Hot Off the Press Kiosk Paper

From left: an issue of Kiosk Paper; inside Kiosk’s store on Spring Street.

Alisa Grifo and Marco ter Haar Romeny started Kiosk with an especially infectious idea: to highlight functional design goods from around the world, focusing on one country at a time. Their store, perched one floor above SoHo’s Spring Street, opened in 2005, and its concept quickly caught on. They now curate small international pop-ups, including one in the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s famed gift shop.

But Kiosk has never been about mere consumerism. Like any good curator, Grifo, who has worked as an interior designer and prop stylist, strives to tell the stories behind the products — to talk about people and their culture through the things that they make. To this end, she writes a brief, impressionistic (and often very funny) essay about every item that Kiosk carries: it’s a key to understanding the significance that each object holds, whether a wooden paperweight made by a 90-year-old Japanese craftsman who won’t reveal his methods or a red Portuguese sugar bowl manufactured by one of the last melamine factories in Europe.

Now, with the help of friends and collaborators Germany Soccer Jersey, the store is applying this approach to Kiosk Paper, a quarterly that aims to explore the world through words and ideas, not just objects. Each issue will be put together by a different editor and, according to Grifo, will offer “perspectives on everyday life.” Subjects, she says, are to include “eating, music, living, nature, collecting, craft, material culture, color and poetry.” Otherwise known as everything. Kiosk Paper comes as an oversize, two-sided broadsheet — a format that grew out of the logo-adorned newsprint the store uses to wrap its products. “We realized that this packaging could actually do and say something, not only look pretty,” Grifo says. For design influences they looked to that famed object of the 1960s counterculture “The Whole Earth Catalog” and the massively wordy label of Dr. Bronner’s all-purpose soap. The two “have a very straightforward and intuitive approach to presenting information,” Grifo says. “Both the density and the randomness [of our content] encourage readers to draw their own conclusions.” And the same could be said for Kiosk Paper.

The first issue, edited by Ming Lin — who initiated the project, and who recently completed a graduate program in anthropology and art history at McGill University — is out now. It contains a mushroom spore; a printing how-to from artist and amateur mycologist Jason Rosenberg; Justin Erik Halldór Smith’s article on the lexical mishaps of multilingual product packaging; a piece by the art collective Slavs and Tatars; and an interview with the color specialist Donald Kaufman.

Kiosk Paper is included with any order placed at kioskkiosk.com; or pick up a free copy at Kiosk, 95 Spring Street, New York.