Why The Internet Loves Big Decorative Letters
WOULD YOU LIKE TO BUY A VOWEL?
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The Oakland Target is fresh out of L's. I'm waiting with another customer at the end of an aisle in the School/Office section, as an employee checks the back for more.

We are about 100 yards from the front entrance of the store, at the edge of an aisle that a sign designates as B13. Smaller bilingual signs below it claim the area for Activity Kits (Kits de actividades), Art and Craft Tools (Articulos manualidades y artes) and School Project (Proyecto escolar). Within the aisle itself, hanging above the white metal shelving system, is yet another in what now feels like an excessive amount of signage, reading HAND MADE MODERN®. All products nearby were made with machines.

The L's in question are beige and made of papier-mâché. Their dimensions are roughly 7 inches (H) x 1.5 inches (W) x 6.5 inches (L), and can stand upright on their own. Their price tags read "UNFINISHED HMM PPR MACHE LETTER L." They are among a 26-part series featuring the entire alphabet, which when in stock cumulatively take up nearly the entire top row of B13. Primo retail space.

The letters haven't always been made of cheap paper. Previously versions were made of wood. At one point there were also light-up marquees, and white-and-black LED light letters. They aren't only available at Target, either. Similar letters can also be found at Walmart and Michaels.1 Though their style and materials have varied, the demand for letters, any letters, has remained consistently high.

Seriously: While I was at the store, almost half of that top shelf space was vacant. They were out of not only L's, but also C's, I's, J's, M's, O's, Q's, S's, T's, X's, and Z's. This seems to indicate the most popular first initials of kids' names or, perhaps, large numbers of people are decorating McMansion living rooms with words like TOXIC CIS or MOIST ZITS.

Each letter sells for $2.49 plus tax. A four-letter word costs about $10. This seems like a good deal, until one considers the average rate most writers get per word. I apparently say this at a steep discount: Fuck.2

The employee finally returned from the mythical back room3 to break the news that nope, she couldn't find any, and she wasn't sure when they'd be getting more in stock.

"Not sure why there's a shortage of L's," she said. "Usually it's just the A's and E's are out." She shrugged in a way familiar to all retail employees prone to constant, unnecessary public abuse, communicating please don't blame me for this.

The customer, 30-something, thick-framed glasses, leaned against her bright red half-loaded shopping cart, and sucked air through her teeth, disappointed. "Would it be possible to reserve one?" she asked. "I've checked multiple stores and they're all out."

I imagined this poor woman, and others like her, zooming around the potholed freeways of the Bay Area. Desperate to find cheap block letters to spell… what? And why? What purpose do they serve?

 

Using text as home decor goes way back. The Vadathika Cave Inscription, for example, dates to the 5th or 6th century. The HAVE inscription (meaning "welcome") outside the House of the Faun in Pompeii, from the 2nd century, is like an ancient doormat. "Writing was and is a means of delineating and mapping space," writes Dr. Sarah Bond, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Iowa. "Additionally, certain words could serve to set the tone for guests entering a household, just as a welcome mat does for us today."

And also decorative signs. Think: blandly inspiring religious messages like the "Footprints" poem, man cave signs, and big blocks of text that use 300 different fonts and when spoken out loud sound like coke-fueled rants, and of course, the individually sold letters, for those who prefer a more customized message. Basically, marketing slogans for the living room, made for the Instagram Age.

 

Let's not unfairly single out God-fearing suburbanites. The trope is common in neo-hipster aesthetics, with marginal differences in style and substance. Just check inside the unfortunately-named Sweatshop Coffee in Brooklyn. They also have an obligatory neon sign.

If there's anyone we can blame for helping popularize the contemporary variant of text-on-walls, in particular big block letters, it's Joanna and Chip Gaines. For those unfamiliar, they're hosts of the HGTV show "Fixer Upper"4 (2013-present), a reality show that follows the married couple as they help others renovate homes in and around central Texas. They also sell a line of home goods called Hearth & Hand™, at — go figure — Target.

The decorative text aesthetic is their jam. Over on HGTV's website, there's a slideshow article titled 43 'Fixer Upper'-Inspired Ways to Fill Blank Walls. Twenty-one of them involve wall text of some kind. Their take on the style utilizes (or at least references) repurposed antique/industrial signage and diner menu boards. Gutted Americana. This often involves spelling out "HOME" inside your home, and "KITCHEN" inside your kitchen, lest you ever forget.

Their Magnolia Market store, originally opened back in 2003, is loaded with this kind of thing. Its sign looks like a ransom note, as if a serial kidnapper decided to hang up his duct tape and open a quaint country store.

In what seems like a natural end point for the style, the Gaineses ultimately recommend just tossing a bunch of letters above your couch, like someone vomited alphabet soup on a wall.

The block letters seem to capitalize on the demand for this kind of aesthetic, making it accessible for those who don't want to dig through antique stores or garbage dumps looking for relics of a formerly prosperous America. It's a design choice that's staggeringly literal. Rather than find an object to symbolically convey the concept of love or family, why not just spell it out in big block letters on an Ikea shelf?

Back in the store, as the woman looking for L's started to walk away, I asked her why she wanted them.5

"It's for a baby shower," she said. "You can decorate them all kinds of ways."

 

The L lady is right, you can use them in all kinds of ways. The online listing on Target.com suggests using them to "spell out and profess your love for that special one with any combination of letters to say just the right thing." It's rare that a product description has to simultaneously explain what the product is and also how the written word functions.

I tried to figure out where the papier-mâché letters were manufactured, but it was more complicated than I anticipated. On Alibaba, I could find only one such product. Unfortunately, it didn't match those sold in Target. The typeface was janky, the size was wrong (8″) and they were made in the Philippines instead of China.

A search for "hmm ppr mache letter" on Google turns up only two results, links to a site called USA Import Data, with the slogan, "Information On Finger Tips." Their listings claim that 147 cartons of the letters arrived in LA from Hong Kong on September 11, 2018 (never forget).

Another batch of letters arrived on September 12 on a ship named CMA CGM Chateau D'If. It looks like this. It is a fine boat. The YouTube account Ships 'n More Ships uploaded a video of it leaving a port in Southampton, possibly filled with more papier-mâché letters.

Also according to that Import Data listing, the letters were shipped by Mitac Precision Developments, LTD., an offshore exporting company. The only listed address I could find for them was in the Virgin islands, c/o Offshore Incorporations Limited (OIL), a company specializing in international incorporations, that changed its name to Vistra in 2017.

I called the phone number for the Virgin Islands office. A pre-recorded voice answered, explaining that there was no one there to take my call.

 

When I first saw the letters on shelves in Target, they immediately seemed like a misguided idea. Putting items that can potentially spell out obscenities where bored teens tend to congregate is just asking for it.

To confirm my suspicions, I searched photos tagged to the Oakland / Emeryville Target, and of course, I found plenty of people creatively taking advantage of them. There's satanic worship:

 

Cock worship:

 

And ass worship:

 

Over at the Alameda location tag, same deal: Send Nudes; Feces; Shark Soiled (??); Anus; and Dick. When I looked up the Brooklyn location, the header image featured the old wooden letters arranged to say #DICKS.

 

Browse the photos for pretty much any big box store that sells such letters, and you'll likely find at least a few examples of lude, ephemeral poetry. It's feasible that, at any given moment, there's a superstore with a cuss word on one of its shelves. Good.

At the Oakland store, I asked a Target employee if these kinds of pranks happened often. She nodded knowingly, with a 10,000 yard stare. "Oh yeah. All the time," she said. "Especially when we had those big block light up letters. Someone would always spell out 'suck' and blank whatever." She confirmed that it was usually teens doing pranks.

I asked her if they have to regularly patrol the aisle because of this. "I don't know if we have people intentionally looking out for it but if we see something we're supposed to swap 'em around," she said, laughing, "but to be honest I think it's pretty funny and usually just leave it. Unless there's customers around I just leave it."

 

Ponder the lifecycle of the hmm ppr mache letters (hmmm!): A cable home decorating show hosted by a married couple in Texas inspired widespread consumer demand for hanging up text in the interiors of American homes. This resulted in big box stores seeking out mass produced letters to meet this demand, utilizing their massive supply chain infrastructure to heave them across great oceans and highways to stores. Once there, bored teens rearranged them into swear words, posting photographic evidence in an app that makes its money by selling their data to advertisers, who want to convince people to buy more products, some of which might be those same letters.

Eventually the letters are sold and driven in oversized vehicles to new homes to sit on different shelves for a while. A few years later, once interior decorating styles have changed, they are chucked into garbage cans, dragged to curbs at dusk mid-week, loaded into trucks very early in the morning, and driven to a landfill to molder in a pile with other unwanted objects for a long time. Individual trajectories may vary slightly, but all become trash.

Walk through a huge retail store and try to imagine a version of the above play out for every product at once. Multiply the number of stores by a few thousand. Maddening. The more you try to understand why, make all the connections, the less any of it makes sense. It's all empty and well-lit and sad. Garbage all the way down.

1

Weirdly, corporate style dictates that it's "Michaels" without a possessive apostrophe, even though according to my intensive research (skimmed Wikipedia) the store was founded by only one Michael (Michael J. Dupey), and not, as I originally thought, a group of close friends named Michael.

2

Ed note: Joe was paid $1.03 to say this.

3

Here, I have a brief, nostalgic flashback to an old job ($7.50/hr), when "checking the back" just meant slowly walking into the storage area, sitting down on a busted swivel chair behind a big shelf, and silently counting to 60, before returning to apologize for not being able to find whatever crap the customer wanted. It was the closest thing one could get to an actual break, and it was glorious.

4

One thing I really like about the show are its dry, overly descriptive and vaguely sinister episode titles, like "On the Hunt for a Fixer that Looks Old but Feels New in Castle Heights" (S01E01), "Young Family Embraces Revitalization Efforts Making Their Own History" (S01E02), and "Couple Pursues Elusive Neighborhood Where Residents Never Leave" (S01E10). It's like a neural network algorithm was programmed to generate them.

5

If you ever want to make strangers feel deeply uncomfortable, walk around a chain store asking them what they plan to do with their various products.

<p>Joe Veix is a writer and artist based in Oakland, CA.</p>

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