Alex Shear’s Object Lesson #2

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In Issue #1, Alex Shear, the legendary collector of pop ephemera, offered a sampling from his collection of soda bottles that “paid homage” to the original 7-Up logo. This time around, he’s contributed a jaw-dropping assortment of gun-shaped objects—from children’s toothbrushes to pizza cutters—arranged on a 17" x 32" removable poster.

Throughout his life, Alex Shear compiled a collection of over 100,000 20th-century pop-culture artifacts in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In the ’70s, Shear was a highly successful designer of housewares and clothing. In the ’90s and until his death in 2014, he focused exclusively on acquisition. Objects from his collection have been featured in exhibitions at Manhattan’s Children’s Museum and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, among others.