Golden Days Before They End
Photographer Klaus Pichler and journalist Clemens Marschall went on a mission to find, document and explore the last public refuges for a dying drinking generation. On countless wanderings through Vienna they found some of these places in their final throes. The book is a swan song for these bars that have shaped their customers’ existences for decades, places that are soon to disappear forever.
The book’s massive cardboard cover maintains the function of a front door into a parallel universe. The title was set using stick-on metal letters — which many bars of this kind use as toilet or kitchen door signs — complete with one letter accidentally mounted upside-down. We wanted the book to convey what you feel and smell inside the bars by using certain textures, aesthetics and surfaces. The sound of dense chatter is mirrored in the claustrophobic typography on the inner pages.
Golden Days Before They End is available in German and English editions from Patrick Frey.
