The Learners (2008)

AD INFINITUM The Learners is a nifty sequel to author Chip Kidd's 2001 debut The Cheese Monkeys, with narrator Happy going to work in early '60s advertising

The Learners, the snappy sequel to Chip Kidd's 2001 debut, The Cheese Monkeys, finds narrator Happy fresh out of college and working as a designer at a Connecticut advertising firm in 1961. He hawks potato chips, meets folks with names like Tip and Sketch, and, in one of those only-in-fiction coincidences, wanders into Stanley Milgram's psych experiments at nearby Yale, which (a) traumatize him and (b) inspire his work. Kidd invents a banter-filled workplace worthy of Howard Hawks, gleefully tweaks the old-guard panic of the Mad Men-era ad world, and even throws in a few typographic bells and whistles (consider page 62's layout a mini-master class). A-