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Monday Miscellany, March 23rd, 2009

The Story Artist — Stand back and admire Cristiana Couceira’s cover for the New York Times Book Review (pictured above) illustrating Colm Toibin’s review of Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy Daugherty (St. Martin’s Press).  You can see more of Cristiana’s fabulous work at her blog Sete Dias.

ma collection de boîtes de conserves — Cartoonist Guy Delisle, author of Shenzhen, Pyongyang, and Burma Chronicles, displays his charming recycled pen-holders. Guy also has some great sketches of Jerusalem on his blog (an experience that is probably even better if your French is not rubbish like mine). (Via the D+Q blog and full disclosure etc: Raincoast Books distribute D+Q in Canada).

And speaking of D+Q,  John Wray’s much-praised novel Lowboy features a cover  by the very talented Adrian Tomine (pictured above). And über-critic James Wood reviews Lowboy in the latest New Yorker.

Paper Egg — Tobias Carroll has posted an interesting interview with Jonathan Messinger, co-publisher at  Featherproof Books:

[T]he line we’ve been delivering for a while now is that printed books will, eventually, go the way of vinyl. At some point, digital distribution will be the predominant method, but there will still be those who value and collect print, as people do records now (a fact that, it seems, has created a strong niche market for cool vinyl releases). But I’m not so sure that I completely buy that analogy, as fun as it is to repeat. Really, the debate seems pointless to me. What it always devolves to is one person clinging to what they’ve grown up with and accustomed to—the printed book, this classic, vaunted, untouchable commodity—and self-appointed visionaries who see digital distro as the obvious wave of the future, plowing down the fogies and fuddy-duddies.

If we de-politicize it, it becomes a much more open, interesting discussion. My feeling is that both media offer something that the other doesn’t. So why should one replace the other? … I’d rather just think about how best to use print creatively—what can it do that nothing else can, what are its limits and how do we test them?

Information revolution, c. 1455 — Murray Whyte looks at the “Gutenberg moment” in the Toronto Star:

as we appear finally to face the end, or partial end, of the Gutenberg era … it’s worth noting that sometimes, those things we view in hindsight as revolution are, in their own time, little more than a pebble in the pond, the resulting ripples needing generations, if not centuries, to be fully felt.