Some lovely letterpress action to ease you through your day:
(via Coudal)
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Typographica’s favourite typefaces of 2011 (pictured above: A2 Beckett designed by Henrik Kubel for A2-TYPE).
The Coroner`s Report — John Banville reviews The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin for The Guardian:
A “Complete Poems” is a death certificate and memorial combined. After the Selected and the Collected, the Complete marks the poet’s official demise and at the same time erects a carven monument designed to outlast the ages. In the case of this mighty volume of the all of Larkin, there is something too of the coroner’s report.
A two-part interview with William Gibson, author of Distrust That Particular Flavor, in the Wall Street Journal.
And finally…
Go Outside — Ian Leslie responds to criticism of his essay on serendipity:
The inherent limits of older formats like newspapers or bookstores are a feature as well as a bug. They make things a bit difficult for us, and because of that they often push us towards unsought-for discoveries.The modern internet makes each of us like a rich man in his mansion who has the finest food flown in from every corner of the world and whose favourite singers and artists come and perform for him in his bedroom at a moment’s notice. He has a nagging feeling that he ought to go outside and experience the city and its manifold surprises first-hand. Nothing is stopping him from doing so. But it feels like such an effort.
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Everyday Epic – Tom Spurgeon interviews Tom Gauld at The Comics Reporter:
I find that when I’m drawing I’m quite happy to come up with larger than life, epic things but when I write things tend to be more down to earth. The contrast between greatness and everyday reality is something which interests me.
You can find my interview with Tom here. His new book Goliath is out in March.
I Am Lousy Copywriter — A list by legendary adman David Ogilvy, author of Confessions of an Advertising Man, at Letter of Note:
If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.
My Name is Tyranny — Mike Doherty interviews William Gibson about his new book, Distrust That Particular Flavor, for Salon:
I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes – I’m often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand. Have you ever seen Brian Eno’s deck of Oblique Strategies? One of them is “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” That’s my favorite. [At a] hotel in New York a couple of days ago, the young woman who checked me in said what sounded to me like, “Thank you, sir; my name is Tyranny. If there’s anything you need …” For the rest of the day, I was thinking of young, benevolent female characters with the first name “Tyranny.”
And finally…
Tiptoeing Through a Sickroom – Luc Sante on Patti Smith for The New York Review of Books:
Her memoir Just Kids (2010), the account of her friendship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, has been justly celebrated. It is delicate and affectionate as it tells of their adventures in a New York City bohemia that now seems a century removed, of the endurance of their relationship despite his realization that he was gay, of their separate pursuits of fame, of his illness and death. It is almost too literary for its own good, since her choices of word and phrase always come down on the genteel side of the ledger: “perhaps” rather than “maybe,” “rise” rather than “stand,” “yet” rather than “but,” “one” rather than “you.” There’s hardly a contraction, outside the dialogue, in the entire book. But despite the fact that this sort of talk is patently not the way she expressed herself at the time, and that it sounds more effortful than natural on the page, it does cover the book with an appropriate hush—it sounds like someone tiptoeing through a sickroom.
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Inspired by the Wizard of Oz, Buster Keaton movies, and a whimsical love of books, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is an award-winning 15 minute animated short by William Joyce, Brandon Oldenburg and Moonbot Studios:
The film is one of five animated shorts nominated for an Oscar this year, and there is an interactive version of the story available for the iPad from the app store.
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Adrift in the World – Tim Parks on fiction and place for the NYRB Blog:
If there is a problem with the novel, and I’m agreed with [David] Shields that there is, it is not because it doesn’t participate in modern technology, can’t talk about it or isn’t involved with it; I can download in seconds on my Kindle a novel made up entirely of emails or text messages. Perhaps the problem is rather a slow weakening of our sense of being inside a society with related and competing visions of the world to which we make our own urgent narrative contributions; this being replaced by the author who takes courses to learn how to create a product with universal appeal, something that can float in the world mix, rather than feed into the immediate experience of people in his own culture.
The Degree-Zero of Typeage – The “un-Google-able” Jenny Hendrix on Tintin for LA Review of Books:
Hergé himself described Tintin as the “degree-zero of typeage — a typographic vanishing point.” The formulation suggests Samuel Beckett, and there is indeed something Beckettian about Tintin. In French, appropriately, the phrase “faire tintin” means something approximating “to go without” or “to be frustrated.” Tintin may be a reporter, motivated, like any good journalist, by the hint of a good story, but only in his very first of his 24 adventures does he actually file copy. He was born 15, and supposedly stays that way, though it is hard to imagine he’s any age at all. He has no last name, no parentage and no past, no desires and no sexual identity. Even his appearance has little to say about him: his face is just a circle, with two black dots for eyes and a black, semi-circular wedge of mouth. He could be anyone, and frequently is…
Super-Punch — The New York Times reviews ‘Printing for Kingdom, Empire & Republic: Treasures From the Archives of the Imprimerie Nationale’, an exhibition of historical steel punches, copper matrices, and typefonts at the Grolier Club in New York:
[T]hese exquisite artifacts… offer a reminder, in the ethereal era of bitmapping, that type was once the tangible province of engravers and metal casters who labored in unforgiving but enduring media. To make a C with a cedilla, for example, involved a lot more effort and thought than holding down the Option key on your Mac. A comma-shaped steel appendage had to be lashed with string to the bottom of the C punch to produce a new matrix.
“People are practically printing books with their smartphones,” Mr. Fletcher said, in a tone suggesting that he did not think this was such a good idea. “It’s much more gratifying to be able to touch something and find out it’s real, rather than a matter of bits and bytes.”
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