“The architects Louise
Harpman and Scott Specht began collecting takeout-coffee lids when they were in
college, in the nineteen-eighties, and continued the practice as graduate
students at Yale.” So begins Anna Russell’s excellent Talk story
“Caffeinated,” in this week’s issue. Reading it, I instantly thought of Robert
Sullivan. In his great Cross Country
(2006), Sullivan chronicles, among other things, his fascination with plastic
coffee lids. At one point, he says,
Plastic coffee lids
represent an area in the cross-country world where stream-lined uniformity has
not yet prevailed – they are the last vestiges of differentiation. I don’t like
to think that we would ever be a one-lid nation, though that day may come.
He even mentions
Louise Harpman and Scott Specht:
In their seminal essay
on lid design, Louise Harpman and Scott Specht, two lid collectors, identified
what they called the “pucker” as the next developmental step in the to-go lid:
a plastic lid with a hole, the hole being in that portion of the lid that is
constructed in an elevated, mountain-range-like shape.
Russell’s piece tells
about some fieldwork Specht and Harpman conducted recently in SoHo. They visit
a number of cafés, including Lafayette, La Colombe, Think Coffee, and Gasoline
Alley. Russell writes,
In Think Coffee, a man
in a blazer, holding two hot drinks, waited while the pair examined the dimples
on the compostable lids. “Decaf, cream, and black—that’s all,” Specht said.
“Caffeinated” artfully conveys Specht and Harpman’s crazy world of coffee lid collecting. I enjoyed it immensely.
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