Midweek Miscellany

Pattern covers by Ray Fenwick for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (thx Sio).

A look inside Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World’s Great Graphic Designers by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico at Fast Company.

Link Drop — A nice list of design blogs to sink your teeth into compiled by David Airey, author of Logo Design Love.

Photographs from Kevin Cummins‘ book about Joy Division at Flavorwire.

Show Me The Money — Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants and co-founder of Wired, talks to PW:

For readers, this is the best time in history. There’s never been more selection, more media types, or quality books. There’s never been more backlist books available. This is a high point for readers. For publishers, though, it is a low point, as their businesses are in transition. But I’m very optimistic, because in my research, money follows attention. Wherever attention flows, money follows.

And finally…

Telling Stories About Superweapons — In an awesome  (if slightly sprawling clearly-has-too-much-time-on-his-hands-and-might-be-bonkers) post, Christian Thorne, associate professor of English at Williams College, discusses Godzilla, Iron Man II and weapons of mass destruction (via Coudal):

Tony Stark is the Japanese scientist of the American Empire, the inventor who will not share his invention, the engineer who withholds the newest technology of death so that only he can command it: “You can’t have the suit. … I’m not giving you the suit. … You’re not getting the suit.” What the new movie shares with Godzilla is the notion that the perfect and ethical weapon would have to be entirely singular—there would literally only be one of them—and so would not be available for manufacture: a permanent prototype, forever in beta. By investing the killer armor with artisanal qualities, as though ICBMs could be blacksmithed, they suggest that the weapon’s uniqueness could be maintained into the future, since it is the hallmark of any handcrafted object that it is in some strict sense unrepeatable. That’s a fantasy, yes, but it’s an unsettled one; unease is simply built into its scenario. The conceit of an unshareable weapon comes with a worry automatically attached, which is simply that one will become two. Arms proliferate, and then so do anxieties, in their wake.