The Brooklyn Rail

Jonny Trunk’s book Audio Erotica showcases the product design of mid-to-late twentieth-century consumer electronic sound components and the graphic design that helped market these now nostalgic artifacts. FUEL, the book’s publisher, is a graphic design agency specializing in art exhibition catalogues for venues like White Cube and Turner Contemporary. Audio Erotica is a nonlinear book; the mostly visual content is organized alphabetically by manufacturer names, making it easy to start at any point. The front and back covers feature black-and-white technical line illustrations of audio components silhouetted on a screen-printed silver metallic background. Densely packed full-color images on every page defy expectations set by the black, white, and grey cover. Breaking the conventions of book cover design, the title is camouflaged as a cassette label in the lower right corner, making this catalogue-of-catalogues present itself as a designer’s object or artist’s book.

An introductory text sets up hundreds of images from vintage audio brochures. Trunk’s brochure collection spans from the 1950s to the 1980s, showcasing an aesthetic range of sound equipment graphic design. As he writes in the introduction, he realized that his collection inadvertently “revealed the history of home listening.” Short blurbs accompany each manufacturer, describing the company, its origin story, and its evolution. Sometimes he includes his own impressions, such as, “I love this kind of industrial-style brochure. No flashy photography, no hip front room, no women lying down in front of anything,” in reference to the Perpetuum Ebner company. His personal notations read like thoughts shared by a collector guiding someone through his virtual museum of ephemera and include irreverent observations.

Many companies no longer exist, while others reinvented themselves by pivoting to completely different products. For example, Norelco, the maker of a transistor radio pictured in the book, is now a personal care products company. A ten-page display of Sony products features items like reel-to-reel recording decks and the game-changing Walkman personal players. Sony is still an electronics and audio giant, while companies like Sanyo (one of the makers of Roku devices) have become more specialized over time.

As Trunk points out, much of the equipment shown in the book is somewhat obsolete, making this collection rare. For example, few people still have reel-to-reel tape decks in their living rooms. Turntables came back because of sound nostalgia driving a revival of vinyl records, not technological advances. Audio Erotica taps into personal memories and the desire to visit another period of sound, music, or product and graphic design. Modernist graphic design shows up on catalogue covers through isolated audio components on plain backgrounds with only essential words—sometimes just the brand name—set in sans-serif type. Mid-century modern product and furniture design, fond of teak wood and spindly splayed furniture legs, is well represented in the book’s photographs of audio components and the rooms where they lived. Most of the products exemplify modernism, the post-World War II ethos that embodies progress and freedom by minimizing design elements.

Trunk chose not to define audio terms used in this book. But the book would have benefited from some technical description, such as why home speakers could be as big as small refrigerators. For example, a simple diagram of a speaker’s components would help the reader understand and appreciate some of the audio objects’ design innovations. Or perhaps even a short glossary that illuminated the difference between a woofer, subwoofer, and tweeter (terms referenced throughout the text) would have been useful for those less steeped in audio culture.

Advertising and marketing images help define the prevailing mythology of any culture. Many of the images illustrate deeply embedded sexism. “You will also see a lot of women in this book,” Trunk explained; “women were an integral part of a very lazy, male-dominated sales process.” He points out that “Erotica” in the title alludes to the “sexy tech on show,” not the women. While women were overrepresented ostensibly to seduce men into buying expensive audio equipment, people of color were noticeably absent for the most part. An image from the BASF (Baden Aniline and Soda Factory) company, then manufacturers of audio tape, shows three young Black women singers photographed from above, dressed like Supremes impersonators in hot pink sequined long form-hugging dresses. Blond wigs complete the look, and their mouths are open as if in mid-song. The nod to Motown alludes to Black popular music’s international explosion in the 1960s. However, the book is not about music culture; it is about the advertising culture that sold machines and materials for recording and listening to sound.

Visual stories reveal social data embedded in sound’s material culture. Throughout the 240 pages and hundreds of full-color images, Audio Erotica presents the consumer sound industry as a microcosm of resonant technological and social change. The book pays homage to a frontier of audio delivery that changed people’s relationships with sound and music to become more personal and customized. That trajectory continues now through personalized playlists and completely portable sound. These products helped fulfill modernism’s promise to deliver more and better everything right to your home.