This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.

The Last Cummings & Good Calendar Looks Back, and Ahead

It’s hard to say goodbye to an old friend, a friend who has always been there for every birthday, every anniversary, and every holiday. But the time has come to bid farewell to an annual favorite: the imaginative monthly calendar created for more than 20 years by the noted Chester design team of Jan Cummings and Peter Good.

The 2017, Month by Month, Day by Day calendar, they say, will be their last. Cummings & Good, partners in life as well as business, are not retiring, but after five decades as graphic designers, are reassessing their professional activities.

For many years, the annual Cummings & Good calendar was a hanging vertical calendar; last year the team changed the format to a desk calendar.

“I use a desk calendar and we wanted to make something that we use ourselves,” Cummings says.

And this year’s version is also a desk calendar with improvements. It is printed on paper that is easier to write on. Last year’s coated paper made notation with felt tip pens, among others, more difficult; more important, the days are arranged so each week starts with Monday rather than Sunday.

“I prefer the weekend days not to be split up, so you can see Saturday and Sunday side by side,” Cummings explains.

Still, it is not what is new about the calendar that gives it special appeal—it is what is old. Cummings & Good have used the calendar as a retrospective, a second look at popular calendars from the past. For some 14 years, the theme of each calendar was a four-letter word, varied selections from Bird, Tree, and Food to Slow, Song, and Ball. The team has incorporated some of each year’s art into the design for each month. And they have also introduced each month with the written pieces that their son Justin authored each year for the front of the calendar to give depth to its theme.

Justin Good, who has his doctorate in philosophy, currently teaches philosophy at Middlesex Community College and aesthetics at the University of Connecticut School of Fine Arts. Some of his introductions are poetry, some prose, but all gave him the chance to do writing, demanding a different kind of imagination than the rigors of academic discourse.

“I love to write and doing essays at the front, gave me a chance to explore new ways of using language,” he says. “Graduate school [writing] demands an impersonal voice, no emotion, and [is] supposedly objective. Writing essays for the calendar gave me the opportunity to find a different kind of voice, to express philosophy in ways that had nothing to do with academic language.”

On a recent visit to their studio, Cummings and Good reminisced about some of their favorite calendar illustrations. Good loves the story about how they got an illustration for the year their chosen word was Slow. Visiting Justin, then living in Massachusetts, they came across a road crew stenciling slow on a street in big yellow letters. The couple hurried to get a camera and photographed the process. Then they had to get permission from the State of Massachusetts to use the photograph in the calendar.

The illustration from the year the theme was Food is a watercolor that Cummings did in the 1960s while at the University of Connecticut. Students brought something for a still life to class.

“I brought a humble potato,” Cummings recalled.

It turned out not to be humble at all. She later entered the potato picture in an illustration contest run by Mademoiselle and she not only won $500 but also the privilege of illustrating a page in the magazine. Then to her surprise, she got another check for $500 in the mail. Mademoiselle had paid her an illustration fee, forgetting the work was part of the original prize. Cummings, then a struggling young graphic artist, cashed the second check. When a staffer at Mademoiselle called to explain that it had been sent in error and asked for the check back, it was too late.

“I explained we had spent it,” Cummings said.

The least popular calendar, according to Good, was the one with the theme Work.

“Sales went down,” he said. “Work was a real downer, even with the quotes on the joy of work.”

As he reflected, Good mused, “Maybe it would have been better if we’d selected the word ‘chocolate.’”

For longtime fans of the annual calendar, there is another four-letter word that might come to mind as they contemplate a calendar-less future: loss. But Cummings and Good reflected on more than two decades of calendars with satisfaction and nostalgia.

“It was absolutely one of our favorite projects,” Cummings says, and Good explains why: “It was an opportunity to put everything we know into a project—ideas, concepts, visual images, quotes.”

The Cummings and Good Desk Calendar is available at www.cummings-good.com and at these local stores:

C&G Art and Apparel in

Chester

Chester Gallery

Celebrations in Deep River

Fromage in Old Saybrook