Books, Design and Culture
Andersen M Studio, the team behind the amazing stop-frame animation book trailer Going West, have produced another stunning short film using intricate paper cut-outs for Kate Morton‘s new novel The Distant Hours (to be published by Pan Macmillan):
(via Creative Review)
5 CommentsThere’s a great op-ed by Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber & Faber, in today’s Guardian about the iPad and publishing:
It’s clear that publishers must move faster to establish our compelling and useful role in the modern life of reading. While acquiring new expertise, we must assert the best of our traditional strengths; providing capital (in the form of advance payments), offering editorial expertise, and creating a readership by designing, creating, storing, promoting and selling the works of writers. But that’s not enough. Publishers also have to explain what value they are bringing to the relationship between writers and readers, a conversation that is made far more transparent through digital media and digital texts.
Page goes on to list what he sees as guiding principles for publishing going forward. These include retaining print and digital rights, reviewing royalties, flexible pricing, connecting to readers, and excellent metadata. He concludes:
The iPad launch is not the moment, but that’s because the moment has passed. We need to work with authors in new ways, and keep pace with reading’s evolution, or better still become agents of change ourselves.
It’s a must-read. If you work in publishing, send it to your CEO.
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The charming illustrated cover for John Waters’ new memoir Role-Models by Eric Hanson, who also happens to be the author of A Book of Ages. Art direction on Role-Models by Susan Mitchell at FSG I believe.
And while we’re on the subject of nice book covers…
Isaac Tobin, senior designer at University of Chicago Press, talks to FaceOut Books about his witty cover for Adrian John’s Piracy. You can read my interview with Isaac here.
On the Dohle — PW takes a (slightly fluffy) look at Marcus Dohle’s first two years at the helm of Random House.
Allen Lane to Amazon — A nice audio slide-show history of British publishing in the 20th century at The Guardian.
And speaking of Allen Lane…
Puffin by Design: 70 Years of Imagination (1940 – 2010) seen at The Penguin Blog.
And Simon Houpt on Penguin’s 75th anniversary and their iconic brand in today’s The Globe & Mail:
Until a couple of days ago, Keir Hardie had no idea how many Penguin books he owned. For years he’d been collecting them informally, picking up a few at a time at second-hand shops. “Like a lot of fans, I grew up in a house with Penguin Books on the shelves,” he wrote in an e-mail this week, from his home in Inverness, Scotland. It was the books’ iconic design, he explained, that first grabbed his eye. “There was never much of a pattern to anything else, but the uniformity of the Penguins made them stand out.”
Indeed.
Comments closedCaustic Soda — James Morrison AKA Caustic Cover Critic talks about five great covers (and a few terrible ones) at Flavorwire. The great ones include Charlotte Strick‘s design for 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. Charlotte talked about this cover and boxed set with FaceOut Books a while back.
The Case of Abundance — The formidable Clay Shirky interviewed at Publishing Perspectives:
We are already in a world where most books are incomprehensible to most people –- whether that be content comprehension or the question “why would anyone publish that?” — but we don’t notice that anymore.
What has happened with the web is that there is so much content that we have broken all the old filters. And for now, we are experiencing it as the completely overburdened and chaotic environment that it is. But that doesn’t mean people should stop publishing online. It just means that we need better filters. Because in fact, the over-publishing of content has been a normal problem since the invention of the printing press. It’s just that we had ways of ignoring things we didn’t care about. The problem isn’t getting people to shut up, the problem is creating filters to help people find their way to things they want.
And finally…
I’m probably the last person on the interwebs to discover Erik Heywood’s blog on books, bookshelves, bookstores, and libraries (etc.), but it really is quite lovely (via The Silver Lining).
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Fantagraphics Art Director Jacob Covey‘s first foray into designing for prose fiction is this cover for a 600-page collection of short stories by Stephen Dixon, What Is All This?
Incidently, Jacob also did a nice job colouring Gilbert Hernandez‘s cover art for Kristen Hersh‘s new memoir, Rat Girl. The design is by Jaya Miceli at Penguin Books:
You can read my interview with Mr. Covey here.
A fittingly Alvin Lustig-like cover for New Directions by Rodrigo Corral, seen at Book Covers Anonymous.
An Open Book-Publishing Platform — Book Oven’s Hugh McGuire on WordPress as a book publishing platform. It’s an intriguing idea even if don’t accept Hugh’s belief that books and the web will be indistinguishable in a matter of years. And, to judge by the comments, it something a lot of people have been working on.
Afterlife — With the US publication of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, Charles McGrath looks at Steig Larsson, the late author of the Millennium series, and his unhappy legacy in the New York Times. Sarah Weinman has more on Larsson and the new book (of course)…
Enticement and Exegesis — Knopf designer Peter Mendelsund (who, incidentally, designed the covers for US editions of the Millennium books) on author David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, and book cover design:
Book jacket design should concern itself with, in my estimation, equal parts enticement (“Come buy this book”) and exegesis (“This is what this book is about, more or less.”) A good cover doesn’t let one category trump the other. A good cover should not resort to cliché in order to accomplish either. But the real key here, in both categories (enticement and exegesis) is the designer’s ability to work the sweet-spot between giving-away-the-farm, and deliberate obfuscation.
Book jackets that tell you too much, suck. Book jackets that try to change the subject also suck, and are furthermore, too easy.
My interview with Peter about Tom McCarthy’s book “C” is here.
And finally…
It’s a Book, Jackass! — a cute video featuring a tech-loving donkey and a book loving ape for It’s a Book! by Lane Smith, published by Macmillan (via Chronicle Books):
Comments closedPenguin Press Art Director and designer Jim Stoddart talks about his design for the (Penguin Classics)RED edition of Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola:
Penguin designers Coralie Bickford-Smith and Stefanie Posavec also talk about their designs for series.
There’s more information about the videos and the (Penguin Classics)RED editions on the Penguin Blog and you can see all the covers of all 8 books on Flickr.
You can read my interview with the talented Ms. Bickford-Smith here.
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90 Covers — David McCandless talks about the protracted cover design process for his new book Information is Beautiful (via This Isn’t Happiness):
Engage — Online literary magazine and short fiction hub Joyland — founded by authors Brian Joseph Davis and Emily Schultz — is launching an e-book imprint.
Graphic Novels for Booksellers — A core list compiled by Graphic Novel Reporter.
And if that’s not nerdcore enough for you, take a look at The Periodic Table Of Super-Powers. “Orphan” is atomic number 1.
Absurdity and Tragedy — Author Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick and his own novel Chronic City at 21C Magazine (via Maud Newton):
I’ve always agreed with the view that – with science fiction – its predictive powers were the least important or least relevant aspect of its public profile. I always loved stuff like Orwell’s 1984, where he explicitly said “It’s 1948, reversed.” I liked writers that were doing allegorical, satirical, fantastical versions of everyday life.
That suggests that Dick’s work is dated to the ’60s and ’70s. And I thought of him very much in this framework, and not as an extrapolative writer… But I think that Dick saw the makings of the contemporary reality we experience so profoundly.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I wanted to like Chronic City more than I did. Dan Green has a comprehensive critique of the book (and Lethem’s post-modernism) at his blog The Reading Experience. Dan is, perhaps, less forgiving than I would be, but definitely smarter…
[W]hile Lethem’s work is consistent with much postmodern fiction in that it is essentially comic, the comedy of a novel like Chronic City is indeed much too gentle, too shy of the more corrosive humor of much postmodern comedy. It isn’t so much that the novel is short on “satiric bite” as that ultimately it is merely satire, a relatively mild critique of post-9/11 New York under Bloomberg, which has become inhospitable to its misfits and nonconformists.
Lethem reads from Chronic City and discusses the book in this video interview with The Guardian.
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David Drummond’s Parker Series for University of Chicago Press.
“a little bit Warhol, a little bit Factory Records” — Christian Schwartz explains why he started type foundry Commercial Type at I Love Typography:
It’s much easier to be an “armchair quarterback,” second-guessing everyone else’s seemingly questionable decisions regarding everything… than it is to deal with the actual reality of budgets, technology, and timelines. Theorizing about how and why things work is all well and good, but putting our ideas into practice is of course the real test…
Typography and Judaica — Steven Heller interviews book designer and typographer Scott-Martin Kosofsky. Fascinating stuff:
It’s the best of times and the worst of times, but I have a feeling that people have always said that… In regard to print, I think we’re at a great moment, with access to mature technology and aesthetics… There’s no excuse for anything looking less than great. But books (and print in general) have lost their pride of place. Book publishers, a group nearly always behind the curve, have failed to grasp that their online counterparts spend a lot of time and money concentrating on User Experience, while they remain unfamiliar with the concept. It wasn’t always that way, but when the professionalism and discipline that was demanded by metal type fell away, things got worse and worse, especially typographically.
Punk — An interview with Jaime Hernandez about Love and Rockets and the recently published The Art of Jaime Hernandez at NYC Graphic:
“That’s how Love and Rockets started: we were just cocky and didn’t know we could fail. We went ahead and published the first one ourselves and didn’t care what the outcome would be, we just wanted to be printed. Hopefully we could sell it and make money, but there was no one to tell us not to. That was the punk part of it. The more we got good response, the more we kept doing it.”
And finally…
The Pollak Coffee Table Book seen at UnderConsideration’s FPO. Breathtakingly beautiful.
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