Quaker Oats to infinity

November 15, 2020 12:57 PM

I’ve seen references (off the top of my head, in the writings of Poul Anderson and John Braine, among others) to a Quaker Oats box design...

...that showed the Quaker holding a box of Quaker Oats on which there was a smaller Quaker holding a smaller box of Quaker Oats, on which… you get the idea. There doesn’t seem to be a copy of this image online; when I looked for it, the first Google result was a brief article saying how the author couldn’t find it anywhere. Does anyone know if it’s someplace offline, say in a book I could obtain by inter-library loan?

posted by Epixonti to Food & Drink (10 answers total)

Maybe this? It’s a poster, not a box design, though.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 1:01 PM on November 15, 2020

There's this one in colour, probably an advertisement, and this woodcut which seems pretty dang old.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:02 PM on November 15, 2020

Actually, none of these work strictly speaking, because although the quaker is holding a box, the box shows him holding a scroll, not another box. But maybe people misremembered it?
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 1:04 PM on November 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

There's also the slightly more famous Droste tin
posted by BungaDunga at 1:29 PM on November 15, 2020 [3 favorites]

In "The Mouse and His Child", there's something similar with a can of dog food
posted by The otter lady at 1:47 PM on November 15, 2020 [3 favorites]

The Droste tin was also the first thing I thought of, and the effect of an item recursively appearing on itself is named for it: the Droste effect.
posted by zsazsa at 2:02 PM on November 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

Morton Salt has that kind of recursive art, and it’s a cylindrical cardboard container, which might lead to mixing it up with an oatmeal box?
posted by LizardBreath at 3:12 PM on November 15, 2020 [3 favorites]

I have a weird feeling that the writers who referred to the Quaker Oats packaging in this way either mis-remembered, or bent the truth a little to avoid any kind of legal entanglement. I found a whole collection of "Droste effect" posts on this blog devoted to grocery packaging, but none of them are Quaker Oats packages. The only mention of it is someone in the comments on one post saying they thought they remembered it but couldn't find any images themselves either.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:01 PM on November 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I think it's referencing a very old Quaker Oats ad design? In Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, from 1928: "But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second? And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there's a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a picture of another Quaker holding another box of oats, on which etc., etc."

2001's The Motivated Sign (Iconicity in Language and Literature), edited by Olga Fischer and Max Nänny, has the Huxley excerpt on P.36, a section on mise en abyme ["a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence" - Wikipedia] starting on P. 37, and later this footnote:

"5. Füredy (1989: 751f) makes a useful distinction between "recursion" and "repetition" yet appears to blur that distinction in the case of the so-called "Droste-effect" on the "famous cocoa tin on which is painted a girl holding another such cocoa tin, on which is painted a girl, and so on". In reality, the factor of scale makes the effect appear closer to repetition than recursion. In many contexts, including Willie's City of the World and the Quaker Oats packet, simple duplication is sufficient to conjure up the possibility of infinite regression in the receiver's imagination. Hence, duplication might be thought of as an iconic sign for recursion."
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:09 PM on November 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I think you've hit on it, Iris Gambol! Thank you very much.

I didn't realize that references to the Quaker and infinity went back as far as 1928. I guess Huxley either saw the ad that Iris mentioned, or there was an actual package design at the time based on the same concept. If the latter, it's not so strange that there are no reproductions of it online, given that it was 90-odd years ago.

Thanks also to everyone else who responded for some cool links!
posted by Epixonti at 10:34 AM on November 17, 2020 [1 favorite]