Tag: christopher king

Published May 5, 2016

Today in Micro-Trends: Cassette Tape Book Covers

This is another one of those posts that started out on Twitter — a flippant tweet from me sparking a conversation about books with cassette tapes and vinyl records on their covers. It turns out that putting a record on a cover has become quite popular. Unfortunately the composition of many of these covers is often strikingly similar, even if the tone/intent is different.

design and illustration Chloe Cushman

design Michel Vrana

design James Paul Jones

The combination of clunky retro-future technology of cassettes and the DIY aesthetic of mix tapes, on the other hand, provides a richer vein of inspiration…

Art Behind the Mixtape design UnderConsideration
The Art Behind the Tape by Marshall “DJ Mars” Thomas, Djibril Ndiaye, Maurice Garland, and Tai Saint-Louis; design UnderConsideration (2015)

Big Rewind design Regina Starace
The Big Rewind by Libby Cudmore; design by design Regina Starace (William Morrrow / February 2016)

Counter Narratives Palgrave Macmillan
The Counter-narratives of Radical Theology and Popular Music edited by Michael Grimshaw; design Palgrave Macmillan Design (Palgrave Macmillan / May 2014)

don't-you-forget-about-me
Don’t You Forget About Me by Jancee Dunn; design by Catherine Casalino (Villard Books / July 2008)

9781846146459
Earthbound by Paul Morley; design by Jim Stoddart (Penguin / August 2013)

he died with his eyes open design Christopher King
He Died with His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond; design by Christopher Brian King (Melville House / October 2011)

Iron Rose design W H Chong
An Iron Rose by Peter Temple; design by W. H. Chong (Text / June 2016)

Kill Your Friends design Glenn ONeill photo colin thomas
Kill Your Friends by John Niven; design by Glenn ONeill; Photograph Colin Thomas (Cornerstone / July 2014)

Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death by Otto Dov Kulka; design by Jim Stoddart (Penguin / March 2014)

UMN28 Walsh Bootlegs D1.indd
Bar Yarns and Manic Depressive Mix Tapes by Jim Walsh; design by Michel Vrana; lettering by Robert Lawson (University of Minnesota Press / NYP)

New Sorrows design Clare Skeats
The New Sorrows of the Young W. by Ulrich Plenzdorf; design Clare Skeats; cover art by Joel Penkman; series design David Pearson (Pushkin Press / September 2015)

Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; design by Erik Mohr (Solaris / October 2015)

Tape
Tape by Steven Camden; cover art by Keri Smith (HarperCollins Children’s Books / January 2014)

Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra; design Christopher Brand; photography Bobby Doherty (Hogarth / October 2015)

(I also rather like this tape-related killed cover by designer Na Kim)

So there you have it — cassette tape book covers are a thing. But please let’s not get started on VHS tape book covers…

design Jamie Keenan

design David Drummond

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Published February 2, 2015

Book Covers of Note February 2015

Here is this month’s selection of new book covers that have caught my eye…

angry-youth-comix
Angry Youth Comix by Johnny Ryan; design by Keeli McCarthy (Fantagraphics / February 2015)

Dom Casmurro hi-res
Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis; design by Nathan Burton (Daunt Books / February 2015)

etta-otto-russell-james
Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper; design by Gray318 (Penguin / January 2015)

fishermen-gray318
The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma; design by Gray318 (Pushkin Press / February 2015)

Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey; design by Greg Heinimann (Bloomsbury / February 2015)

i-am-radar
I Am Radar by Reif Larsen; design by Will Staehle (Penguin Press / February 2015)

ismael-and-his-sisters
Ismael and His Sisters by Louise Stern; design by Dan Mogford (Granta / February 2015)

The Italians by John Hooper; design by Nicholas Misani (Viking / January 2015)

karate-chop-pearson
Karate Chop by Dorthe Nors; design by David Pearson (Pushkin Press / February 2015)

munich-airport
Munich Airport by Greg Baxter; design by Anne Twomey (Twelve Books / January 2015)

room
The Room by Jonas Karlsson; design by Christopher Brand; photograph by George Baier IV (Hogarth / February 2015)

shooting-stars-burton
Shooting Stars by Stefan Zweig; design by David Pearson (Pushkin Press / February 2015)

Pudd’nhead Wilson and The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain; design by Isabel Urbina Peña (Vintage / February 2015)

utopia-of-rules
The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber; design by Christopher Brian King (Melville House / February 2015)

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Published January 12, 2015

Books Covers of Note January 2015

January’s selections include some of this month’s new releases plus a few stragglers from 2014 that were undeservedly overlooked last year:

against-the-country
Against the Country by Ben Metcalf; design and illustration by Leanne Shapton (Random House / January 2015)

bad-character-novel
A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor; design by Janet Hansen (Knopf / January 2015)

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; design by Scot Bendall & Richard Carey / La Boca (Vintage / November 2014)

fifty-mice
Fifty Mice by Daniel Pyne; design by Alex Merto (Blue Rider Press / December 2014)

first-bad-man
The First Bad Man by Miranda July; design by Mike Mills (Scribner / January 2015)

91bGUNqrbPL._SL1500_
GB84 by David Peace; design by Christopher King (Melville House / November 2014)

hall-of-small-mammals
Hall of Small Mammals by Thomas Pierce; design by Grace Han; cover art by Kate Bergin (Riverhead / January 2015)

9781250052216
The Heart Does Not Grow Back by Fred Venturini; design by Henry Sene Yee (Picador / November 2014)

I-THINK-YOURE-TOTALLY-WRONG
I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel by David Shields and Caleb Powell; design by Chip Kidd (Knopf / January 2015)

mermaids-in-paradise

Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet; design by Chris Welch Design (W. W. Norton / November 2014)

9780241004968
Trouble in Paradise By Slavoj Žižek; design by Richard Green (Allen Lane / November 2014)

Unbecoming by Rebecca Scherm; design by Paul Buckley (Viking / January 2015)

schafferzf
The Veiled Sun by Paul Schaffer; design by David Drummond (Véhicule Press / January 2015)

Weathering by Lucy Wood; design by Greg Heinimann (Bloomsbury / January 2015)

X by Ilyasah Shabazz with Kekla Magoon; design by Matt Roeser (Candlewick Press / January 2015)

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Published September 23, 2014

Beasts!

beasts
Lions and tigers and bears! Oh my! I’m kicking off a new series today on animal book covers. The first post is on ‘beasts’ — mostly ‘wild’ beasts, but one or two more domesticated (and dead) animals may have nosed their way in. Other posts series will look at birds, bugs, reptiles and amphibians, and quite possibly sea creatures and farm animals (unless someone pays me a large amount of money to stop before that). Thanks to all the designers, ADs, publicists and others who have been helping me with images and credits. If you notice that some information about a cover is missing, please let me know.

KENNEDY_American-gabrielle-bordwin
American Spirit by Dan Kennedy; design by Gabrielle Bordwin (New Harvest / May 2013)

animals-of-my-own-kind-drummond
Animals of My Own Kind by Harry Thurston; design by David Drummond (Vehicule Press / April 2010)

Untitled
Annabel by Kathleen Winter; design by Bill Douglas (Anansi / June 2010)

beasts-jacob-covey
Beasts! by Jacob Covey; design by Jacob Covey / Unflown (Fantagraphics / February 2007)

bedside-book-of-beasts-richardson
The Bedside Book of Beasts by Graeme Gibson; design by Scott Richardson (Doubleday Canada / October 2009)

Bobcat by Rebecca Lee; design by Nathan Burton (Penguin Canada / August 2012)

brothers-beasts
Brothers & Beasts edited Kate Bernheimer; design by Isaac Tobin; illustration by Lauren Nassef (Wayne State University Press / January 2008)

9780374119027
Caribou by Charles Wright; design by Jeff Clark / Quemadura (FSG / March 2014)

Charm and Strange by Stephanie Kuehn; design by Sharon King-Chai (Electric Monkey / June 2013)

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem; design by Miriam Rosenbloom (Faber & Faber / December 2009)

Company-of-Liars
Company of Liars by Karen Maitland; design by gray318 (Penguin / January 2008)

9781770893009_HR
Doppler by Erlend Loe; design by Nicolas Cheetham (Anansi / October 2012)

eeeee-kelly-blair
Eeeee Eee Eeee by Tao Lin; design by Kelly Blair (Melville House / April 2007)

ExtinctionClub
The Extinction Club by Jeffrey Moore; design by Michel Vrana (Hamish Hamilton Canada / April 2010)

feral
Feral by George Monbiot; design by Jim Stoddart (Penguin / May 2013)

The Good Suicides by Antonio Hill; design by Christopher Brand (Crown / June 2014)

Gottland: Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia by Mariusz Szczygiel; design by Christopher King (Melville House / May 2014)

Penguin-Goya-Hi_res
Goya’s Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky; design by David Gee (Penguin Canada / August 2007)

Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway; illustration by Paul Rogers (Vintage / September 2007)

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway; illustration by Paul Rogers (Vintage / September 2012)

Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway; illustration by Paul Rogers (Vintage / September 2012)

Hope A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander; design by John Gall (Riverhead Books / January 2012)

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle; design by Emily Mahon; illustration by SHOUT (Modern Library / October 2002)

9780141034324
Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle; design by Coralie Bickford-Smith; illustration by Despotica (Penguin / March 2008)

JOYLAND-Haunt-Hi_res
How I Came to Haunt My Parents by Natalee Caple; design by David Gee (ECW / May 2011)

hunger
Hunger by Lincoln Townley; design by Matt Johnson (Simon & Schuster / May 2014)

jaguars-eels
Jaguars and Electric Eels by Alexander Von Humboldt; design by David Pearson; illustration by Victoria Sawdon (Penguin / February 2007)

Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis by Robin Richardson; design by Natalie Olsen / Kisscut Design (ECW / September 2013)

jamrachs-menagerie
Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch; design by gray318 (Canongate / March 2011)

jungle-book
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling; design by Alice Stevenson (Penguin India / 2014)

leopard
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa; illustration by Hans Tillman (Vintage / September 2007)

TEARSoftheGIRAFFE_B2
Tears of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall Smith; design by Mark Ecob (Abacus / August 2003)

design & illustration by Mark Ecob

me-and-the-devil
Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches; design by Keith Hayes (Little Brown & Co / December 2012)

9781594488078B
Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi design by Helen Yentus with Jason Booher (Riverhead / September 2011)

978-0-7710-0833-7
Morning in the Burned House by Margaret Atwood; design by Kelly Hill (McClelland & Stewart / September 2009)

natural-acts-fulbrook
Natural Acts by David Quammen; design by John Fulbrook III (W. W. Norton / May 2009)

Dreams in Time of War by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o; design by Peter Mendelsund (Pantheon / March 2010)

In the House of the Interpreter by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o; design by Peter Mendelsund (Pantheon / November 2012)

9780865477735
The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane; design by Charlotte Strick; illustration by Ariana Nehmad Ross (Faber & Faber / October 2013)

Layout 1
Off Course by Michelle Huneven; design by Rodrigo Corral; photograph by Gregori Maiofis (FSG / March 2014)

orphan-master
The Orphan Masters Son by Adam Johnson; design by Lynn Buckley (Random House / January 2012)

panther
Panther by David Owen; design by gray318 (Constable and Robinson / May 2015)

pastoralia-rodrigo-corral
Pastoralia by George Saunders; design by Rodrigo Corral (Riverhead / June 2001)

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson; design by Matt Dorfman (Riverhead / December 2011)

sharp-teeth-dean
Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow; design by Susan Dean; illustration Natasha Michaels (William Heinemann / August 2007)

short-history-bill-douglas
A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright; design by Bill Douglas (Anansi / October 2004)

9781447268963
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel; design by Nathan Burton (Picador / September 2014)

stories-ii
Stories II by T. C. Boyle; design by Greg Heinimann (Bloomsbury / October 2013)

tattooed-soldier
The Tattooed Soldier by Hector Tobar; design by Jim Tierney (Picador / October 2014)

tell-the-wolves
Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt; Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich (Dial Press / June 2012)

this-book
This Book Will Save Your Life by A. M. Homes; design by Paul Buckley (Penguin / April 2007)

Tiger-in-Eden
Tigers in Eden by Chris Flynn; design by W.H. Chong (Text Publishing Co. / October 2013)

The Tiger's Wife-Tea Obreht
The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht; design by James Paul Jones; illustration Wuon Gean Ho (Phoenix / March 2011)

3796386738_ef71a142a3_o
Tooth and Claw by T. C. Boyle; design by Paul Buckley (Penguin / September 2005)

The Transcriptionist by Amy Rowland; design by Keith Hayes (Algonquin Books / May 2014)

9780143125020
The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma; design by Alison Forner (Penguin / March 2014)

Wolves-tpb
Wolves by Simon Ings; design and Illustration by Jeffrey Alan Love (Gollancz / January 2014)

7 Comments

Published September 3, 2014

Book Covers of Note September 2014

It’s hard to believe it is already September, but here we are… time for another round of book covers!

If you’re new to this feature, each month I collect together new and recent covers that have caught my eye in the previous few weeks. Although the focus is on books released in the current month, the posts also include covers I’ve missed earlier in the year. You can find the previous month’s posts here.

Thanks (as always) to my local bookstores — Type Books on Queen West, Book City on the Danforth, and Indigo Bay & Bloor — for fighting the good fight (and their wonderful displays!).

9781568987262_cfl
Abbott Miller: Design and Content; design by Pentagram (Princeton Architectural Press / September 2014)

Arvida by Samuel Archibald; design by Catherine D’Amours / Pointbarre (Le Quartanier / August 2014)

(this is an obvious miss from last month’s post about maps. Sorry Catherine!)

assassination-of-margaret-thatcher
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel; design by Rodrigo Corral Design; photograph Demurez/Glasshouse (Henry Holt / September 2014)

9780374169046
The City Under the Skin by Geoff Nicholson; design by Oliver Munday; photograph by George Baier IV (FSG / June 2014)

(Another one that should have been in the maps post. And yes, that really is someone’s back apparently)

The Establishment by Owen Jones; design by Richard Green (Allen Lane / September 2014)

forensic-songs
Forensic Songs by Mike McCormack; design by Jason Booher (SOHO / July 2014)

God Telling a Joke by David Margoshes; design by David Drummond (Oolichan Books / May 2014)

Hack Attack by Nick Davies; design by David Drummond (Faber & Faber / August 2014)

The Histories by Herodotus; design by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Penguin Classics / September 2014)

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; design by JP King (Penguin / August 2014)

lippy-booher
Lippy by Bush Moukarzel; design by Jason Booher (Oberon Books / August 2014)

The Most Dangerous Animal of All by Gary L. Stewart with Susan Mustafa; design by Jarrod Taylor (HarperCollins / June 2014)

(I’m not endorsing the content of this book at all, but the red acetate cover does need to be seen in person to be fully appreciated)

smoke-gets-in
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty; design by David High / High Design (W. W. Norton / September 2014)

The Transcriptionist by Amy Rowland; design by Keith Hayes (Algonquin Books / May 2014)

Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle; design by Timothy Goodman (FSG / September 2014)

wittgenstein-jr
Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyers; design by Christopher Brian King (Melville House / September 2014)

You by Zoran Drvenkar; design by Kelly Blair (Knopf / August 2014)

2 Comments

Published July 9, 2014

Book Covers of Note July 2014

As well posting great cover designs for books released in July, I’ve taken this month’s round-up as an opportunity to catch up on a few I missed earlier this year. Enjoy!

adam
Adam by Ariel Schrag; design by Christopher Moisan (Mariner June 2014)

american-blonde
American Blonde by Jennifer Niven; design by Sara Wood (Plume July 2014)

9780307594792
The Arsonist by Sue Miller; design by Gabriele Wilson (Knopf June 2014)

California by Edan Lepucki; design Julianna Lee (Little Brown & Co. July 2014)

Cartwheel by Jennifer Dubois; design Eileen Carey / photograph by Kniel Synnatzschke (Random House May 2014)

cubed
Cubed by Nikil Saval; design by Oliver Munday (Doubleday April 2014)

fourth-july-creek
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson; design by Allison Saltzman, cover art Bryan Nash Gill (Ecco June 2014)

9780374158613
Friendship by Emily Gould; design by Jennifer Carrow (FSG July 2014)

gottland-300dpi
Gottland: Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia by Mariusz Szczygiel; design by Christopher King (Melville House May 2014)

how-to-be-danish
How To Be Danish by Patrick Kingsley; design by Andrew Smith (Atria February 2014)

9780670786107
A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain by Adrianne Harun; design by Kristen Haff (Penguin February 2014)

the-martian
The Martian by Andy Weir; design by Eric White (Crown February 2014)

8128E2fJSjL
Nobody is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey; design by Charlotte Strick; illustration by Patrick Leger (FSG Originals, July 2014)

no-country
No Country by Kalyan Ray; design by Christopher Lin (Simon & Schuster June 2014)

My Fellow Skin

Shutterspeed by Erwin Mortier; design by David Pearson (Pushkin Press / 2014)

Marcel by Erwin Mortier; design by David Pearson (Pushkin Press / 2014)

My Fellow Skin / Shutterspeed / Marcel by Erwin Mortier; design by David Pearson (Pushkin Press July 2014)

Night Film by Marisha Pessl; design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant (Random House July 2014)

out-of-time
Out of Time by Lynne Segal; design by David A. Gee (Verso July 2014)

panic
Panic in a Suitcase by Yelena Akhtiorskaya; design by Helen Yentus / Photograph by Emine Ziyatdinova (Riverhead July 2014)

string

The String Diaries by Stephen Lloyd Jones; design by Keith Hayes (Mulholland Books July 2014)

dueling-neurosurgeons
The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Kean; design by Will Staehle (Little, Brown & Co. May 2014)

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Published April 7, 2014

Recent Book Covers of Note April 2014

accidental-universe
The Accidental Universe by Alan Lightman; design by Pablo Delcán (Pantheon January 2014)

9781447254225
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi; design by Jo Thomson (Picador March 2014)

9781594631399B
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi; design by Helen Yentus (Riverhead March 2014)

9781594205798

Chop Chop by Simon Wroe; design by Ben Wiseman (Penguin April 2014)

danish-dynamite-steve-leard
Danish Dynamite: The Story of Football’s Greatest Cult Team by Rob Smyth, Lars Eriksen & Mike Gibbons; design by Steve Leard (Bloomsbury April 2014)

dept-of-speculation-gray-318
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill; design by Gray318 (Granta March 2014)

9781555976712
The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison; design by Kimberly Glyder (Graywolf April 2014)

exception

L’Exception by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir; design by David Pearson (Éditions Zulma April 2014)

David’s cover design for Rosa Candida by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (Éditions Zulma March 2011) is also stunning.

mistakes-i-made-at-work
Mistakes I Made at Work edited by Jessica Bacal; design by Jaya Miceli (Plume April 2014)

quand-pépin
Quand j’étais l’Amérique by Elsa Pépin; design by David Drummond (Les Éditions XYZ April 2014)

Resurrection by Wolf Haas; design by Christopher Brian King (Melville House January 2014)

The cover for next book in the series, Come, Sweet Death! (Melville House July 2014), is great too.

there-goes-gravity-alex-merto
There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll by Lisa Robinson; design by Alex Merto (Riverhead April 2014)

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Published March 24, 2013

Something (Late) for the Weekend

Enjoy Your Cigarette — Tom Cox reviews Penguin’s Underground Lines boxed set for The Guardian:

Underground Lines often matches its writers to its tracks very well, in terms of temperament as well as personal history. The Jubilee line, so often associated with capitalism and the Docklands development, is a good match for John O’Farrell, a writer whose wit was marinated in the political 1980s. The nervy prose of William Leith could not be more apt for the rather fraught Northern line, and his manic, anxious account of being evacuated from a train that was filling with smoke is probably the most addictively readable thing here. “People never tell you to have a pleasant journey on the underground, just as people will say, ‘Enjoy your meal,’ but never ‘Enjoy your cigarette,'” he writes.

Dirty Lit — Edward Jay Epstein at the NYRB Blog on being taught literature by Nabokov:

He made it clear from the first lecture that he had little interest in fraternizing with students, who would be known not by their name but by their seat number. Mine was 121. He said his only rule was that we could not leave his lecture, even to use the bathroom, without a doctor’s note.

He then described his requisites for reading the assigned books. He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them, aside from a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines. He assured us that the authors he had selected—Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Robert Louis Stevenson—would produce tingling we could detect in our spines.

Exploded Hearts — Melville House’s Christopher King on his cover design for How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive by Christopher Boucher, at Talking Covers:

In the end, I did what I usually do, which is to steal an idea for the cover directly from the manuscript. In this case, the narrator’s son—who, again, is a car—has a heart in place of an engine, so I printed off an image I found online and showed it to our publishers:

“It’ll be like this exploded diagram of a car, but with a heart in place of the engine.”

“OK!”

And finally…

The Wall Street Journal looks at ‘The Improbable Rise of NPR Music‘ which, for all of the WSJ’s obvious churlishness, manages to be fascinating despite itself:

NPR Music’s breadth, depth and ability to break new material are its main strengths. The site offers music that appeals to rock, jazz and classical lovers—all under one roof. Still another advantage is NPR Music’s ties to “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition,” which, even if Washington-centric, have music woven into their fabric and provide news for the site as well as a familiar storytelling style.

NPR Music in its present form just turned five. “It’s the closest thing we have to a pure startup inside what is now a 40-plus-year-old institution,” says Kinsey Wilson, NPR’s executive vice president and chief content officer. “This group of now roughly 20 people has had an opportunity to invent something from scratch.”

(via Largehearted Boy)

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Published June 22, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

There’s been much speculation online about who designed the wonderful hand-drawn cover for Big Machine by Victor LaValle (pictured above). Thanks to the nice folks at UK publisher No Exit, I can finally identify the designer as Lynn Buckley, who originally designed the cover for the US publisher Spiegel & Grau.

Collected — Gary Groth, co-founder of alternative comics publisher Fantagraphics, talks about the state of the industry with the Comic Book Reporter (via Robot 6):

By and large, nobody publishes alternative comic books anymore. The reason is fairly obvious; since the reader knows it’s going to be collected in a graphic novel, there’s very little reason for them to buy a twenty-four page comic of something he’s going to get a year or two down the line as a graphic novel, and in the way it probably ought to be published anyway, collected in a single work. I think it’s just an inevitability of the rise of the graphic novel as the dominant form of alternative comics. I don’t know how accelerated that’s going to be for mainstream comics. It feels like it’s headed that way.

Lingua Franca — Tim Parks on translation and international literature for the NYRB:

[N]either readers nor writers are happy any longer with the idea that a literary text’s nation or language of origin should in any way define or limit the area in which it moves, or indeed that a national audience be the first and perhaps only arbiter of a book’s destiny. We feel far too linked, and linked in the immediate present, not to want to see immediately what books are changing or at least entertaining the whole world. And if we are writers, of course, we want our own books to travel as widely as possible.

And finally…

Chisel Away — An interview with designer Christopher Brian King, art director at Melville House, at Slated Magazine:

On a conceptual level, [designing for book covers] actually isn’t much different from designing a logo, for example. After all, a logo has to give you a glimpse into the whole story of a company, so it comes down to the same challenge: how do I chisel away at this big, complicated story until it becomes a single elegant image which explains what the whole thing is about? Where book covers differ is that you have a much larger toolkit to work with—typography, color, illustration photography, production tricks, or anything else. Since it’s so open-ended, the real challenge starts to become figuring out which tool is best to use on any given project.

3 Comments

Published January 26, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

A shiny new (and somewhat unsettling) cover for Joyland’s next e-book, How I Came to Haunt My Parents by Natalee Caple, designed by the shiny (and somewhat unsettling) David A Gee.

Holden Caulfield’s Goddam War — Vanity Fair excerpts J. D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski:

Tuesday, June 6, 1944, was the turning point of J. D. Salinger’s life. It is difficult to overstate the impact of D-day and the 11 months of combat that followed. The war, its horrors and lessons, would brand itself upon every aspect of Salinger’s personality and reverberate through his work. As a young writer before entering the army, Salinger had had stories published in various magazines, including Collier’s and Story, and he had begun to conjure members of the Caulfield family, including the famous Holden. On D-day he had six unpublished Caulfield stories in his possession, stories that would form the spine of The Catcher in the Rye. The experience of war gave his writing a depth and maturity it had lacked; the legacy of that experience is present even in work that is not about war at all. In later life, Salinger frequently mentioned Normandy, but he never spoke of the details—“as if,” his daughter later recalled, “I understood the implications, the unspoken.”

An excerpt from Jason Epstein’s review Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century by John B. Thompson for the latest NYRB:

Digital enthusiasts should… consider that as the embrace of other electronic media has widened, the average quality of their product has declined: from Masterpiece Theatre to Jersey Shore, from Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson to Sarah Palin, from Julia Child to Rachael Ray. My own guess is that the digital future in which anyone can become a published writer will separate along the usual two paths, a narrow path toward more multilingual variety, specificity, and higher average quality and a broader path downward toward greater banality and incoherence, while the collective wisdom of the species, the infallible critic, will continue to preserve what is essential and over time discard the rest.

(The full review requires a subscription)

Best Online Comics Criticism 2010 chosen by contributors to The Comics Journal. And from that list, film scholar David Bordwell on Tintin (via Robot6):

Most commentators on Hergé mention that he was a film fan and drew many situations from movies of the 1920s and 1930s. Like Hollywood studio cinema, his tales put striking technique in the service of fluent storytelling. Pause to study the narrative and you’ll find a surprising richness to the imagery; start by looking at the pictures as pictures, and you’ll see how composition, color, and detail smoothly advance the action. Hergé was well aware that his polished imagery could stand scrutiny in its own right, but he saw it as serving a larger narrative dynamic.

(Out of curiosity, does anyone compile annual list of the best online literary criticism?)

Montaigne and Monkeys — Saul Frampton, author of the ridiculously titled When I Am Playing With My Cat, How Do I Know She Is Not Playing With Me?: Montaigne and Being in Touch With Life, on 16th Century French philosopher Michel-de-Montaigne and neuroscience in The Guardian:

For Montaigne, as for contemporary neuroscientists, humans… have an inbuilt imitative, sympathetic capacity. Moreover, he does not see it as species-dependent… In one of his most famous aphorisms he asks: “When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?” And he tells how animals themselves form “a certain acquaintance with one another” and greet each other “with joy and demonstrations of goodwill”. Then, in a lengthy comment added to the final edition of his essays, he completes the circle from animal-to-human to human-to-human again, concluding that we cannot help but communicate ourselves in some way… even if it is something to which we are habitually blind…

And finally (in the unlikely case anyone missed it)…

Caustic Cover Critic interviews Christopher King, the new Art Director at Melville House Publishing.

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Tag: christopher king

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Tag: christopher king

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