graphic design – Pathetic Fallacy

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—I was on a vacation with my family, and—having little or no money in my purse—our recreation consisted of day trips to corners of New England that were unfamiliar to us, but close enough to not require a hotel. On the drive back from one of these we stopped in at a roadside second-hand store, and it was here that I purchased, for the princely sum of seven dollars, a 1943 edition of the card game Authors.

My copy of the “Salem Edition” of *Authors*

Authors had been a favorite game of my youth for a few years around 1975. If you are unfamiliar with the game, it’s basically Go Fish with a literary coat of paint. As in Go Fish, players attempt to make melds of four by asking opponents if they hold missing cards of the set they are collecting—but instead of collecting cards of the same rank, one collects cards bearing the titles of works by an author—e.g. for the Shakespeare set, you would need cards for Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest. Thus, by familiarizing players with the works of Twain, Stevenson, Hawthorne, and Alcott, the game had a veneer of culture and respectability, which was probably a plus in the eyes of my mother, whose own parents forbade playing cards in the home, as these tools of the devil led inevitably to gambling.

Not my copy, but the 1960’s–70’s edition of Authors from my childhood

I was charmed to see that the 1943 cards had the same design as those from the 1970’s. Most legacy games go through major re-designs every decade or so; look at all the various editions of Clue, for example. However, the illustrations from my Parker Brothers set (1943) were not only included in the Whitman edition (first published in 1951¹ and in various editions through the 70’s), but also by a later edition published by U.S. Games Systems (1986) with the last version using these designs (at lest, the last I could find) printed in 1996.

First edition (probably), Whipple & Smith, 1861

This isn’t to say that these were the original set of illustrations, or even the original selection of authors. The first version of Authors was published in 1861 by the Salem, MA company of Whipple & Smith, and its cover featured American short story writer Washington Irving and (checks notes), um, British poet Thomas Macaulay?

If you search for the creator of Authors you may find a credit for Annie W. Abbott and a date of 1843, fully 18 years before the game was first published. This confusing chronology is because Ms. Abbott created a card game called Dr Busby which had almost exactly the same play as Authors, except instead of collecting sets of four books, players collected cards representing members of four fictional families. Stewart Culin, writing in The Journal of American Folklore in the July–September, 1893 issue, claimed that Dr. Busby was retooled into Authors by an unnamed Salem man²; I have also read the claim that Abbott herself was responsible for the new game. But whomever was responsible, both Authors and Dr Busby are based on Go Fish, whose origins are murky, but which may have come from ultimately from the Italian game Andare e piscere in the 15th Century.

It’s everyone’s favorite game, *Dr. Busby*

Wherever and whenever Authors came from, other publishers soon began to publish their version of the game, with differing selections of authors in a variety of formats. In my earlier essay about Parker Brothers’ game design in the 1970s, I referenced Philip Urbanes’s 2004 book The game makers: the story of Parker Brothers from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit, which I thought might fill in some details for this essay. Unfortunately, Urbane discusses Parker Brothers’ initial publication of Authors only in passing, noting that around 1870 to 1890, the company began publishing existing games that they did not originate; Authors was one of these (copyright wasn’t the same back in those days).

Parker Brothers was headquartered in Salem, MA, the same as Whipple & Smith and (as mentioned) where Authors was originally conceived; some combination of these facts no doubt led to naming the 1943 version of the game the “Salem Edition.” Parker Brothers distinguished its versions from the competition with high-quality illustration and state-of-the-art reproduction, and sold several versions at the same time, with names like “the Nickel Edition,” and “the Petite Edition De Luxe.” Even the game’s title varied on the cover of different editions, from The Game of Authors, to Great Authors, to Household Authors, which is my favorite because it implies that every good home should have a stock of writers³.

Early Parker Brothers’ editions, c. 1870, c. 1893, 1897, 1910

The Salem Edition (my edition) seems to have been the first to use the familiar illustrations, which are unfortunately unattributed. Unless somewhere there are archives still extant that contain correspondence or billing from the 1940’s, the artist has been lost to time. However, they appear to be the work of one hand, or perhaps a few artists working under close direction. Even though they are remarkably of a piece with one another, there are some odd variations to note. While all seem to have been painted in watercolor over an underdrawing, some are noticeably darker, such as the Robert Louis Stevenson portrait, which has heavy shadows painted with opaque colors, possibly using gouache.

The level of detail varies, probably owing to the source material being copied; this material would have included photos and engravings of the authors, as well as earlier versions of the game. About half have a highly painterly background of washes in blue, green, and yellow; the others are presented on flat white. And one portrait, that of John Greenleaf Whittier, has an entirely different ground treatment which almost resembles airbrush.

Wait, John Greenleaf who now? This edition contains two authors that were cut from the deck when the designs transferred to Whitman publishing: William Makepeace Thackery and John Greenleaf Whittier. The English Victorian Thackery is still read today, primarily for his novels Vanity Fair and Barry Lyndon. The American Quaker abolitionist Whittier, however, is not a name you will know unless you study 19th Century American literature, and then only as an example of a poet who was popular in his lifetime, only to fall into obscurity when his earnest, moralizing style failed to resonate with 20th century tastes. It’s not surprising that editions of Authors reflect the forever evolving literary canon. The Rare Book School at the University of Virginia had an exhibition of Authors cards in 2025 that focused specifically on the writers who have come and gone through many, many versions over the last 150+ years.

The novelists, playwrights, and poets selected for the 1943 portraits are mostly Victorian, with the most recent work referenced being Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger (1916)⁴. Looking over the assortment of writers, it’s impossible not to note that they are all American or British, white, and—save for the exception of Louisa May Alcott—male. Aside from this chauvinism, it’s also interesting that for a game published in 1943 there were no Modernist authors—this was the era of Hemingway, Faulkner, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Fitzgerald, Eliot, etc. Probably the choice was in part set by earlier versions of the game. And perhaps there was an editorial decision to avoid living writers. Whatever the criteria, the game’s roster of authors is stodgy, academic, and leans heavily on sentimental and Romantic writers.

All of this was lost on me as a child when I played the game. I assumed that the authors selected were, in fact, the greatest and most important names in literary history, and for many years I kept the titles on the cards tucked away in my memory. This was my first brush with the idea of a canon, and I found it appealing because it implied that great books were finite and that it would be possible to read them all, and then I guess I thought you would be done. These days I’m less inclined to think this way, although I do have a podcast about the subject.

My copy of the 1943 edition has a few interesting features. It has it original rule sheet, beautifully block printed in a variety of typefaces, including a midcentury geometric sans-serif font that closely resembles Futura. This sheet calls the game “PARKER BROTHERS’ IMPROVED GAME OF AUTHORS” and declares that it is the “BEST EDITION.” My favorite passage of these rules comes at the end, where it lists “other PARKER GAMES” which include Monopoly, Rook, and Camelot, which is noted as: “the most absorbingly interesting of all games of skill, and many times more exciting than Checkers.” I have no idea what the game of Camelot is, but I chose to believe the claims made on its behalf, and I won’t Google to learn otherwise.

The game box also contains a shallow tray of yellow cardboard discs that the rules calls “counters” (with quotation marks). These are to be awarded for each meld a player makes, but with the twist that first three are given, then two, then one, and then back to three, etc. This mechanic seems so tacked-on that my assumption is the discs were cast offs from holes punched in another game that some office manager decided to repurpose. Also in amongst the cards there is a rule card from a later Whitman edition of the game, which is (oddly) far more worn than any of the portraits.

Right, Center: the original rules sheet, front and back; Left top: the “counters”; Left bottom: what are these doing here?

Finally, my copy of Authors also contains both a faded lavender wooden checker and a Scrabble tile of the letter G. These were left mysteriously by its previous owner, and one can only imagine how each contributed to any house rules.

How and why the designs transferred to Whitman is a mystery to me. I know Whitman primarily as a children’s book publisher, particularly for its licensed works featuring Disney characters. ↩︎
Quoted in Kaplan and Miller; see note below. ↩︎
If you are even more fixated on this subject than I am, there is an exhaustive 476-page catalog of every known edition of Authors and ancillary games: The Game of Authors Compendium Stuart R. Kaplan and William G. Miller (2021). ↩︎
This is a peculiar choice. In his final years, Twain wrote several divergent drafts of The Mysterious Stranger, perhaps his most bleak and existential writing ever. The eventual posthumous publication in 1916 was cobbled together with parts rewritten by Twain biographer Albert Bigelow Paine. Contemporary scholars do not ascribe this edition (the one referenced in Authors) to Mr. Clemens. ↩︎

Never the same game twice

My last essay was a critique of nostalgia, and so to mix things up this post will be a discussion of something from my youth for which I have a great deal of affection, and that is Parker Brothers graphic design from the 1970s. This is admittedly a niche interest, even for me, but I hope you’ll be indulgent. Perhaps you, too, will come to love these beautiful and strange designs.

From around 1970 to 1980, the Salem, Massachusetts-based Parker Brothers (now a brand of Hasbro) published games whose innovative and fanciful designs drew inspiration from Pop Art, Op Art, and Madison Avenue advertising. They had boxes, boards, and components that reflected the most current techniques of printing and plastics molding. They were witty, silly, and weird. The other main players in American games at the time were Milton-Bradley, whose art tended towards cartoony, corny, and flat designs, and Ideal, whose games (like Mousetrap) were mostly showcases for their novel plastic components.

Parker Brothers design stood out for its style and sophistication, and even as a young nerd I could see that it was special. In fact, I believe they were my introduction, at the age of seven, to the whole concept of graphic design. This isn’t to say that the games were good in the sense of being fun or engaging to play; a lot of them were re-skinned versions of the basic race-around-the-board type that had been popular since the Uncle Wiggly Game. But they looked amazing and they were different.

There’s not a lot of sources of information about the company, but there is one very interesting book, The Game Makers : the Story of Parker Brothers from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit, which was written by Philip Orbanes in 2004 and published by Harvard Business School Press. From this book I learned that starting with its founding in 1883, Parker Brothers was a family owned operation, and its ethos was decidedly conservative. It produced child-friendly tabletop games that it purchased from independent creators, with little to no research and development and with a small factory that printed simple boards and boxes and made components from simple materials.

Along the way they picked up some major properties, like Monopoly and Cluedo, which was rebranded in America as Clue, but they didn’t develop these in-house and they didn’t really have a marketing strategy of any kind. But all that changed in 1968 when the company was sold to General Mills—yes, that General Mills, of Cheerios fame. After the departure of one president who wanted to cash out and retire, and the death of another who died of lung cancer, executive vice president Ranny Barton took the helm, and he immediately replaced the head of manufacturing and the head of sales. Orbanes writes:

In one fell swoop, Ranny Barton had changed Parker Brothers from a family-run, conservative operation to one now seeking high-flying M.B.A;s and marketing wizards in a quest to again double sales. Ranny […] would oversee a group of executives who were experts (165-166).

For the first time, the company had project leaders and marketing staff (largely on loan from General Mills). They brought in professionals in design, production, and printing. They bought a new state-of-the art press capable of much finer detail and vibrant colors, and they switched to making their components out of injection molded plastic. They were out to compete, and that meant to advertise on the new medium of television, and to be distinctive.

Okay, that’s more than enough backstory. Let’s look at some of the games from this time.

Waterworks (1972)

I remember coming across a used copy of this game at a school tag sale when I was in first grade. It looked like nothing else I’d ever seen. The cover art was sparse and focused on its photography. The text was set in Blippo, which seemed shockingly futuristic (it was actually designed in 1969). Most of all, the diegetic title on the manhole cover felt absolutely tangible. I splurged on the 30-cent purchase (my allowance at the time was a quarter).

Inside, the cards were wonderful, featuring detailed, photorealistic depictions of pipe fittings, handles, and spouts. They came in a draw/discard bathtub. And there were tiny brass monkey wrenches (perhaps using the existing Clue wrench molds). Everything was designed to be tactile and engaging.

Waterworks was designed by Mattiene Moustakas, although whether she designed the gameplay and components, or illustrated the cards, or both, is unclear. She certainly has a crazy resume. As for the play, a modern gamer will recognize it as a tile placing game such as Carcassonne; one chained one’s cards together to make a line from handle to spout, while playing pipe junctions and leaks on the opponent’s spread. It was…ok. It was certainly different from the card games I’d played, which were basically War and Solitaire¹.

The Inventors (1974)

I’ve mentioned before that the 1970s had a strange retro fad for “old-timey” things, by which I mean Americana from about 1890 to 1905. I am at a loss to explain this. It was a time of serious social problems, from race relations to stagflation. Perhaps there was a longing for a mythical past. The counterculture had drawn heavily on Art Nouveau in poster design, and maybe this trend was breaking into the wider culture. In any case, The Inventors was themed around patenting odd Victorian-looking inventions. The cover art was a highly staged studio shot with models in costumes with props. It featured many of the gadgets referenced in the game, as well as an inventor holding the game itself on his lap, and that kind of self-referentiality was catnip for me. (By the way, the text on the bottom right is in a typeface called Desdemona, which originated in Vienna and has always sounds drama club to me.)

The board features a pastiche of Victorian typography and day-glo colors. It features two different tracks to circle the board, but the filigrees and other ornamentation make it seem much more complex. There are handsome cards that feature descriptions of the various inventions to be patented. But the real star of the show is the centerpiece, “the incredible patent picker, move maker machine.”

This chunky bad boy held the metal clip-on numbers that were the game’s patents, and the “push-pull” dispenser never really worked because the invention cards would bend and fray when you stuck them in. But that didn’t matter, because the real attraction was the dice chute. You placed the dice into the hopper and hit a plunger and they would roll into the tub below, all while ringing a bell.

The Inventors was designed by Jeffrey Breslow, who was a student of Marvin Glass, a powerhouse designer that has created many of the most recognizable toys of the 20th century. Breslow, working with Glass, also designed Ants in the Pants. As for The Inventors’ gameplay: meh. It vaguely resembles Monopoly in that players attempt to succeed financially by developing their properties. But for the most part it’s circling the board in parallel to one’s opponents, with perishingly few actions that directly affect the other players.

The Magnificent Race (1975)

Another old-timey game, The Magnificent Race obviously takes inspiration from Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. The players must circumnavigate the globe using cars, ships, planes, and balloons. The gimmick of the game is a non-player-character (before there even were NPCs) called Dastardly Dan, represented by a purple marble, who can interfere in, and even win, the titular race.

The game’s board shares its typography, color palette, and even curvilinear forms with the Inventors’ board, and I’m pretty sure the same designer did both. One innovation to this board is the paths are not directional, and players may move their arrows in any direction. This may not seem like a particularly distinctive feature today, but it was unusual in 1975.

The components here pull out all the stops. There are big chunky arrows used as player markers, layout cards on which to place “advantages,” a pegboard to track overall progress around the world, and a spinner with colored marbles (including Dastardly Dan) that determines the winner of each of the series of small races that make up the game. Each player drops in a number of marbles based upon their advantages, the device is spun, and the first to drop into a divot near the center wins.

When everything is set up it’s pretty impressive. Fun fact: the groovy fake money for the game is printed on green and purple paper that isn’t shelf-stable. I know this because the bills in the copy I purchased for my kids many decades later crumble apart at the slightest touch.

The game was designed by Bill Cooke, who co-designed Boggle (also originally published by Parker Brothers). On his Facebook page Cooke has photos including the original schematic drawings for the spinner. But for me the real attraction is the scratchy, cartoony pen drawings, which recall some of the more elaborate designs of Milton Glaser. I would dearly love to know who the illustrator was for these.

As for the gameplay…this one’s a real let-down. All of the bells and whistles can’t hide that at its core it’s a random chase around the board. However, the spinner is a lot of fun, especially when the Dastardly Dan marble wins.

Bonkers (1978)

Or to refer to it by its full name as printed on the box, This Game is Bonkers. This was not a game my family owned but I played it at friends’ houses and it had an earworm-y television commercial that probably most Americans in their 50s can still sing today.

In the Bonkers graphic design Parker Brothers reached an apotheosis. For years they had been cribbing from the cheekier parts of Madison Avenue; here they went full-on Peter Max with shooting stars, lightning bolts, volumetric arrows, and exclamation points everywhere. The board starts pretty empty, but players fill in the spaces with U-shaped cards that change the flow of movement, directing tokens forwards and backwards and eventually into spaces that score or remove points.

The design couldn’t be more frenetic or bold. Unfortunately, the graphics promise a zanier time than the gameplay delivers. The mechanic of players altering the rules of the game as they go is a good one (see modern games like Fluxx), but that’s not really what’s happening here; instead, the normal clockwise race around the board is being lengthened by digressions. It’s still a fixed track. But man, does it look great.

Bonkers was designed by local boy Paul J. Gruen, who lived in West Newbury, just a half-hour drive from Parker Brothers. He also designed Pay Day (1972) for Parker Brothers, another game whose original graphics had pop art origins—in this case with illustrations resembling those of Heinz Edelmann, character designer for the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine (1968).

That’s enough

I could go on for hours, and it probably feels like I have already. There’s so many wonderful designs from this period: Vertigo (1970), Masterpiece (1970), 10-Four Good Buddy (1976), The Mad Magazine Game (1979). Even the original Boggle (1973) cover art is a crazy snapshot of a time of weird innovation: it didn’t actually feature the game².

As the 70s ended, Parker Brothers swung heavily into electronics with toys like Merlin (1978) and their own line of cartridges for the Atari 2600. And in 1985, General Mills merged the company with Kenner, then sold it to Tonka in 1987, before everything eventually got bought up by Hasbro in 1991. But for a brief time in the 70s, Parker Brothers was the one game company that was distinctive, brassy, different. The games themselves were hit-or-miss, but the design always landed.

As an aside, I learned the version of Solitaire I knew from my mom, which was a hard-as-nails version that I have never seen anyone else play, so I don’t even know what it would be called. Years later I would learn that most kids played Klondike, which I would scoff at as a baby game. ↩︎
Also it was set in Optima! ↩︎

Less Fun than a Barrel of Crackers

Header image: S.O. Grimes general store, Westminster, Md., c. 1900. Image via Library of Congress.

Another day, another shot fired in the culture wars: this time, the internet is losing its collective mind over the new logo for Cracker Barrel. If you are unaware of the controversy, congratulations—you might consider skipping reading the rest of this essay to remain in blissful ignorance.

To summarize: Cracker Barrel, that paragon of blandly inoffensive roadside dining, has decided that its long-standing theming to evoke early 20th century general stores might be limiting its appeal to Gen Z, and so has embarked on a brand makeover that downplays the hokey country charm. Part of this rebrand is a simplified logo that ditches an illustration depicting a gentleman in overalls perched on a wicker seat ladder back chair and leaning against the titular barrel. (This man, “Uncle Herschel,” was a real person.)

Cracker Barrel logos, left: 1977, right: 2025.

To say that the change has not been taken well by the chain-restaurant-going public would be an understatement. Some of those seeing red also see a political conspiracy—from “influencers” who say that the logo is stripping culture and heritage away from rural white Americans, to Fox News hosts claiming that corporate moves such as this logo change are why President Trump needs to send troops to Chicago. Underlying these criticisms is the assumption that the rebrand is part of an insidious “woke” movement perpetrated by American businesses.

The truth is, no corporation wants to touch anything political with a twelve-foot pole, especially these days. Look at what happened to the department store Target, which caught flack from the right for daring to stock pride merchandise, only to get hit even harder from the left for caving to anti-DEI pressure. Walmart and Amazon have also been subject to boycotting headaches over DEI policies and allegations of abetting the Trump administration. No, politics have nothing to do with the decision to change the Cracker Barrel logo—although it remains to be seen if political outrage from consumers can be sustained.¹

The rebrand reminds me of a similar kerfuffle last year involving the British confection Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Americans may be confused that such a product exists in the first place; but they would be even more baffled by the logo for the sugar refinery Abram Lyle & Sons, which consists of bees swarming about the corpse of a lion. The company’s motto, “Out of the strong came forth sweetness” points to the source of this imagery, the biblical tale of Samson’s riddle². All of which is to say that this is the most badass logo ever, as well as being an amazingly long-lived one—it dates to 1883. In 2024, Lyle & Sons decided that this work of art was too morbid, and replaced it with a more anodyne illustration of a syrupy lion. This change was also greeted with political accusations.

But just because I doubt that these choices were motivated by politics doesn’t mean the detractors don’t have a point: something basic is being lost here. In both cases the companies have discarded character and context in an effort to streamline their identity. I have written previously about the often misguided penchant art directors have towards simplifying their brands. I suspect that the lion’s share (ha) of this tendency is simply following trends, and the current fashion in corporate design is simple, flat typography and short (often single-word) brand names. To the extent that someone actually gave this a thought, the rationale is to remove any attributes that might complicate a consumer’s attitude towards the brand. It also reflects the desire of new executives to mark their territory by peeing on it—see HBO’s constant rebranding, or Elon Musk destroying the only part of Twitter that had any value, its name recognition.

If you want to be charitable, and I try to be when I can, the move towards brand simplification also reflects a longstanding adage in design—be it visual art, design, writing, or engineering: “less is more.” This saying, often misattributed to Mies van der Rohe, emphasizes clarity and utility. The goal is to focus on what is essential. Practitioners of this belief make outsized claims about the effects of this approach. In his seminal work Understanding Comics (1993), cartoonist Scott McCloud claims that idiographic drawings amplify meaning. He also claims that in simplified, “cartoony” design, viewers can insert themselves into the depiction³. I love McCloud to pieces but this all seems a bit farfetched to me.

Scott McCloud claims that simplification leads to self-identification. *Understanding Comics*, 1993.

There’s a lot to be said for purposeful simplicity. Growing up in the 70s and 80s I was surrounded by, and loved, logos by Saul Bass, Milton Glaser, and Paul Rand, all of whom were known for absolutely iconic, geometric, minimalist designs. But these artists, working before digital tools, had to visualize their designs as tight, abstract forms. They did not select something they liked from the font menu, slap it on a generic color shape, shut down Adobe Illustrator and call it a day. Even at their simplest, the great Modernist graphic designers had a sense of context and of play. They weren’t afraid of their work conveying an attitude.

And it’s attitude that’s missing from the Cracker Barrel rebrand. The original logo wasn’t great, in much the same way that the actual restaurants aren’t great. But it did have a point of view, and that’s what the new design is lacking. As a rule of thumb, good design is supposed to not draw more attention than the message it conveys. But when design fades away into no design, the message also disappears. When you look at the new Cracker Barrel logo, ask yourself: would you even know what good or service it represents if you didn’t already know the brand name? Here, look at what happens when you replace the words:

Is it a clothing line? Is it a cake mix?

It also remains to see if Cracker Barrel is going to remain committed to this rebrand, given the fact that their stock is being absolutely destroyed. ↩︎
If you’re not familiar with the Book of Judges: Samson, on the way to visit his future bride Timnah, is set upon by a lion. The hero kills the beast with his bare hands. Sometime later he returned to the scene of the attack and found that a colony of bees had made a hive in the lion’s body. Samson eats some of the honey. Returning to marry Timnah, he tells the bridal party (made up of Philistines, who are his sworn enemies) that they must answer a riddle or forfeit their clothes: “Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet.” Ultimately this story does not end well for Samson, Timnah, or the Philistines. ↩︎
Amusingly, in his essay “Modern Cartoonist,” comics artist Dan Clowes takes exception to McCloud’s theory: “Comics tend to lean toward the iconic (‘The Adventures of a featureless blob'”‘) because it encourages reader identification. Let’s get away from this arena of vagueness (a cheap gimmick designed to flatter the shallow reader)” Eightball 18, 1997. ↩︎