Coffee Lids: Peel, Pinch, Pucker, Puncture

Louise Harpman & Scott Specht

Softcover | 14 x 2 x 15 cm | 256 pp

Princeton Architectural Press | 2018 | 9781616896560

The ubiquitous plastic coffee cup lid combines indentations, protrusions, tabs, and score lines that can be pinched, pulled, pushed, punctured, and tucked to create an opening to sip from while also keeping a piping-hot liquid in its place.

Louise Harpman and Scott Specht have collected these familiar triumphs of industrial design, in their many variations, for decades, creating what Smithsonian magazine calls the world's largest collection of coffee cup lids. In addition to oddly compelling close-up photographs, Harpman and Specht include lively field-guides to their classification system and patent drawings for many of the most unique designs. This beautifully designed book will appeal to designers, coffee drinkers, and anyone who delights in the small bits of humble genius that surround us every day. You'll never look at your to-go coffee cup the same way again.