The Extraordinary Ordinary

Description

Extraordinary Ordinary is Jo Soo-yong’s, publisher of Magazine B, second book. Where his first solo essay collection, Sense of Work, explored his personal approach to sensation as a designer and creative thinker, this new book turns outward — revealing which brands have captured his attention over the years and, more candidly, which moments within those brands have genuinely moved him.

Jo founded Magazine B in 2011, at a time when brands were proliferating and brand culture was increasingly in the spotlight. The magazine became a dedicated space for examining the charm and essence of individual brands from multiple angles, and through that process, Jo developed a refined and distinctive perspective on what makes a brand endure. Extraordinary Ordinary is the distillation of that accumulated thinking.

The book’s table of contents reads like a considered personal canon — 51 brands that Magazine B has followed with care, ranging from the fragrance house Le Labo to the bag maker Freitag. The underlying question running through the book is a simple but worthwhile one: as tastes shift and favorites change over time, what messages from these brands still hold?

To write it, Jo returned to articles previously published in Magazine B, substantially revising and expanding them through the lens of his current perspective and experience. Several new pieces were written to complete the collection and give it an organic through-line.

The emphasis on essentials that defined Sense of Work continues here. Extraordinary Ordinary traces how unremarkable ideas become remarkable ones — how brands take root in people’s lives and quietly become indispensable. Those are the moments the book is after.

NOTE: This book is in Korean. No English translation is available.