Coffee Lids: Peel, Pinch, Pucker, Puncture

If you're one of the 200 million Americans who drink coffee every day, you may have marveled at the ubiquitous plastic coffee cup lid, with its clever combination of 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.

Louise Harpman practices architecture in New York City and Scott Specht in New York City and Austin Texas. Their obsession with coffee cup lids stems from their aesthetic interest in familiar objects that contain unique and endlessly fascinating variations.