" ... While the zipper may not be a monumental or socially transforming technology like the railway or electricity, it is the only machine -- and machine is what it is -- [which is] regularly operated on a worldwide scale at our most intimate contacts with others and with our environment, sometimes ablutionarily, sometimes seductively ... "

-- Giles Forden, "Alligators of Ecstasy," a review of Robert Friedel, "Zipper: An Exploration of Novelty" (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), Times Literary Supplement, 26 May 1995.