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Midweek Miscellany, July 8th, 2009

A-TypeThe Independent has a nice look at book design and Faber & Faber’s Eighty Years of Book Cover Design by Joseph Connolly:

You could argue that the current renaissance in book design came about thanks to Penguin, always the most design-savvy of publishers. In 2004 they produced their first series of Great Ideas – small paperback editions of classic, mostly philosophical texts. They had highly tactile covers and used bold period typography to give a sense of when and where each book was coming from. The following year we got Penguin by Design, an illustrated history of 70 years of Penguin covers, and then, in 2007, Seven Hundred Penguins, a two-inch-thick collection of the best covers, shown life-size, one to a page. For seasoned haunters of second-hand bookshops, this particular item was as thrilling as a similar-sized brick of Class A drugs.

JRSM has more on the Faber book at Caustic Cover Critic.

5 Easy Pieces — Dave Daley discusses his site  Five Chapters,  which publishes a short story in 5 parts over the course of a week, with Ron Charles at the Washington Post‘s Short Stack blog:

“I write passionate notes to writers I admire. And I tell them about the site and why I think it’s a good place for them to be. Here’s an audience of story-lovers and book buyers… The short story is just ideal for our attention spans these days.”

Rogue Agent — Scott Esposito talks to Denise Oswald, the new Editorial Director Soft Skull, for The Quarterly Conversation:

Soft Skull is like a rogue agent—who wouldn’t want to work there? It’s exciting. I’ve always loved their shoot from the hip / take no prisoners attitude and the house’s commitment to embracing the outspoken and the contrarian, the marginal and the disenfranchised. Their books are thoughtful and deeply engaged on a ground level with the world we live in. Yet there’s always room for something elegant and literary or naughty and fun, which is a very satisfying balance at the end of the day because it helps one from becoming too self-serious.

Coffee and Memory — On topic close to my heart, research from the University of Florida has shown that caffeine both prevents and reverses symptoms of Alzheimers in mice, which, according to Donald Clark, just goes to show coffee is cognitively good for you:

Coffee has… long fuelled learning, whether it be through the direct stimulation of the brain, increasing attention, improving memory, preventing dementia or providing a social context for debate and work. It’s something we coffee drinkers have always instinctively known!