Phone Booth

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
The phone booth exists as a memory to those over thirty, and as a strange, curious, and dysfunctional occupier of public space for those under thirty. This book approaches the phone booth as an entity that, in its myriad manifestations in different parts of the world, embodies a cluster of attitudes concerning privacy, freedom, power, sanctuary, and communication. Playing off of varied surfaces-literature, film, personal narrative, philosophy, and religion-Phone Booth looks at the place of an object on the cusp of obsolescence.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

“In this delightful set of mini-essays, Ariana Kelly has created a paen, rather than an elegy, in celebration of the many dimensions of the vanishing phone booth. Her text gleans images and sensations from our collective memory of the once (if briefly) ubiquitous structure. Site of superhero transformations, crimes, communications, quick changes, and other coins of the social realm, the phone booth and the kiosk served as small theaters of intimate activity in full view of the public eye, a curious combination of enclosed and exposed space. She shifts scale from the minutiae of physical observation-hanging wires and scratched glass-to the larger cultural issues of communication and longing, mixing personal experience with historical, literary, and film references throughout.” – Johanna Drucker, Professor of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA