I admit it’s not my favorite, but I do still love that it’s actually distinctive and has a specific “vibe”. You look at it and you know exactly when it’s from and what it’s about.
I can’t think of any ‘style’ in the last 20 years that has that.
I’m not actually surprised. Water and gas meters have to work perfectly, for years on end, without leaking or jamming, through rain, ice, and blistering heat. They feel like the kind of invisible infrastructure that we almost never think about, yet is actually some fairly robust engineering with a lot of R&D behind it.
Art deco for sure, possibly turn-of-the-century industrial as well.
Seriously look at this steam engine. It looks like it belongs in a massive cathedral or something.
So, if the meter has one of those old displays with all the little dials, it has some kind of a sensor that reads that and transmits it? Convoluted, but probably much reduces the price compared to retrofitting the actual meter itself.
The last few times this was brought up for discussion, one thing that many people mentioned - including quite a few who had interacted with publishers - was that publishers were strongly selecting for female authors. Some of this may have been in an effort to correct for lack of female presence in what was perceived as a male-dominated genre, some may have been trying to find the next wildly successful Rowling / Suzanne Collins / Sarah Maas / etc.
Several expressed that it was actually difficult to get a response as a male fantasy author, so this well-intentioned drive may have resulted now in some over correction bringing us to our current place.