A Disappointment

I recently found an old gadget I bought a long time ago. I saw this little cookie cutter in a mail order catalog, and immediately I saw the potential for a sculpture project. This little gadget would be perfect for incising letters in clay or wet cement. It reminded me of a strange old photo I saw in an Art History lecture, it was taken around 1900, it showed a man pushing a big paint roller down a Paris sidewalk, printing the Cinzano logo right onto the pavement.


Cookie Gadget



The kit advertised 26 letters and 10 numbers, so obviously I had to buy two kits, since I might need double letters for some words. Fortunately the kits were cheap, only about $5. But you can imagine my disappointment when I opened the kits, and found this:


The Alphabet


The packaging is correct, it contains 26 letters. They just didn’t include all 26 letters. Both kits were identical. I’m throwing the whole mess in the trash, it’s totally useless.

6 thoughts on “A Disappointment”

  1. You know, I only noticed that the funky E might be an M after I posted the article. But that still doesn’t account for the lack of a U and the double V. Maybe the manufacturer (in Hong Kong) thought the U was close enough to V that it wouldn’t make any difference. But in any case, the whole kit is useless as a message roller if any of the letters come up sideways, like the W/M.

  2. Well, of course you could just cut extra cookies and invert an M for a W, but that’s not what I bought these rollers for, and besides, what would be the point of making this as a roller if you just wanted to cut out cookies? You could do that just as easily with a flat strip of metal and attach the cutters. The only logical purpose for this gadget is to roll out continuous letters on a surface.
    But what really gets me, how can you skip a vowel like U? I thought maybe these were made in some country with a strange language with no U, but they’re made in Hong Kong where they don’t even use a roman alphabet.

  3. Well, of course, one of the V’s could pass for a U, as in Latin… or, judging from the box photo, you could invert the A for a U.
    Legibility is not the main point here — after all, they’re meant for pressing into dough.

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