Skip to content

Monday Miscellany, March 16th, 2009

Beyond Miffy —  Caustic Cover Critic on Dutch illustrator and graphic designer Dick Bruna, best known for Miffy, but who also designed some very cool book covers for crime novels (picture above).

Cautiously Hopeful — Literary agent Nathan Bransford, who has been talking about remaining positive in the face of negativity on his own blog recently,  interviewed by Alan Rinzler on The Book Deal blog:

The role of publishers especially is going to change dramatically as there will be tremendous downward pressure on prices and publishers increasingly retrench behind “known” commodities and bestsellers.

Publishers will live and die by their big bets if they aren’t cultivating any small bets that have the potential of panning out in a big way.

6 Projects That Could Change Publishing for the Better — Michael Tamblyn’s  presentation from the BNC Tech Forum is available online.

Open Baskerville — An open source project to create a digital version of Fry’s Baskerville,  originally created by  Isaac Moore a punchcutter at the typefoundry of Joseph Fry in the 18th Century (via Eightface):

With the written word an absolute fundamental component of daily communication, typography and fonts have are vital to providing aesthetic harmony and legibility to our textual works. There are thousands of fonts available, of which only a small number are useful or any good for setting vast quantities of text, and of which an even smaller number are available to be freely distributed and shared. This project aims to help close that hole, beginning with a Baskerville revival.

Optic Nerve — the fabulous Adrian Tomine interviewed at the Creative Review (illustration above).

Why Kindle On The iPhone Matters — Michael Gaudet on the iPhone Kindle app at E-Reads:

What Amazon is finally acknowledging is that E-Books are a multi-device service and that Kindle is not just a device but an E-Book platform. E-Books may be commodities, but reading is a user habit that has always required a distribution service that anticipates the creative ways readers are looking to acquire new content.

Books and Stuff — Illustrator and designer Amy Cartwright, who blogs about vintage kids books and modern design at Stickers and Stuff, shares some wonderful pictures of her favorite books and “the stories behind some of her finds” at the always awesome Grain Edit (including the Cosy Tomato Post Card Book pictured above).