French Fries

by Warren Lehrer, Dennis Bernstein

From the This book/play presents a day in the life of the original DREAM QUEEN restaurant (a restaurant that grew to become the third largest burger chain in the western hemisphere). Before the book/play begins, 83-year-old Gertie Greenbaum is found dead in a pool of blood and ketchup. Four customers and three employees (each set in his or her own typographic voice and color) give testimony to how Gerite died, and continue their day discussing food, money, religion, politics, love, loss, dreams, memories, and fading aspirations. The text is illuminated with icons and images that evoke the fast food tableau, and the internal projections of the characters. FRENCH FRIES Written by Dennis Bernstein & Warren Lehrer Designed by Warren Lehrer, 1984, Visual Studies Workshop Press and EarSay Books. 8” x1 1”, 104 pages. Three colors on acid-free Mohawk Superfine. Hardcover [ketchup-resistant faux-leather cloth, die-cut over boards]. Color separation by Phil Zimmermann. “Lehrer pioneered what might be best termed “typographic performance” in his 1984 book/play French Fries, a hot type cacophony of word and image that is today considered by historians one of the lynchpins of the deconstructionist era…” Eye Magazine Steve Heller “Without a discernable grid, the typography [in French Fries] flows freely across the pages, intersperced with images and marks evoking the ambiance and mood of the situation. Except for the work of the famous French designer Robert Massin, I had never seen an approach to typography quite like this before… I could experience the relationship between the text and its visualization, and I saw how effective it could be. Somewhere between seeing the books of Edward Rusha and Warren Lehrer’s French Fries, I discovered that my options as a graphic designer had expanded by tenfold.” Emigre Magazine, The Last Issue. Rudy Vandlans

104 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1984

About the author

Warren Lehrer is a writer and artist/designer known internationally as a pioneer in the fields of visual literature and design authorship. His work explores the vagaries and luminescence of character, the relationships between social structures and the individual, and the pathos and absurdity of life. His books are acclaimed for capturing the shape of thought and reuniting the traditions of storytelling with the printed page.

Lehrer has received many awards for his books and multimedia projects, including the Brendan Gill Prize, the Innovative Use of Archives Award, three AIGA Book Awards, The International Book Design Award, a Media That Matters Award, and grants and fellowships from the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, the Rockefeller,
Ford, and Greenwall Foundations. Lehrer is a professor at the School of Art+Design at Purchase College, SUNY, and a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. Together with his wife Judith Sloan, Lehrer founded EarSay in 1991, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, NY. Over the last few years, he has been setting stories and text into animation, video, and interactive media. His latest novel, A Life In Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley, is on sale now.

Reviews

[karly]

hope to read this book soon :)