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Tag: alan moore

Published December 8, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Curate, Curate, Curate — An interview with James Daunt, the new managing director of Waterstone’s, in The Independent:

“You have to let the booksellers decide how to curate their own stock,” he says. “The skill of a good bookseller is how you juxtapose your titles, and create interesting displays, and reflect what your community wants… The computer screen is a terrible environment in which to select books. All that ‘If you read this, you’ll like that’ – it’s a dismal way to recommend books. A physical bookshop in which you browse, see, hold, touch and feel books is the environment you want.”

An epic three–part interview with the ever-quotable Alan Moore at Honest Publishing:

[T]he people actually producing technology, such as Kindle and iPad, these are always the people who are telling us that we have to have these things. And being the type of creatures that we are, a fair number of us will naturally fall into that, will perhaps assume that as a status symbol it’s much better to be seen reading a Kindle than a dog-eared paperback. Although I will note that the last two or three times I’ve taken train journeys, everybody around me was sitting round reading a dog-eared paperback. I tend to think that for most people the idea of the book, with its easy portability, where you can turn the corner of a page down, where you are basically working with ordinary, reflected light rather than screen radiance, I think that the book will end up as the reading method of choice.

See also: A full, unabridged version of Laura Sneddon’s interview with Moore for The Independent.

And on the subject of authors with beards…

Neal Stephenson, author most recently of REAMDE, talks to The New York Times about the future:

What I’m kind of hoping is that this is just kind of a pause, while we assimilate this gigantic new thing, ubiquitous computing and the Internet. And that at some point we’ll turn around and say, ‘Well, that was interesting — we have a whole set of new tools and capabilities that we didn’t have before the whole computer/Internet thing came along…Now let’s get back to work doing interesting and useful things.’

And finally…

Terry Gilliam talks movies with the LA Times:

“The thing is, some really good scripts come my way, but there’s nothing in them for me to come to grips with, they are complete in themselves,” Gilliam said. “There’s no uncertainty. I don’t look for answers; I look for questions. I like when people leave the cinema and feel like the world has been altered for them somewhat. On ‘Brazil,’ I know a woman who said she saw the film, went home and later that night she just started weeping. I also heard about an attorney who saw the film and then locked himself in his office for three days. Fantastic.”

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Published November 30, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

And The Moral Is Don’t Fuck William Faulkner… A really great post by Glen David Gold, author of Sunnyside and Carter Beats the Devil, at the LA Review Books:

The world after publication is — beyond its many joys — an evaporating and ruinous goldfish bowl of thwarted ambition. If you write long enough, you will know editors and agents. You will have dinner with people who give interesting fellowships to weeklong retreats in the south of France. You will teach at good programs and you might know when a publisher’s child is having a birthday and what his favorite Transformer is, and these facts more than the quality of your humanity might be what makes you a chess piece when another writer slaps you on the back and asks you if you might read something he wrote.

Very Long, Very Tricky, Very Strange — Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker on the appeal of Tolkien and fantasy novels:

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist, fights that never happened, all set against the sort of medieval background that Mark Twain thought he had discredited with “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

Against Bigness — Mark Edmundson on the movies of Robert Altman and Woody Allen at The American Scholar:

Altman was against bigness. He always wanted to turn the carpet over. He wanted you to see the signs of strain and stress that went into the making of what looked like a serene, well-balanced thing. But he didn’t want to debunk the whole construction; he simply wanted to marvel at the quirky congestion of threads. It was probably tough for the players who acted prominently in his movies to redeem their Hollywood standing. He turned stars into hand-held sparklers. He waved them around. But he did it without resentment, without meanness: he simply liked them better that way.

Meanwhile in the comics corner…

Alan Moore talks to Fast Company about  a Kickstarter project to build a memorial to the late Harvey Pekar in Cleveland Heights public library, and to The Guardian about the Occupy Movement wearing V for Vendetta masks at protests.

And at The Daily Telegraph, Kasia Boddy reviews MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman:

The effect of this great assemblage is complicated. On the one hand, it consolidates Maus’s status as a canonical work, about which we need to know everything, and emphasises its claim to historical testimony (Spiegelman complained to The New York Times when Maus was included on the fiction bestseller list.) On the other hand, however, the almost overwhelming presence of all this stuff emphasises that history is far from a straightforward retrieval of “facts”, but rather involves a complex process of accumulation, sifting and construction.

And finally…

Martin Filler reviews the documentary Eames: The Architect and the Painter for NYRB:

The last time I saw Ray Eames, a few months before her death, I mentioned the high prices that the couple’s original furniture was fetching in New York galleries. “Oh, no,” she cried, and held her hands to her ears in genuine dismay. “We wanted our things be available to everyone, not just rich people.” Yet although the Eameses’ molded plywood LCW chair of 1946 at first retailed for $20.95, their rosewood-and-leather lounge and ottoman of 1956 cost a not-inconsiderable $578 when first introduced, and now, still in production by Herman Miller, sells for $4,499. This luxurious seating became a familiar component of upscale psychiatrists’ consultation rooms, as much an emblem of mid-century professional attainment as pairs of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’e chrome-and-leather Barcelona chairs were in the reception areas of Fortune 500 companies.

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Published October 12, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Art or Death — Art Spiegelman on books, comics and technology at Publishers Weekly:

I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that’s going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you’re better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update. If you’re going to read a quick mystery novel to keep you amused while you’re traveling, it’s fine.
None of this is about the business model. It has to do with the boutique nature of a book, the idea that, as McLuhan put it, when a technology is replaced by another technology, the previous technology either becomes art or it dies.

See also: Jeet Heer reviews MetaMaus for the Globe and Mail:

One way to explain the achievement of MetaMaus is to imagine a great architect like Frank Gehry offering a guided tour to one of his classic buildings, opening up the original plans, explaining the solutions he came up with for each problem. Such an act of self-exegesis is immensely rewarding, even if the creator’s genius is as enigmatic as ever.

And, on the subject of comics… A short interview with Alan Moore in Metro:

At the moment I feel an awful lot of my comic career is behind me, particularly all of the superhero stuff – the stuff that’s owned by American corporations. I want to distance myself from that, so the stuff I’m proudest of is what I own: From Hell, Lost Girls, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I don’t read my earlier work because there are too many unpleasant associations with it. I don’t have a copy of Watchmen in the house. I’m glad the work is out there in the world, having an effect, but it’s like I’ve gone through a messy divorce.

Immersion — Author Neal Stephenson talks about writing and his new novel REAMDE at Full Stop:

I would say that people who like to engage with the details of the historical era or the technical concepts might find [my] books especially rewarding to read. For me it’s a pretty straightforward thing—you know, what readers are paying for, what they’re buying and what I’m selling is a particular kind of experience: essentially one of getting immersed in another world. And it could be a very different world (as in a science fiction book), it could be the history of our world, or it could just be a story that takes place today, like Reamde. And a way to do that — a way to create that feeling of immersion and get the reader feeling like they’re really there — is to supply a lot of details that convey a feeling of immediacy.

See also: REAMDE reviewed by Laura Miller for The Guardian.

And finally…

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit talks about his latest design documentary, Urbanized, with Print Magazine:

I love all the interviews in all the films, that’s why they are in the film. But there are definitely some that people respond to when they watch the film. Most of all Enrique Peñalosa, who is the former mayor of Bogota. He’s got some great lines in the film, like “There’s no constitutional right to parking.” He’s really charismatic and has some really common sense ideas about using the city as a tool to create equality, democracy and social equity. I also got to interview Oscar Niemeyer, the legendary Brazilian modernist architect. He’s about to turn 104 and is the oldest living architect in the world. He’s got his grandchildren working in his office. That was a big honor for sure.

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Published September 7, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Book designer and all-round good chap David Pearson on phillumeny at We Made This:

It’s no coincidence that a book designer should be drawn to matchbox labels. Their shape is intrinsically book-like, their method of communication instantaneous and spare, and they provide a dizzying range of illustrative styles. Their uncluttered compositions ensure communication across language barriers, and designs appear cohesive as a result of type and image being rendered by the same hand. But perhaps most alluring of all is their uncompromised clarity of purpose, an attribute that most modern designers can only dream about.

You can see more of David’s ephemera collection on Flickr, there’s another amazing collection of match-box covers here.

An Invisible Rightness — Six graphic designers, including Derek Birdsall and Peter Saville, discuss designers they admire in The Guardian.

A Repurposeful Life — Author William Gibson on cities and fiction in The Scientific American:

Necessity being one of invention’s many mothers, I have a certain faith in our ability to repurpose almost anything, provided it becomes sufficiently necessary. Then again, I suspect we’ve abandoned cities in the past because they were too thoroughly built to do some specific something that’s no longer required.

Let Us Tweet! — An epic-length rant by Jared Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget, at Edge:

I’m astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online… What that leads to is the world that Wells and Kurt Vonnegut and many others wrote about, where there just is enough virtual bread and circuses, just barely enough to keep the poor in check, and perhaps somehow not breeding, and they just kind of either wither away through attrition or something.

The A.V. Club offer a nice primer on newspaper comics.

Meanwhile… Robot 6 lists six great superhero comics from unlikely sources.

And finally…

An Act of Vengeance Against Former Pleasures — The Comics Journal reviews The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969, neatly summing up my own reservations about the direction of the series:

What’s disconcerting about 1969 is how joyless the exercise has become, and how wan and stretched the story feels. Like its predecessor…, 1969 comes off as glum and a bit rancid. It feels like the story of characters who have outlived their time, which may indeed be the point… I don’t need to itemize the various bits of cleverness in 1969, or to point out the screamingly obvious, that 1969 is more intelligent and insinuating than most comic books. It is, after all, a book by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. But the taste of it sits like battery acid on the tongue, and, like 1910 before it, it reads like an act of vengeance against former pleasures.

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Published July 27, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Kelly Thompson chooses her favourite 52 comic book covers from the past year on her blog 1979 Semifinalist. The cover above is by Dave Johnson for Unknown Soldier #22. Other personal favourites of mine on the list include the very retro Deadpool Pulp #4 by Jae Lee, and Hellboy: The Fury # 1 by Mike Mignola (you just can’t go wrong with a big axe really…)

And if you don’t read Kelly’s regular three sentence or less drunken demolitions of Marvel and DC covers you really are missing out. “Motherfucking gangbusters.”

Comics Dwindling Gene Pool — Alan Moore talks about the latest instalment of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Century: 1969, and more with The Guardian:

These days, the majority of the comic book audience is 40-somethings who are not necessarily interested in comic books as a medium or panel progression or sequential narrative. They are probably interested in Wolverine. There is a large nostalgic component in there and there’s nothing wrong with it. But if those people then begin to influence the books themselves or increasingly the movies or the television series then they will want their story to refer to stories that they remember. It becomes very incestuous and over a few decades you get a very limited dwindling gene pool. And you get stories that have become weak through inbreeding.

And sticking with comics for a moment… Eric Reynolds talks about comics and Fantagraphics’ Mome Anthology in a four-part interview The Daily Cross Hatch:

Putting comics online is definitely of interest to myself and all of us at Fantagraphics, for sure. We know that that’s only going to continue to grow. It has certain advantages and disadvantages. But I don’t know if I necessarily want to edit an online anthology, per se. I don’t know why… I know if it’s just that I enjoy the tactile pleasures of print, or what, but—and this is my own personal preference—it doesn’t seem to quite exist when it’s on the Internet, which is quite paradoxical. The Internet has the potential to reach a lot more people that print, in this day and age, and yet, you don’t have that physical object to hold as proof that you did what you did.

Meanwhile, if you are looking for some ‘serious’ books for your vacation, the indefatigable Largehearted Boy is doggedly aggregating online summer reading lists for the year.

While at Slate Robert Pinsky explains  how not to write a book review (whether you’ve read the book in question or not).

And finally (in the likely instance you haven’t seen these yet)…

Cardon Webb’s clever designs for a new series of Oliver Sacks paperbacks from Vintage (via John Gall).

 

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Published July 15, 2011

Something From the Weekend

Paint It Black — Alan Moore talks to Pádraig Ó Méalóid about the latest instalment of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Century: 1969 (available next month) for the Forbidden Planet blog:

What we’ve got in 1969, in keeping with the League’s usual practice, is that we’ve got a world entirely composed of references to the culture of that period, or around that period. So we’re taking bits from various films, television series, books, comics, any culture of that time we’re working into the fabric of our story… I hope that people will have as much fun digging out the various references as we had putting them in there…

See also: Pádraig Ó Méalóid’s recent interview with Alan Moore for 3AM Magazine.

Gonzo Graphic Novels — Six leading cartoonists discuss their own favourite cartoonists for The Guardian. Here’s political cartoonist Martin Rowson on Joe Sacco:

Although Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a work of incredible importance, I think it gave the entire genre a bum steer. It then got into this terrible kind of introspective, personal, adolescent angstiness. All this “you have to be serious about this because it’s a serious art form”: well, it is and it isn’t. Therefore, discovering Joe Sacco was a liberation. Here is somebody who is using the medium as journalism and reportage. It’s taking the best bits of the underground comics of the 60s – the radicalism – with the personal immersion you got with Spiegelman. It’s an extraordinarily powerful way of telling a story – a true one in this case. The fact that he places himself in the heart of it makes it gonzo journalism turned into a graphic novel, although it’s not really a graphic novel, it’s a sort of visual journalism.

Also in The Guardian… Lee Rourke, author of The Canal, on The Book Barge, a bookstore in a travelling canal barge:

It is the brainchild of Sarah Henshaw. “By setting up on a canal boat,” she explained, “we hope to promote a less hurried and harried lifestyle of idle pleasures, cups of tea, conversation, culture and, of course, curling up with an incomparably good Book Barge purchase.” I was immediately sold. But why a canal boat? “I hoped that by creating a unique retail space, customers would realise how independent bookshops can offer a far more pleasurable shopping experience than they’re likely to find online or on the discount shelves at supermarkets.”

Wonderful.

And finally…

Recording the Disjunction — Errol Morris talks to the A.V. Club about truth, self-deception, and his new documentary Tabloid:

People sort of imagine that they go to a documentary—and this is also true [when] you read an article, a work of journalism—that they’re [experiencing] a work of non-fiction. We know that what we’re reading is not the absolute truth. If we’re reading a first-person account, we know that each and every one of us, myself included, have a great desire to be seen in a certain way, or to be perceived in a certain way. It’s unavoidable. What a movie can do—and this is what really does interest me, it’s at the heart of documentary—is not so much delivering the so-called truth. Yes, pursuing the truth, trying to investigate what really happened, trying to uncover some underlying reality, but recording that disjunction, that distance between how people see the world and the way the world might really be—that’s at the heart of the enterprise.

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Published June 17, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Simplicity and Economy — Mike Dempsey profiles Keith Cunningham, who designed book covers for Peter Owen, for the Foyles bookshop blog:

A tight discipline can galvanise a creative designer’s mind and Cunningham rose to the occasion with his very first cover for Peter Owen.

This sparse graphic approach was to become the visual hallmark of Peter Owen covers in the 60s and 70s. Over a relatively short period Cunningham quickly created a highly individual ‘brand’ (before the term was used) via the houses jackets distinguished by their utter simplicity and economy.

There is a much longer profile of Cunningham on Dempsey’s own (and excellent) blog Graphic Journey.

Movement and Sound — Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, offers advice on how to film comics:

Animation and comics are false siblings. They resemble one another but they’re two completely different things. The relationship a reader has with a comic is nothing like the one a viewer has with a film. When you read a comic, you’re always active, because you have to imagine all the movements that happen between the frames. In a film, you are passive: all the information is there. And when you make a comic it never happens that you have 500 or 1,000 people reading it in the same place at the same time, all reacting. The language of cinema and comics is different, even though they both use images. In comics, you write with images; they’re like pictograms. And in a movie you think about movement and sound and music, all those things that are not considerations when making comics.

Cutting to the Chase — Alan Moore discusses his new novel Jerusalem with Helen Lewis Hasteley of The New Statesman:

[W]hile his first prose novel, Voice of the Fire (published in the mid-1990s), took 300 pages to cover the county of Northamptonshire, Jerusalem uses 750,000 words to explore an area of Northampton about half a square mile across. “So the next one will be several million words and it’ll just be about this end of the living room.”

Moore says he hopes never to write anything as long as Jerusalem again but he won’t countenance scaling it back. “Any editor worth their salt would tell me to cut two-thirds of this book but that’s not going to happen. I doubt that Herman Melville had an editor — if he had, that editor would have told him to get rid of all that boring stuff about whaling: ‘Cut to the chase, Herman.'”

And finally…

Manual Labour — Peter Foge profiles philosopher Simone Weil, who work for a time in a steel plant and died of self-induced starvation in wartime London, for Lapham’s Quarterly:

Part philosopher, part activist, part mystic, Weil is almost impossible to classify. A youthful Marxist who abandoned the faith in favor of liberal pluralism. A lover of all things ancient Greek who equated the Roman Empire with Nazi Germany and Hitler with Caesa, she was a mass of contradictions. Yet her reputation has grown over time as one of the most original and uncomfortable thinkers of the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot, a great admirer, considered her “a woman of genius, a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” “A genius,” added one of her many anthologists, “of immense revolutionary range.”

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Published July 16, 2010

Something for the Weekend

The Trouble With Amazon — Colin Robinson, co-publisher at OR Books (so perhaps not entirely neutral), on the internet retailer for The Nation:

The accumulated effect of Amazon’s pricing policy, its massive volume and its metric-based recommendations system is, in fact, to diminish real choice for the consumer. Though the overall number of titles published each year has risen sharply, the under-resourcing of mid-list books is producing a pattern that joins an enormously attenuated tail (a tiny number of customers buying from a huge range of titles) to a Brobdingnagian head (an increasing number of purchasers buying the same few lead titles), with less and less in between.

And, on a not unrelated note…

What’s Wrong With Music Business — A fascinating  interview with Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records, at Wired. I’m usually really skeptical about comparisons between the music industry and book publishing, but there’s lots of good stuff here for book folks:

[T]he premise of technology being the great democratizer and allowing more artists to break through than before — actually, we’ve seen the opposite effect. Fewer artists are breaking than ever before, and fewer artists who are doing it themselves are breaking through than ever before. Back in the early ’80s, when the cellphone was first invented, there were more artists breaking on their own, with no technology, than they are now, with technology. Why is that the case? And what can change to open the gates again, to allow artists to break through, whether on their own or with help?… [S]ocial networks have been a really big disappointment in terms of moving the needle in either exposure or sales in any meaningful way. There are a lot of myths in technology that everybody wants to believe, because everybody wants things to get better.

The Little Coincidence That Haunt Your Life — An interview with Alan Moore, author of From Hell, V for Vendetta, Watchmen et al,  at The Quietus:

One of the academics at this conference was saying that he was working on a book which was about Watchmen as a post-9/11 text. I can see what he means to a degree. One of my friends over there… said he’d been talking to some people on Ground Zero on September 12, 2001 and he was asking them if they were alright and what it had been like. Two of them, independently of each other, said that they were just waiting for the authorities to find a giant alien sticking half way out of a wall…

…There was that atmosphere of a cataclysmic event happening in New York, which I don’t think had been depicted previously… even in science fiction terms it was perhaps unimaginable! Yes, you do find that a lot of odd, little coincidences like that haunt your life.

Double Take — Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and C, discusses Hitchcock, his preoccupation with doubles and the exact meaning of “MacGuffin”, with BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme (via Lee Rourke).

And finally…

Blogs are dying says The Economist. Oh no they’re not, says Cory Doctorow in The Guardian.

The real question, however, is whether Publishers Weekly starting their own blog, PWxyz, is evidence for the prosecution or the defense… (Sorry, that’s a little mean-spirited. It’s great PW have started a blog even if it feels a somewhat belated)…

Have a great weekend.

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Published November 6, 2009

Something for the Weekend, November 6th, 2009

Wild Woodbines — The Creative Review profiles illustrator Tony Meeuwissen who designed the brilliant cover — based on a pack of cigarettes — for Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar pictured above (NB: David the Designer has more on this wonderful cover if you’re interested).

There is an exhibition, Tony Meeuwissen: 50 Years in Illustration and Graphic Art at the Subscriptions Rooms, George Street, Stroud (UK) from December 5th – 19th if you’re in the neighbourhood.

The Wonderful Wizards of Lodz — Vintage Polish kid’s books at A Journey Round My Skull.

In Praise of Chapbooks — Bryce Milligan, publisher/editor of Wings Press, at Publishing Perspectives:

I do not think that the average reader—no matter how happy he or she is with their voluminous digital libraries on their diminutive screens—will be satisfied to never have access to a true literary artifact, something tangible that connects them to a favorite author. It makes perfect sense that larger printed works violate both our economic and our evolving green sensibilities, but small artifacts of the author may remain a necessity, if only a psychological one.

He’s Just Like Me But >choke< EVIL! — Comics Alliance list their favorite comic book clichés.

Can you put more balloons in your stories? — Hark! A Vagrant: comics by K. Beaton (thx Sio):

And also in comics news… 70 Things You Didn’t Know About Marvel in The Times (via largehearted boy‘s Twitter).

Public Gothic — Having already ‘fessed up to slab-serif obsession earlier this week, I might as well tell you that I’m also slightly obsessed with vintage ephemera — especially luggage tags — so I’m very intrigued by this new typeface from Antrepo even though I’ve no idea how I’d use it or been able to download it!

And speaking of typography, ephemera, and luggage tags, take a look at Alistair Hall’s (We Made This) Flickr Set while you’re at it:

And finally…

Barack Obama Names Alan Moore Official White House Biographer:

“As evidenced by his epic run on Swamp Thing #21–64, Moore’s deft hand with both sociopolitical commentary and metaphysical violence makes him an ideal choice to chronicle my time in office”

Oh come on…. It would be awesome.

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Published May 25, 2009

Monday Miscellany, May 25th, 2009

Health Insurance and Shostakovich — Caustic Cover Critic interviews über-book designer Peter Mendelsund:

Book jackets, mind you — which are already needless, redundant, frivolous items in life’s already cluttered inventory — themselves need designing. This arcane little tidbit came as something of a shock to me. “Someone gets paid for that?”

The Ampersand — a blog about ampersands. Really.

Hard Decisions — the National Post interview Andrew Steeves, co-founder and co-publisher of Gaspereau Press, about their recently announced cutbacks:

I think it’s important to stress that I don’t think this is directly related to the more general economic downturn. Honestly, when you start a business from scratch you gradually try and figure out what size works for what you’re doing. I mean, you go through so many years where there isn’t a normal; the year previous can tell you nothing about what to expect.

And more good stuff from the National Post — In this month’s installment of their Ecology of Books series, Mark Medley talks to Evan Munday of Coach House Books, and looks at the thankless task of being a book publicist.

The Wankers Shelf — Nicholas Royle on the ethical dilemma presented by authors who are wankers (via 3:Am Magazine):

Do you have a Wankers shelf? I do. It’s for books by Wankers. Books that are so bad – or books by authors who are Wankers, whose books might actually be OK, from time to time, but they themselves are such unbearable Wankers – that you wonder if the best thing to do, rather than giving these books to charity, is to keep them out of circulation.

I fear the nuance is lost here for North American readers — but anyone associated with McSweeney’s is probably a Class A wanker if that helps. Martin Amis, he’s a definitive wanker. Who would be on your wanker shelf?

And lastly…, I may have rather unfairly dismissed the new volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1910 as “mildly disappointing”, but — like most of Moore’s work — it is undisputedly clever and even if I read 1910 another half-a-dozen times, I’ll still miss half the allusions, references, and knowing winks… Fortunately Jess Nevins has posted some very helpful annotations for the amateur nerd (via LinkMachineGo).

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Published May 20, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, May 20th, 2009

Cut It Out — Dioramas made from the covers of pulp novels by Thomas Allen, seen at We Made This (via Ingrid Paulson on Twitter).

You Can’t Be Serious — The Guardian takes a gloomy look at fate of  non-fiction and bookselling in the UK, managing to summon up  some half-hearted optimism towards the end:

Despite decades of predictions to the contrary, the appetite for demanding non-fiction has survived the advent of newspapers, radio and television – and, in Britain, a popular culture with a particular ability to absorb talent and themes that in other countries would be channelled into grand state-of-the-nation volumes. In fact, many publishers think the noise and immediacy of the web will make slow, quiet immersion in a book seem more, not less, appealing. And books, unlike most digital media, are not directly dependent on recession-affected advertising revenues.

Boy’s Own Misadventure — 3:AM Magazine’s Mat Colgate gets to the heart of why volume 3 of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman Century: 1910 (published by Top Shelf)  is mildly disappointing (by Alan Moore standards). Could it really be that Moore writes better when subverting restrictions of form and genre than when he has free reign?

It’s Not Just Your Type — Priya Ganapati talks to designers, including Henry Sene Yee, about the problems of  e-book design at Gadget Lab.  (And Joshua Tallent’s commentary at TeleRead about the problems of formatting for ePub is also worth reading).

Restraint — I mentioned Marian Bantjes’ gorgeous new typeface at the weekend, and now you can download a rather lovely Restraint desktop from the folks at Typenuts (via I Love Typography on Twitter).

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