Bialetti: A Catalogue reconstructs the material history of an icon that sold 300 million units worldwide yet left almost no archive behind — through objects gathered from ruins, markets, and stores by artist David Bergé.
About This Book
When Renato Bialetti industrialised the stovetop coffee maker in the early 1950s, he had little interest in preservation. No prototypes, no records, no archive. Into that deliberate void, artist David Bergé stepped — gathering Bialetti machines from the ruins of the original factory, second-hand markets, and flagship stores — to construct the catalogue that never existed. The result is part industrial archaeology, part oral history: insights into precision engineering production are set alongside testimonies from family members, former factory workers, and union representatives. It is a portrait of a twentieth-century design icon, and of the human labour that sustained it, now largely absent from contemporary kitchens.
Key Features
- 96 pages of catalogue documentation, production process imagery, and oral history material
- Edited by David Bergé
- Published by Spector Books, 2024
What You'll Discover
- How Bialetti's stovetop coffee maker was produced as precision engineering, and the industrial logic behind its many clone variants
- The deliberate erasure of corporate memory — why Renato Bialetti kept no prototypes or records, and what that means for design history
- First-hand accounts from former factory workers and union representatives that restore the human dimension behind a mass-produced object
- An artist's methodology for reconstructing a design catalogue from dispersed physical evidence in the absence of any official archive
About the Author
[Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 96
- Dimensions: 22.86 x 15.88 x 1.19 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783959057592
- Publisher: Spector Books
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Designers and historians interested in industrial design, material culture, and the politics of corporate memory; readers drawn to artist-led archival practice and twentieth-century object history.