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Midweek Miscellany

Beautiful typographic notecards by Chicago-based designer Tom Davie.

The King of Comps — The prolific Ian Shimkoviak, one half of The Book Designers, interviewed at Caustic Cover Critic:

Every designer has their way of doing things… For me, I start with 3 sketches and as I work on those it will lead to other potential solutions and then I see something online or on a walk or in a magazine and it seems like it could work well for that project too and it just goes on and on. Things also happen unexpectedly. Something happens almost by accident and it looks interesting and somehow works.

No Layout — described as “a digital library for independent publishers, focusing on art books and fashion magazines.” (via Michael Surtees)

Warmblooded — NPR talks to independent booksellers, including Rebecca Fitting and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo of Greenlight Books in Brooklyn, about the future of bookstores:

“I kind of feel like we’re coming to end of the age of dinosaurs and there’s all these warmblooded animals running around instead,” [Fitting] says…

For her part, Bagnulo sees the chains’ woes — and the recent news that Google is entering the e-book market — as something of an opportunity.

“The potential is for there to be two trends,” she explains. “Digital content — which is ubiquitous and everywhere — and the local, boutique, curated side. And the chain stores unfortunately don’t have the advantage in either of those areas. I mean, they can’t carry every book in the world in their store, and they don’t have the same emotional connection to their neighborhood that a local store does.”

And finally…

Author Umberto Eco on WikiLeaks and how technology advances crabwise (and sounding weirdly like William Gibson) for Presse Europ:

So how can privy matters be conducted in future? Now I know that for the time being, my forecast is still science fiction and therefore fantastic, but I can’t help imagining state agents riding discreetly in stagecoaches along untrackable routes, bearing only memorised messages or, at most, the occasional document concealed in the heel of a shoe. Only a single copy thereof will be kept – in locked drawers. Ultimately, the attempted Watergate break-in was less successful than WikiLeaks.

I once had occasion to observe that technology now advances crabwise, i.e. backwards. A century after the wireless telegraph revolutionised communications, the Internet has re-established a telegraph that runs on (telephone) wires. (Analog) video cassettes enabled film buffs to peruse a movie frame by frame, by fast-forwarding and rewinding to lay bare all the secrets of the editing process, but (digital) CDs now only allow us quantum leaps from one chapter to another. High-speed trains take us from Rome to Milan in three hours, but flying there, if you include transfers to and from the airports, takes three and a half hours. So it wouldn’t be extraordinary if politics and communications technologies were to revert to the horse-drawn carriage.

One Comment

  1. Hey, thanks for the plug on my long-winded interview. Like my comp work, I seem to have a bunch of crap to say;)

    That NPR talk about indie bookshops is right on the money. There is a local bookshop here in Sellwood, Portland OR called the Looking glass http://lookingglassbook.qwestoffice.net/

    Walking in there is a very human experience compared to walking into a B&N and trying to make sense of what to do in there. Increasingly such large chains loose their personal appeal and feel like you are walking into a McDonalds to order something.

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