Modernism 101

Modernism 101

From Shreveport, Randall Ross Peddles Rare Design Books Across the Globe

By Chris Jay

It was a Friday morning in late February of 2014, and Randall Ross was digging through a box of loose catalogs, warranties, and owner’s manuals at an estate sale when something caught his eye.

“I recognized it for what it was, which was a very significant piece of information design produced by Knud Lönberg-Holm and Ladislav Sutnar around 1952,” Ross said.

To the vast majority of estate sale shoppers, the Honeywell Thermostats sales catalog would have been just another old magazine retrieved from the depths of a dusty workbench. Had it not attracted Ross’s attention, it would likely have wound up in a garbage bin.

He took the catalog home, scanned the cover, and e-mailed it to Adrian Täckman, an architect and design historian in Copenhagen who has built an archive relating to the career of Lönberg-Holm. Täckman immediately purchased it for his collection.

Randall Ross and his wife Molly McCombs have been collecting special, rare books and ephemera on the subject of graphic design since the early 1990s.

Molly McCombs

In less time than it would take to get in and out of brunch at a busy restaurant, Ross had rescued a piece of design history from the waiting maw of a landfill and placed it with a grateful collector on the other side of the globe. “On days like that, I feel like the keeper of a sacred flame,” he said. “But other days, I just feel like a professional recycler.”

Ross grew up attending swap meets, garage sales, and flea markets with his mother in West Texas towns like Lamesa, Abilene, and Sweetwater, where he was especially drawn to old books and periodicals of any kind.

“I was always looking for portals into the rest of the world, and to me they were newspapers, films, and books,” Ross said. “Books were really the thing that made me feel connected to the rest of the world. These days, books connect him to the world in a more tangible way. Ross and his wife and business partner, Molly Mc- Combs, operate an online design bookstore called Modernism101 from their home in Shreveport, where they have lived since 2009.

Ross’s journey as a bookseller began in the early 1990s at book shows and conventions around Austin, Texas. As a University of Texas journalism student, he fell in love with the writers of the Beat Generation, the “new journalism” of Tom Wolfe, and also with his future wife. After graduating, he and McCombs each pursued careers as graphic designers, and Ross made a “pivotal” decision to begin buying and selling books.

He initially specialized in pulp fiction paperbacks of the “hardboiled detective” variety, but his professional interest in graphic design eventually crept into his collecting. He began to pursue rare and out of print design books, while McCombs pursued a similar interest in photography books and ephemera.

The couple would spend long weekends together on book-hunting road trips to Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, bouncing from one bookstore to the next, then retire to the hotel to pore over their best finds. They called these outings “working the triangle,” in reference to the three cities’ locations respective to Austin.

“I was like: ‘I know this stuff is out there,’” Ross said. “I’ve always had this hunting and gathering instinct. To me, the idea of driving around all day looking for books is a dream.”

As their expertise grew more focused on midcentury design and architecture, so did the Modernism101 collection. The duo had a knack for unearthing materials related to the biggest names in mid-century architecture, including Louis Kahn, Richard Neutra, and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as designs produced by commercial artists like Paul Rand and Herbert Bayer. The only problem was that no one wanted to buy the design books. There was always a market for a great first edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or a rare pulp novel, but no one—at least no one in Austin in the mid-1990s—seemed to have any interest in rare books about design and architecture.

Then came the advent of affordable, high-speed home internet, and everything changed.

Suddenly, Ross no longer needed to stand behind a table at a book show to find his customers. Those interactions started taking place on message boards and listservs. The Modernism101 website, modernism101.com—launched in 2001— became a beacon attracting design collectors from places as far-flung as Denmark, Japan, and Australia. People even started reaching out to Ross to sell design-related collections that they had inherited. He cultivated relationships with museum acquisitions departments, research libraries, and private collectors, and soon he and McCombs found themselves criss-crossing the country to evaluate and purchase entire collections of rare design and architecture books.

In April of that same year, Ross quit his job as a graphic designer. “I just decided: ‘I can make this work,’” he said.

One of Ross's great finds was the Honeywell pamphlet below, designed by Knud Lönberg-Holm and Ladislav Sutnar.

Courtesy of Randall Ross

The couple’s guest bedroom in Austin became the Modernism101 office. When it became apparent that they would need more space to contain their growing collection, Ross rented a retail and office space just off of Austin’s bustling South Congress Avenue, where he sold books by appointment and occasionally to people who were passing through for South by Southwest.

“My e-mail rolodex was just exploding,” he said. “I was having a hell of a good time. But really, in Austin, what I was doing didn’t matter. Nobody cared.”

With Austin home prices skyrocketing and traffic worsening, Ross and McCombs began to joke that “maybe our dream house is waiting for us in Shreveport,” the Northern Louisiana town they had visited on occasion to attend the Centenary College Book Bazaar, an enormous used book sale held each fall. So, they went looking for it.Today, the couple runs their business out of an architect-designed mid-century home in Shreveport—an ideal vessel for their jaw-dropping collection of design books, art, and mid-century furniture. In their new home city, Ross and McCombs enjoy fewer distractions, more space, and increased access to the myriad of cultural institutions and organizations Louisiana is home to. They’ve produced design exhibitions for the School of Design at Louisiana Tech University and the Meadows Museum of Art at Centenary College, and have helped foster a growing appreciation of Shreveport’s place in design history.

Ross also manages Shreveport Modern, a Facebook page that documents Shreveport’s place in the history of modernist architecture. While many Shreveport residents are familiar with the legacy of Samuel and William Wiener—architects and Shreveport natives whose groundbreaking work helped establish modernism in the United States—Ross has made information about the Wieners and their contemporaries more accessible by placing it on social media.

As the world of the web continues to evolve, so does Ross’s access to a global audience interested in design. The @modernism101 Instagram account, for example, currently has more than seven thousand followers.

Now that he and McCombs are busy buying and selling collections and networking with international collectors, it would be fair to wonder how much time they still spend rooting around in dusty flea markets.

“You’d be surprised. I’m always on the look-out for stuff,” Ross said. “You can find anything, anywhere, at any time.”

modernism101.com