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Midweek Miscellany

Bespoke — Richard Weston, AKA Ace Jet 170, on the book designs for the soon-to-be-launched Bespoke Editions:

Bespoke Editions is a one-off edition press; offering beautiful custom-made classic books, printed on demand and hand-finished to order. Personalised and unique, each edition will be made using specially selected cover papers and finishes… The editions will be in a Demy format and the page layouts will be based on the Van de Graaf Canon. After a set of tests, we’ve settled on the beautiful Hoefler Text for the typesetting and each title page will feature a carefully chosen typographic ornament that has some relevance to the particular book.

All Programs Considered — Bill McKibben on the new public radio for The New York Review of Books (via the always astute Edward Nawotka at Publishing Perspectives):

[I]n one sense this is the perfect moment to be a young radiohead. It’s like 1960s and 1970s cinema, with auteurs rewriting the rules. New technology lets you make radio programs cheaply: Pro Tools sound-editing software has now replaced much of the equipment used in big, expensive studios. Listening is even cheaper: the iTunes store has thousands of podcasts… available for free download in a matter of seconds. “It’s a transformative and exciting moment, a huge revolution,” says Sue Schardt, executive director of the Association of Independents in Radio.

But there’s one problem, and that’s the economics of this new world. Radio is now cheap to make, true, but the people who make it still need to live. And it’s very hard to get paid anything at all…

Sounds awfully familiar…

The beautiful Ligature Loop and Stem poster at For Print Only:

Aside from being a purely creative outlet devoid of typical restrictions… one of the goals for anything produced under the Ligature, Loop & Stem moniker is that it educates as well as inspires. This piece scratched an itch for us in wanting to have a quick reference for letterform characteristics — in essence, so we can all speak the same language when talking about type.

A Pointy Tool — David Carr  talks to the founders of The Awl for The New York Times (via Kottke):

“My friends keep talking to me about how they want to start a Web site, but they need to get some backing, and I look at them and ask them what they are waiting for,” Mr. Sicha said. “All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing. Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

And finally…

Tintin Gets Scalped — An annotated page from Charles Burn’s new graphic novel X’ed Out at New York Magazine (via Bookslut):

Nitnit’s name—and shock of hair—betray his origins. “Golden Books put out six of the Tintin books in English. This was before I could read, but I was looking at them very carefully. The books’ endpapers were filled with images from other Tintin stories that hadn’t been translated. I studied these endlessly. There was a little sentence on the back of each book that said, ‘Look for future titles.’ I kept looking but they never came.”