Cover Story: Joost Swarte Invents a New Way of Looking

Joost Swarte, the artist who drew this week’s cover, “Love Stories,” is a Dutch cartoonist, architect, and designer. One of his recent designs was a pair of “literary spectacles” that let him “see the world with more irony.” He explains:

“I’ve always bought my glasses in the small town where I live and I started to talk to the owner of the eyewear shop: Are there glasses that not only make you look sharp, but that also influence the way you look? He told me that wasn’t the purpose of glasses, but, I thought, let me give it a try. Of course, there is not so much space on glasses, so there was a technical aspect to solve. But there’s always a little space in the corner. Many of the manufacturers use it for a logo.”

“I came up with the idea of having quotation marks on each side, creating glasses that can trigger the imagination. The shop owner loved the idea, and said, ‘Well why not just put them in production?’ Now, another meaning of quotation marks is that what you see between them, what you read between them, is a quote from somebody else. And if what you see through your glasses is a quote, then you can start looking at things from different perspectives. My spectacles, drawn with clean lines, carry the name: Quotation Marks. They were created not only for their form, but also most emphatically for their content.”