THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 73

Dr. Bronner’s is one of my favorite companies of all time. I liked them well before I used the soap, I just love the audacity of making your packaging be wall-to-wall screeds with little care for the usual graphic trickery. You used to be able to send away for a bunch of the soap labels in a self-addressed stamped envelope back in the day. We would send away for all kinds of weird things by mail back in the day. The screeds were Dr. Bronner’s original passion, the message, he would lecture in halls. The soap was secondary although his family were soap makers in Germany. Bronner came to America, escaping the holocaust & avoiding the grisly fate of his family being killed by the Nazis. In America Bronner became part of the fabric of the country. If you are unaware of the soap labels you probably just need to see them for yourself, but i’ll do my best to describe. The label is two color, white letters on another color. Some contrast in the design uses the color for the letters on white. Every inch of space is taken up with screeds about the All-One faith & the Moral ABCs. The type is probably 8 point or smaller. This kind of oddball spirit is my kind of “only in America” moment. I'm not sure if other countries allow for this weird mix of idiosyncrasy (Essene Rabbi going off the plantation), but Dr. Bronner seems like a key example, not common but common enough, doing something that is ultimately good for the people but insisting on inserting his own eccentricity into the mix & succeeding in doing so. His soap was embraced by the Hippies in the late sixties & seventies, then it was ubiquitous in countercultural homes, being endlessly diluted until it broke through into the mainstream & can easily be found in Target & other such places. Nowadays the company embraces more common & less idiosyncratic moral causes, but behind this veil of acceptance is a purely eccentric phenomenon.