iconic graphic designer Kidd coins a new genre—stylized sentimentalism (think AMC’s Mad Men without the bile)—to tell this tale of a creative naif’s aesthetic and emotional coming of age. . . . Grade: A

Washington Post

Chip Kidd, in his second novel, The Learners, repeats and evolves the typographical high jinks he gave us in The Cheese Monkeys....Kidd’s quirky approach to life is endearingly recognizable in its expression.

Los Angeles Times

Like “The Cheese Monkeys,” “The Learners” is about learning--again under duress--to see everything, including oneself, differently....[In] Kidd’s attempt to blend the satirical and serious...he modulates the mix just right in the novel’s redemptive climax, which is both wild and winning, funny and moving.

San Francisco Chronicle

[The Learners] offers an enjoyable introduction to another world and a major writing talent....genuinely interesting...sympathetic characters, funny lines, a firm grasp of time and place, and a plot that makes surprising shifts without ever losing its way....[Chip Kidd is] an author to watch.

USA Today

Kidd captures the predigital art department just right....[He] seamlessly weaves real-world detail into his fiction--brushed-aluminum office furniture, Jackie O. ensembles--while offering primers in typography and design tools.

Newsweek

Required reading.

New York Post

The Learners is witty and well observed as an office comedy, as a meditation on art and as a story of self-discovery…the book's charms are, literally and figuratively, in the details: the visual observations, the comedy of the office's small-stakes battles and the meditations on Kidd's own graphic art, which at their best moments serve his protagonist's character as well. In one touching passage, Happy lays out examples on the page of all the ways one can typeset the words "Forgive me," but concludes that typography "has its limits like everything else." In another novel, it might seem like showy metafictional playing around. In The Learners, it's a sweet, small reminder of how words —and type—can fail us.
—The New York Times

James Poniewozik

A sequel to book designer Kidd's first novel, The Cheese Monkeys, this beautifully composed paean to pre-computer graphic design pitches recent graduate Happy (his nickname), now 21, into the mercantile halls of down-at-the-heels New Haven ad agency Spears, Rakoff and Ware. Kidd paints the agency with all the customary conventions of a mid-century office culture farce: lacquered secretaries, lunchtime scotches and broken-down businessmen. Happy wiles away his time in blissful drudgery until he fields a call for designing a tiny ad for a seemingly innocuous psychological study. The study is being run by (real-life psychologist) Stanley Milgram, and Happy is unable to resist volunteering; little surprise for readers that Happy finds himself a participant in Milgram's notorious Obedience to Authorityexperiment, playing the role of "The Teacher" who is ordered to shock "The Learner" with near-lethal doses of electricity. Though character development is less the point than jokes about behaviorism and old school office culture's last gasps, the experiment teaches Happy more than he ever hoped to know. The jokes are sometimes dippy, and some of the typographical pyrotechnics are on the twee side. But Kidd's ebullience and generosity in unpacking the art and practice of graphic design carry the novel. (Feb.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Publishers Weekly

Graphic designer Kidd (The Cheese Monkeys, 2001) writes a novel about a graphic designer. Considering the author's job experience, it's natural that at times the narrator digresses (if there's such a thing as a digression in a postmodern novel) and gives us his thoughts about the applicability of certain fonts in certain contexts. (For example, it's bad form to write "You have inoperable cancer!!" in a loopy script.) Right out of college, narrator Happy gets a job at a graphic-design firm in New Haven, in part because his most charismatic professor in college had previously worked at this same firm. There he is introduced to the idiosyncratic subculture of graphic designers. He meets Sketch, a master at drawing potato chips for the firm's Krinkle Kutt account; Mimi, the formidable matriarch of the firm, who "doesn't go to extremes; she lives there"; Tip, creator of witty slogans; and head copywriter Preston, whose creative spasms are in the past and who in the present can only produce uninspired cliches. Happy's on-again, off-again girlfriend Himillsy (was there ever a more awkward name?) kills herself unexpectedly, and Happy suspects that her death has something to do with her participation in "obedience experiments" originally conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale in the 1960s. Periodically Kidd allows abstractions such as Wit, Irony and Deception to make brief appearances, setting a context for what's to come. The big news in the novel is not Himillsy's suicide but the firm's desperate attempt to land a lucrative account for Buckle Shoes-and whether it's possible to design an ad that doesn't show feet. Whimsical, at times bordering on fey, but also keen-edged and original.

Kirkus Reviews