We're relieved at the number of caveats we wrote in our earlier rumor-mongering, because we have been informed on two counts this morning, one via someone else's journalistic integrity, that this whole LTL/Ini Ani/lids/homage deal is just so not on. According to our own tipbox,

re:LTL coffee lids....they're LTL's own work, and not a piece of flipped artwork. I'm a design writer, wrote about the shop, and interviewed those nice designers. They explained the process to me--one of them coincidently had a collection of lids--and it was done with cast plaster.

OK, so, we were wrong. And this dude/tte could be right. But rumors run thicker than plaster. And according to the other source in this sordid ordeal, who somehow, mysteriously, managed to get responses from both the architects and the original lid-caster in question (it's okay, we're new), it's even less on than we were thinking ten minutes ago.

Ah...the joy of gossip. We’d like to correctly locate the plagiarism reference. For the coffee lids we lifted from an article about lids in I.D. Magazine May/June 1996, and from the 5 to 10 coffee cups we consume each day. Also, the cardboard walls were ripped-off from a stack of U-LIne shipping boxes. The steel for the frame holding the cardboard was blatantly taken from images in McMaster-Carr Supply catalogue.

-Lewis dot Tsurumaki dot Lewis

As if that wasn't erudite enough, the artist-formerly-known-as-ripped-off responded too.

In our office, we cast groupings of the lids in resin in 2000 for potential use in a project. We made many sample resin panels. We have examples of these castings on display in our office. We did not give these to LTL as a gift.

Louise Harpman

We're at Ini Ani, loooking at the wall in question, as hard as we can. And we're still just waiting for answers.