Skip to content

Tag: collecting

Bibliomania

At The Guardian, Lorraine Berry looks into the curious history of compulsive book buying:

In the 19th century, book collecting became common among gentlemen, mostly in Britain, and grew into an obsession that one of its participants called “bibliomania”. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, an English cleric and bibliographer, wrote Bibliomania, or Book Madness: A Bibliographical Romance, which was a gentle satire of those he saw as afflicted with this “neurosis”. Dibdin medicalised the condition, going so far as to provide a list of symptoms manifested in the particular types of books that they obsessively sought: “First editions, true editions, black letter-printed books, large paper copies; uncut books with edges that are not sheared by binder’s tools; illustrated copies; unique copies with morocco binding or silk lining; and copies printed on vellum.”

But Dibdin himself was obsessed with the physical aspects of books, and in his descriptions paid an intense attention to the details of their bindings and printings (rather than the content) that betrayed his own love. In a letter published in an 1815 journal, he beseeched subscribers to bulk up their subscriptions to help complete a set of volumes called The Bibliographical Decameron – more beautiful than they could imagine. “I should be loth to promise what is not likely to be performed, or to incur the censure of vanity or presumption in asserting that the materials already collected, in this department of the work, are more numerous, more beautiful, and more faithful, than any which, to my knowledge, have come under the eye of the publick.”

Comments closed

The Photo Man


Mark Kologi collects  found photos. In this weirdly fascinating short film he discusses buying and selling the personal pictures of complete strangers:

(Does he remind anyone of Steve Buscemi? Is that just me?)

Comments closed

Retromedia

Digital formats are really convenient, but they are easily forgotten as well. If you ask anyone what was their first vinyl they bought they’ll probably remember that, but I don’t think a lot of people will remember what was their first mp3 download.

When you play a vinyl record it demands your attention and this is a way to connect to the music.  You have to take it out, you have to put it on the turntable, you have to put the needle on… These are all actions that demand attention from you and then you have to keep your attention and wait until the side is done and then you have to flip the record…

Photographer Eilon Paz, Dust and Grooves

A new short documentary from PBS Off Book on the attraction of physical formats in the digital age:

Eilon Paz successfully raised funding for a Dust and Grooves book with Kickstarter early this year.

See more of Eilon’s photos here.

Comments closed

Midweek Miscellany

Literary prints by Evan Robertson, AKA Obvious State.

Chairman of the Bored — Bruce Handy on collecting boring books:

My hobby has two rules: I buy books only on the street. (Uniquely boring books must present themselves willingly; you can’t hunt them down.) And the titles must meet a standard of boring intrigue that I have a hard time putting into words, beyond “I know it when I see it.” This is where — if I may shed any pretense of modesty — taste and connoisseurship come into play.

Niche — Will Brooker, author of Hunting the Dark Knight, on comic books at The Browser:

[Comics] are a unique storytelling medium. They can tell a story in a way that no other medium can. But I’m not evangelical about comics, and I don’t have a problem if they’re a niche interest. There was a time in the eighties when everyone thought comics were going to break through. They were sold in bookshops. “Sequential art”, “post-textual literature” and all kinds of other pretentious terms were bandied about. I don’t think that’s necessary. Comics are their own thing, and work on their own terms, in different ways to novels and films.

See also: Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero by Larry Tye reviewed for The New York Times.

And finally…

Steven Hyden on My Bloody Valentine album Loveless at Grantland:

Listening to Loveless is not unlike the sensation of having just endured a two-hour sonic hurricane, then feeling an intense yet melodic pounding in your eardrums for the next week. And I mean that in the most pleasant way imaginable. What took so long for Shields to find in the studio was the ecstatic pleasure point buried in the suffocating psychic evisceration caused by pure unadulterated volume. On most rock records, the music drowns out the lyrics; on Loveless, the music drowns out the music.

2 Comments

Something for the Weekend

Commercial Indifference — Geoff Dyer’s Zona reviewed at the LA Review of Books:

[Dyer] followed a book of eccentric travel writing with a book on photography, and then in 2009 served up a couple of loosely-linked novellas under the, let’s face it, terrible title of Jeff In Venice, Death in Varanasi. Add in Dyer’s pre-2000 offerings on jazz, D.H. Lawrence, and World War I, along with several novels, and you have an oeuvre that resembles a messy and ever-expanding Venn diagram of the author’s obsessions. Even so, a 200-page book about a Russian film from 1979 takes commercial indifference to heroic lengths.

(And much as I love you and your recent redesign LARB, could we get simple RSS feed please?)

The Great Unwashed — Julia Kingsford, writing at The Bookseller, on the cultural snobbery and clichés surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey  (h/t Don Linn):

Surely they can’t be ‘real’ readers whose papery passions have traditionally been our bread and butter and who shop in ‘real’ bookshops? No, these must be a different sort of reader, new and not as good, ‘silly’ and to be only temporarily humoured and nervously served before we gladly see them off as they return to whatever form of entertainment they normally enjoy. Far from intellectual snobbery about readers being the preserve of the book trade, it runs rife through everyday media and culture, constantly perpetuating the view that books are for the few.

Medium-Rare — Author Lev Grossman (The Magician King) on almost being a rare book collector, at Time:

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don’t buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed. (In the rare book trade the little details that definitively identify a first edition are called “points.” My books are not strong on points.) It’s not glamorous, but it’s still satisfying, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.

And finally…

“New” — An archive interview with art director and pioneer of modern advertising Helmut Krone. There is so much good stuff in this… (via Coudal, naturally):

“New” is when you’ve never seen before what you’ve just put on a piece of paper. You haven’t seen it before and nobody else in the world has ever seen that thing that you’ve just put down on a piece of paper. And when a thing is new all you know about it is that it is brand new. It’s not related to anything that you’ve seen before in your life. And it’s very hard to judge the value of it. You distrust it, and everybody distrusts it. And very often it’s somebody else who has to tell you that that thing has merit, because you have no frame of reference, and you can’t relate it to anything that you or anybody else has ever done before.

(The going rate for Helmut Krone: The Book appears to be upwards of $80 on Abebooks. Time for a reprint?)

Comments closed

Q & A with Richard Weston, Ace Jet 170

I don’t know exactly when I first discovered Ace Jet 170. It was a few years ago — at least four because I was reading it before I started The Casual Optimist. And it must have been recommended by someone (I Like? Noisy Decent Graphics?) because I don’t think I can have stumbled across it. But perhaps I did. Certainly, there was little reason for me to be interested in the blog of designer/writer living in Belfast at the time. And yet I started t0 follow Ace Jet 170 religiously. I still do, even as I’ve lost interest in many other well-known design blogs who ‘curate’ stuff.

Admittedly, I share some common interests with Richard Weston, the man behind Ace Jet 170 — Penguin paperbacks, printed ephemera, maps, found type and fatherhood, to name a few — but really it is the tone of the blog as much as  anything that keeps me coming back. “Unassuming” is probably the word for it, but somehow that undersells it. It’s personal, funny, idiosyncratic and occasionally little eccentric. It looks like it comes easily, although I expect it probably doesn’t.

Like Anne Ward at I Like, Richard seems to find everything interesting and yet never really tries to sell you anything. There is little shameless promotion. Just interesting things. And like I Like, Ace Jet 170 was one of the early inspirations for this blog — one of the few I hoped it would be like when it grew up. (It isn’t of course, but how could it be?)

Richard and I are now friends, but in a very modern way. We’ve never met or even spoken to each other (I still don’t know what he looks like), but we stay in what seems like a very ambling dialogue via Twitter, Instagram and Path. I do actually feel quite honoured to finally him on the blog talking at length. We chatted by email.

When did you start Ace Jet 170?

The middle of 2006.

How has the blog developed since then? Is it different from when you started?

I think it is different. At first, I was just trying to catalogue stuff I had stashed away all over the place. In retrospect, it’s not the best way to do that. But as time went by it became somewhere to write as well. It’s a little wordier than it used to be. Of course, it also gained interest from others and has helped me make surprising connections.

What’s your interest in ‘found type’?

Loads of typographers and graphic designers love ephemeral typography. And have done for decades. If you look through old copies of Typographica, there’s Fletcher/Forbes/Gill [Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes and Bob Gill], or Herbert Spencer or Robert Brownjohn with photos of found type.

If you have a love of letter forms, you’re drawn to them aren’t you? My blog, again, was just a useful place to put things. Quite quickly, other people started sending stuff in. That was probably the first kind of feedback I got. It was exciting to find out other people wanted to contribute. So it became an irregular slot on Fridays. Not every Friday. And then of course, I realised Flickr collates “crowd sourced” found type much better. And Flickr pools started springing up. Nothing to do with me. But they show how common the urge is.

In your personal photography you often seem to be looking for the beautiful in the mundane. Is that a conscious thing?

Like the found type thing, it is a compulsion. Something that’s been with me for years – long before I started recording it. I have pretty modest tastes and expectations. I guess I have a fairly humble background. So the little things mean a lot. But it’s an interesting world isn’t it? I mean visually. I reckon you could work down any street and take ten photos of interesting, everyday things. Instagram, of course, monopolises on that. It takes it to the next, natural level where we can all share stuff.

When did you start collecting vintage Penguin paperbacks?

When we lived in England, I found this Penguin Education book, in a box of junk outside a second-hand bookshop. The cover was designed by Derek Birdsall at Omnific. It’s so simple and perfect. He was already a bit of a hero of mine.

A little later, I picked up a Pelican also by Birdsall. It wasn’t in the common style, which was odd. It was less of a big idea like Juniors but beautiful. I was hooked. I soon got to know the Marber Grid that Pelican and Penguin books used through the 60s and into the 70s. It coincided with a glut of covers from emerging talents so you’d find covers by Fletcher, Forbes and Gill; loads by Germano Facetti and then Romek Marber himself; but also Milton Glaser, Massimo Vignelli, Alan Aldridge – all these guys who went on to become the leading lights of their generation. Finding covers credited to names you knew became pretty exciting. You could pick up a design by Abram Games for 50p. That’s amazing. But I also admired the system. The Marber Grid was beautifully constructed and it’s a testament to it that it was used so extensively. It just worked so damn well. And then there’s the whole Penguin business, Allen Lane’s brilliant idea. Inspiring. Oh and I like sets. Penguin do a great set. Always have done. Still do.

Do you look for certain designers or illustrators?

I generally prefer to pick up covers I like. If they’re by designers I recognise, all the better but it’s not essential. You get to know them after a while and that’s fun. You see a cover and you think, hey that looks like a Facetti. And you’re right!

With the Pelicans, I really like the ones that successfully represent the idea behind the book. Some do that more successfully than others. Occasionally the good ones aren’t the aesthetically pleasing ones, but they make a point really well.

With Penguins I can pass them by if I don’t like the illustration on the cover then go into a cold sweat if I find one with a Paul Hogarth cover.

David Gentleman’s covers for the Penguin Shakespeare series are amazing. And the Stephen Russ covers for The Penguin Poets; beautiful and clever within a very restricted format. Great design.

Are there any editions you particularly covet?

There’s a little booklet called Penguin Books, The Pictorial Cover, 1960-1980 by Evelyne Green that was published by Manchester Polytechnic in 1981. I really want a copy. Saw one on Amazon recently but it’s out of my price range. It’s a really low-key publication – typewritten text. It’s hardly a “book” but it’s unique. I harbour a fantasy that one day I’ll find one in the surplus box at a charity book shop and pick it up for 50p.

What else do you collect?

Blimey. So many things. Sometimes I think I collect collections. I have a stamp collection that I love but I’m not a proper stamp collector. A proper one would be horrified with how I store them. I have them on file cards in little Moleskine wallets. And they’re judged purely on looks. I don’t care about their value or country of origin. Actually, the cheaper the better and I think every country produces brilliant and bloody awful stamps designs.

I’ve got tons of books of course, stationery products (staplers, bulldog clips, typewriters), coffee pots, branded espresso cups, vintage light meters, you know, all sorts of nonsense. Some are really small collections.

What have you read recently?

I’m well into the Saul Bass book. Karen, my wife, keeps laughing at me. She says designers aren’t really supposed to read these books. We’re supposed to leave them lying around and look at the pictures every now and then but I love a monograph. It’s an amazing, if slightly cumbersome book. And it’s been a long time coming – I remember the Bass exhibition at the Design Museum in London, must have been around ten years ago. There was talk of a book after that.

By sharp contrast, we read 101 Things I learned in Architecture School, in the UX Belfast Book Club I go to. It’s short, snappy and really good. Interesting glimpse into the life of an architect and great to see universal principles that apply across disciplines.

And then I read From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. Have you read it? Has everyone? It’s brilliant. Really captures a less politically correct time.

Haven’t read much fiction for a good while. Lots of work related stuff. David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous was brilliant too.

What are a few of your favourite books?

Favourites are hard; so much to choose from. I have books that have had a major effect on me and my work. Ruari McLean’s first book on Tschichold and the ancient tomb by Vincent Steer, Printing Design and Layout really pushed me on as a young designer. And John R Biggs’ modestly titled Basic Typography.

Monographs! Like I said before: I love a monograph: Games, Sutnar, Huber, Aicher, Lustig, Schleger, Rand – amazing stuff. Then I like a marketing book too: anything by John Grant. Fiction-wise: trickier still. I’ve read lots by classics like Chandler and Deighton. Graham Greene.

What is the day job?

I work at a multidisciplinary design company called Thought Collective. It’s pretty new, although born out of two companies that came together, officially, at the beginning of 2011. One a “traditional” design studio and the other a web developer. So the company is evenly split now between cross media designers and those concerned with coded matters.

I claimed the rather grand job title of Head of Strategic Design. I write and design. Work out strategies and how to do stuff I’ve never done before. It’s really good.

Is there a thriving design community in Northern Ireland?

Yes. It’s a microcosm. Belfast in particular is an intensely populated, compact area. I think the Irish connection fuels the creativity of the region. So there’s some great things going on. There’s a significant web design/development community and loads of design companies. The degrees of separation seem fewer so it’s fairly easy to get to know other designers.

Are you still interested in print design?

Definitely, although I don’t do much. From where I’m sitting print feels more treasured than it was, say, ten years ago. There are loads of great books being published and things like letterpress are way more accessible than they used to be. I feel there’s a great focus on craft.

How do traditional ways of thinking about design apply to digital design?

For a spell, while I was acclimatising to working on more digital projects, I thought it was a major shift. But then it dawned on me that much of what I’d learned to date was still extremely relevant. There are universal design principals that transcend medium. And the parallels between the development of intelligent marketing activities offline and user experience focus online are striking.

I don’t know if you know the Claude C Hopkins book Scientific Advertising? He wrote it just after he retired. Around 1923. Hopkins has been described as the ‘Father of Modern Advertising’ and [David] Ogilvy said something like, “you shouldn’t work in advertising until you’ve read this book seven times” – like he would. It’s antiquated in many ways. But also, with a little imagination you can discern from it techniques and approaches that are still very active today. Especially online. I’m talking about strategic marketing scenarios. If nothing else, it illustrates how principals cross over mediums. And can be timeless.

And then there’s all that fundamental human stuff (hierarchy of needs etc) that has nothing to do with the specific channels by which messages are delivered.

So, “traditional ways of thinking” apply well. What’s new is some of the language used and the complex mechanical ways in which ideas are expressed and realised.

What does the future hold for books?

I think the near future is looking pretty healthy. It feels like we’re in some kind of print renaissance for crafted, tactile print-based experiences. There’s some great stuff being made.

But I do think that one day, once we’ve all got used to reading on devices and the experience has become much more rich and fulfilling, that print may well vanish. If it does, it’ll be when we’re happy for it to die; when other forms provide what we want and need. Perhaps in the future we’ll think of digital files as artifacts when their content delivers a sensory experience we can currently only guess at.

Or perhaps we’ll stop caring about the artifact like we care less about the Album or CD sleeve; when we treasure the content more that the object. I’d be very happy if that doesn’t happen in my life time.

Is that a bit of a depressing point to finish on? It’s not meant to be. Rich digital experiences are exciting. Who knows what the book of the future will be like. You can be pretty sure it’ll exceed expectations.

Thanks Richard!

3 Comments

There’s No Place Like Here

Here’s a wonderful Etsy video about Brazenhead Books, a secret secondhand bookstore located in Michael Seidenberg’s apartment on the Upper East Side, New York:

(Thanks Kate!)

Comments closed

Something for the Weekend

Visual Vocabulary — An interesting interview with book designer Peter Mendelsund at Czech Position:

I definitely take into account the author’s native culture, though whether I choose to adopt something stylistic from this culture depends on the vagaries of the particular project. There are times when one wants to accentuate the universal aspects of a writer’s work; and there are times when one wants to situate an author in a specific time and place… With Kafka, I would argue that his greatness lies in the universality of his ideas, that his writing transcends time and place… Conversely, with many other writers, nationality is at the core of their work — their great subject is place and contextual identity. They may write about Czech-ness, or English-ness, etc. These are the books where it makes the most sense to bring the local artistic tropes and visual cues to bear. For what it’s worth, I love delving into the visual vocabulary of different cultures.

The Casual Optimist interview with Peter is here, and you can read my 2-cents on his Kafka redesigns here.

The Polish Club50 Watts asks you to design the Polish edition of your favourite book. $400 is up for grabs.

Living by Dying — Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Suitors and Ether (forthcoming), on the death of the book in the new Los Angeles Review of Books:

For the record, my own loyalties are uncomplicated.  I adore few humans more than I love books.  I make no promises, but I do not expect to purchase a Kindle or a Nook or any of their offspring.  I hope to keep bringing home bound paper books until my shelves snap from their weight, until there is no room in my apartment for a bed or a couch or another human being, until the floorboards collapse and my eyes blur to dim.  But the book, bless it, is not a simple thing… [W]hat could it mean for the book to die?  Which sort of book?  And what variety of death?  What if the book had only ever lived by dying?

A World Made of Stories — James Gleick, author of The Information, on memes:

In the competition for space in our brains and in the culture, the effective combatants are the messages. The new, oblique, looping views of genes and memes have enriched us. They give us paradoxes to write on Möbius strips. “The human world is made of stories, not people,” writes the novelist David Mitchell. “The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed.” Margaret Atwood writes: “As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.” Nearing death, John Updike reflected on

A life poured into words—apparent waste intended to preserve the thing consumed.

Fred Dretske, a philosopher of mind and knowledge, wrote in 1981: “In the beginning there was information. The word came later.” He added this explanation: “The transition was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind.” Now we might add, thanks to Dawkins, that the transition was achieved by the information itself, surviving and perpetuating its kind and selectively exploiting organisms.

Cull or be Culled — NPR’s Linda Holmes on how we are missing everything:

You used to have a limited number of reasonably practical choices presented to you, based on what bookstores carried, what your local newspaper reviewed, or what you heard on the radio, or what was taught in college by a particular English department. There was a huge amount of selection that took place above the consumer level. (And here, I don’t mean “consumer” in the crass sense of consumerism, but in the sense of one who devours, as you do a book or a film you love.)

Now, everything gets dropped into our laps, and there are really only two responses if you want to feel like you’re well-read, or well-versed in music, or whatever the case may be: culling and surrender.

And on a related note…

Lester Bangs’ Basement — Bill Wyman on collecting and scarcity at Slate:

Lester Bangs, the late, great early-rock critic, once said he dreamed of having a basement with every album ever released in it… [T]he Internet today is very much like [that]. In its vastness, cacophony, and inaccuracy, it’s also very reminiscent of Borges’ Library of Babel. Just as that library contained books made up of every possible combination of letters, in the corners of the Internet I’m concerned with here you can find similar chaos: The song “Let It Be” by the Beatles, sure, but also mislabeled as by the Stones, by the Kinks, by the Hollies, by the “Battles” … and also with, of course, those same labels attached to entirely different songs (like “Let It Bleed”).

Anyway, is it enough?

For some, the enjoyment of art or culture has fetishistic aspects. To them, being a fan is about something more than just experiencing the art. There will always be collectors, fixating on the physical objects, like the great LP jackets from the 1960s and 1970s… And there will always be people who can’t be happy unless they have something regular fans don’t. Indeed, a friend of Bangs’, long after he died, said to me that the unspoken corollary in Bangs’ mind to his fantasy was that no one else would have access to it.

Happy Easter.

Comments closed

This Must Be the Place

BYUN is the first film in a series called This Must Be the Place by Lost & Found. The series explores the idea of home — what makes them, how they represent us, and why we need them.  I can’t wait to see the rest of the series…

(via Coudal)

1 Comment