I found “Manhole Covers of the World” by Björn Altmann sitting on a shelf and couldn’t put it down. It’s a book of manhole covers from 80 countries, all shown in clean black-and-white graphics. That’s it. Just manhole covers.
But here’s what makes it interesting: each one is designed to do a job. Keep people safe, mark what’s underneath, blend into the street. And somehow, even with those constraints, they look completely different from one another. Some are minimal. Some are ornate. Some are geometric. They all work.
What’s clever about Altmann’s book is how seriously it takes these everyday objects. You walk past manhole covers every day without looking. Most people never notice them. But when you see them collected like this, drawn cleanly in black and white, you start to see the craft in them. The patterns. The way they sit in the street. The cultural differences between a cover from Japan and one from Germany.
The book shows you that design lives everywhere, even in the places nobody’s looking. Function first, but the form matters too. The details matter. The way they’re drawn, the patterns they use, the space they take up on the street. None of it is wasted.
If you’re interested in design, this book is worth reading. Not because it will teach you a lesson, but because it shows you something you’ve walked past a thousand times and never really seen.
