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Tag: Grove Press

Published May 14, 2016

Roy Kuhlman Archive

‘Dominique’ by Eugene Fromentin. Copyright 1948; No print date (circa 1952-53). Grove Press dust jacket on an imported hardcover originally published and printed by The Cresset Press (London). Cover design by Roy Kuhlman.
‘America Day by Day’ by Simone de Beauvoir. Grove Press, 1953. Hardcover. Cover designed by Roy Kuhlman.

Early this week I posted about the Robert Brownjohn online archive created by his daughter, Eliza. Today, a new website dedicated to the work of the graphic designer Roy Kuhlman curated by his daughter, Arden Kuhlman Riordan, has gone live.

Kuhlman is best known, of course, for the brilliant mid-century modern book covers he designed for Grove Press. The site is not comprehensive — at least not yet — but given the number of covers  and other pieces Kuhlman must have designed over his career that is, perhaps, not surprising. Archiving his work must be a massive undertaking. Hopefully there is much more to come.

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Published August 26, 2013

The Mounting Tide of a Mass Avant-Garde

Phil Ford, author of Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture, reviews Loren Glass’ new book on Grove Press, Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde, for the LA Review Books (which is, by the way, probably the most consistently interesting place around to read about books right now):

Grove Press and its charismatic owner, Barney Rosset, sit right at the center of postwar intellectual history. Glass notes early that if Rosset made a lot of impulsive bad decisions, he was guided steadily by a shrewd understanding of where American culture was headed. In the 1950s, Americans were beginning to go to college en masse, and when they got there they would seek out whatever was chic, daring, avant-garde, experimental — in a word, hip. Counterculture, the notion of seceding from the mainstream and dwelling in an autonomously created realm of liberated culture, was perhaps the most potent dream of the postwar age. Everybody wanted in. Against the mounting tide of a mass avant-garde, the old censorship codes could not long endure.

But while it’s hard not to be inspired by the story Grove Press, it’s also important to note the less savoury side of it, and how it was overtaken by the cultural changes Rosset helped start:

Those who harkened to Evergreen Review’s call to “join the underground” constituted the higher-brow version of the man who read Playboy: a 1966 advertising survey discovered that he was “a 39-year-old male, married, two children, a college graduate who holds a managerial position in business or industry, and has a median family income of $12,875.” (That’s about $92,000 in 2013.) It turns out that “Chuck,” the everysquare in a 1965 Evergreen Review spoof of Charles Atlas ads, painted a pretty realistic portrait of the Grove readership. But with the emergence of a feminist critique made possible by the very cultural revolution Rosset served, the masculine literati no longer enjoyed the privilege of guiltless consumption, and modernist experimentalism no longer provided a dignified alibi for it. In the 1970s, the Evergreen Review image of the hip intellectual soured. We might imagine Chuck a decade later, up to his ears in alimony, parted hair modishly grown out though thinning and combed-over on top, paunch swelling under a safari suit coat, leering at younger women who wish he would drop dead.

Read the whole review.

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Published March 1, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Elegant Simplicity — A nice profile of book designer David Pearson at Spitalfields Life:

On the basis of “Penguin By Design,” David was given the job to design the covers for Penguin Great Ideas, an experimental series of low-budget books with two-colour covers. “I’m not an illustrator and I can’t take photographs, so I decided to do all the covers with type,” explained David, almost apologetically. Yet David’s famous landmark designs for these books, derived from his knowledge of the history of Penguin covers, were a model of elegant simplicity that stood out in bookshops and sold over three million copies. “I saw people picking them up and they didn’t want to put them down!” he confided to me, rolling his eyes in delight, “They were a phenomenon.” Then he placed a hand affectionately upon a stack of copies of this series for which he has now designed one hundred covers.

My interview with David is here.

Books Mattered — David L. Ulin on the late Barney Rosset for The LA Times:

For Rosset, the mission was simple: Books mattered, they could be dangerous, they could change your life. Writers were heroes, “cosmonauts of inner space,” to borrow a phrase from “Cain’s Book” author Alexander Trocchi, their function less to reassure than to destabilize, to challenge the assumptions by which society was made.

This could happen in all sorts of ways — Beckett’s unflinching absurdism (“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better”), Burroughs’ scabrous cynicism (“A functioning police state needs no police”), Miller’s sense of living at the end of history, when all the so-called verities had collapsed beneath their own sanctimonious lies.

See also: Barney Rosset obituary in The Guardian.

Sprawling Tentacles — Alexandra Manglis reviews Alan Moore: Storyteller by Gary Spencer Millidge for the Oxonian:

The work and the man have morphed together resulting in a giant Moore myth that fans and comic creators alike have difficulty surmounting, its tentacles sprawled out far beyond his small Northamptonshire home. The infamous Guy Fawkes mask, for one, created in Moore’s anarchist comic V for Vendetta, has been worn by protesters from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street, and Moore is indubitably proud of the anarchist symbol’s use in real civil unrest. Yet the symbol’s popularisation is largely due to the comic’s adaptation into a Hollywood blockbuster, from which Moore removed his name and refused to take royalties. Moore’s stories have become bigger than the man himself; the images he has authored have grown beyond him and often, as in the case of V for Vendetta, in spite of him.

See also: Paul Gravett’s review for The Independent; The Guardian celebrates 35 years of British comic 2000AD

And finally…

Geoff Dyer, author of Zona, interviewed at Bookforum:

Failure is quite interesting, and it’s something I have a certain amount of experience with. I wasn’t a failure in the way lots of people are failures—I could always get published, that was pretty straightforward. Literary failure is funny because it’s not like you get this massive slap in the face and become a figure of ridicule. It’s more that you do this thing, you write this book, and then this big thing is poised to happen on publication. And nothing happens. It’s just a weird non-event. The literary Richter scale doesn’t register any kind of tremor. That was happening to me for a very long while, and then I managed to persuade myself that these serial failures were perhaps a kind of liberation in that it meant I was free from any kind of pressure from publishers. The stakes were so low that it didn’t really make any kind of difference to anybody that I went from writing a novel to writing a book about the First World War. So I’ve certainly known what it’s like for a book to simply, well, disappear.

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Published February 23, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Publisher, film distributor and rebel Barney Rosset has died aged 89. The Associated Press obituary is here:

As publisher of Grove Press, Rosset was a First Amendment crusader who helped overthrow 20th century censorship laws in the United States and profoundly expanded the American reading experience. Rosset had an FBI file that lasted for decades and he would seek out fellow rebels for much of his life.

Between Grove and the magazine Evergreen Review, which lasted from 1957 to 1973, Rosset published Samuel Beckett, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and William Burroughs. He was equally daring as a film distributor, his credits including the groundbreaking erotic film “I Am Curious (Yellow),” and art-house releases by Jean-Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras and others.

Music and American History — Simon Reymolds profiles author and music critic Greil Marcus for The Guardian:

For Marcus, listening rapt at the cusp of the 60s and 70s, rock was growing up in the richest and most unexpected way. What’s more, his two great passions, music and American history, had converged. “Their music sounded like a new way to understand who you were, the fact that you weren’t just a product of your own willfulness but also a product of the past,” he says of the Band, the subject of Mystery Train‘s most compelling section (although the chapters on Sly Stone and Elvis Presley aren’t far behind). “There was this sense that they were opening a door to your own country and your own history.”

A Bunch of People in a Room — An interview with Chip Kidd at Smashing Magazine:

I very much try to downplay the jacket as a sales tool, because I think that publishers invest too much intellectually in this concept, and they can actually make my work much, much harder than it needs to be. And certainly with the advent of buying books on the Web, you’re not going to buy a book from Amazon because of the way it looks. It’s just not the nature of how that works. The problem arises when you get a bunch of people in a room looking at a jacket and determining the fate of the design based on preconceptions of how the book will sell, about how this design will help the book to sell.

And finally…

Flawed Monster Heroes — Legendary comic book artist Neal Adams on Marvel superhero Spider-Man:

A weakling kid is bitten by a radioactive spider and decides to become…a circus performer? Yes, that’s right, Peter Parker is more interested in using his “gift” to find a paycheck, not a damsel in distress. Until, with all his power, his weaknesses cause him to fail to save his Uncle Ben. Soft monsters as superheroes. Not sparkly-toothed-born heroes…but flawed monster heroes. Then came the incredible Steve Ditko… Marvel had found a… creator who got it, who totally understood the concept: Flawed monster heroes. It was a new idea, born out of a touch of coincidence, a touch of history, a massive amount of brilliance

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Published January 11, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

An interview with Jason Cohn, director of the documentary Eames: The Architect and The Painter, at Imprint:

Charles was extremely ambitious and maybe a little bit cut throat in his career. I do think that it was important to him to build a strong brand. The way that he used the image of them as a couple to publicize and self-promote was far thinking. I think that he and Ray intuited that when you are selling a mass-produced item like a chair or an iPod, it’s not quite enough to have something that is beautiful, works well and at the right price point. It helps when you can buy a tiny piece of the designer as well. Just like Steve Jobs did that with Apple, Ray and Charles did that with their furniture. When you were buying a piece of Eames furniture, you were buying a little bit of that joie de vivre, the free and easy California lifestyle, that Charles and Ray represented to a generation of people.

Jason Epstein reviews Richard Seaver’s memoir The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age for The New York Times:

In the spring of 1953 Seaver opened a letter from Barney Rosset, who had just acquired for a few thousand dollars the assets of Grove Press, a stillborn Greenwich Village publishing firm. Rosset said he was coming to France, and could Mr. Sea­ver introduce him to Beckett? Dick replied that Beckett was reclusive, but he should approach Beckett’s publisher, M. Jérôme Lindon at Les Éditions de Minuit. Rosset replied that he was now in touch with Minuit and had made an offer for Beckett in America. Rosset later asked Seaver to join him at Grove, and Dick, now married to the beautiful Jeannette Medina, a concert violinist who had recently won a scholarship to Juilliard, accepted. The ’60s would be a time of triumph and tragedy for Dick and Barney.

And on a not entirely unrelated note…

An obituary for George Whitman, owner of Shakespeare & Company, in The Telegraph:

Whitman displayed a blithe disregard for money, often informing customers that the book they were perusing was not for sale and remaining philosophical when the cash box disappeared — a regular occurrence. Yet while more commercially minded bookshops were being taken over or going to the wall, Whitman weathered the depredations of beat poets and hippies, and survived the 1968 student riots and numerous tax audits by the French authorities. Quite how he did it remained something of a mystery.

See also: The Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist and many more…

And finally…

Outsider Art — Alexander Chee interviews cartoonist Daniel Clowes for the BOMBlog:

I think the so-called acceptance of comics is all in the minds of journalists and desperate booksellers. My comics sold fairly well when it was a completely unknown underground thing and they seem to sell vaguely the same numbers now as they did then, it’s just a different audience. Back then it was only people involved in the underground culture and now it’s a general audience at bookstores… If you looked at the number of people who buy books there it would be a very small percentage of the population, far less than those who’d buy an indie movie. I mean, probably several million people saw the Ghost World movie, for example, but it’s in the hundreds of thousands for the book—a small percentage.

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Published November 4, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Project Thirty-Three, one of my favourite mid-century modern design blogs, is now using Blogger’s “Dynamic Views” template. It looks great using the new ‘Flipcard’ feature.

The Crash — Alan Hollinghurst talks about writing and his new novel The Stranger’s Child with the New York Times:

Mr. Hollinghurst said he modeled his work habits on another friend and novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro. “He has this thing he calls ‘the crash,’ ” Mr. Hollinghurst explained. “He takes a lot of time to prepare a novel, just thinking about it, and then he draws a line through his diary for three or four weeks. He just writes for 10 hours a day, and at the end he has a novel.”

He laughed and pointed out that for him the Ishiguro method was only partly successful: at the end of three or four nonstop weeks he is still years away from being done.

Also in the New York Times, author Adam Thirlwell (The Escape) on translation and David Bellos’ new book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?:

Google Translate, no doubt about it, is a device with an exuberant future. It’s already so successful because, unlike previous machine translators, but like other Google inventions, it’s a pattern recognition machine. It analyzes the corpus of existing translations, and finds statistical matches. The implications of this still haven’t, I think, been adequately explored: from world newspapers, to world novels. . . . And it made me imagine a second prospect — confined to a smaller, hypersubset of English speakers, the novelists. I am an English-speaking novelist, after all. There was no reason, I argued to myself, that translations of fiction couldn’t be made far more extensively in and out of languages that are not a work’s original.

Counter-Culture — Loren Glass on Barney Rosset and the history of Grove Press at the LA Review of Books:

Philip Larkin famously dated the beginning of sexual intercourse to the end of the Lady Chatterley ban and, more recently, Fred Kaplan has used Rosset’s campaign to situate 1959 at the crux of an epochal transformation. Whatever its larger historical significance, it surely marked a turning point in the fortunes of Grove Press. On the brink of a decade in which the geopolitical order would be transformed, flush with cash for the first time, and well connected to the international avant-garde, the West Coast scene, and the nascent counterculture in college towns across the country, Grove was positioned in the eye of the coming storm. At the nexus of an emergent international vanguard, Grove became a potent symbol of the counter-culture, increasingly drawing radical authors, readers, translators, professors, lawyers and activists into its expanding network.

Part two of Glass’ history Grove Press is here.

And finally…

A slightly weird  interview with the David Lynch in The Guardian:

Film is dead, Lynch tells me. It is too heavy, too much of a dinosaur, and its time has largely past. But digital is alive and well and pointing to the future. He admits he’ll miss shooting on celluloid (“because it’s so beautiful”), but is more than happy to shoot on digital instead – as and when the opportunity arrives.

Until then he’s happy pottering around his studio and slurping his coffee; painting his spooky black houses and singing his eerie songs of love gone sour. “I can understand why people might be frustrated with me: ‘Let’s give up on these side ventures and go make a film instead.'” He chuckles. “But all these other things feed into the future. And if the ideas aren’t there for cinema, and if the pressure is on, then you might pick a bad idea and find yourself forced to marry something you’re not totally in love with. So I’m happy to wait.”

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Published December 8, 2008

Monday Miscellany

“I have always enjoyed photographing loners” — A lovely BBC audio slideshow of “Writers’ Rooms” narrated by award winning photographer Eamonn McCabe. The project, appearing weekly in The Guardian and currently on show Madison Contemporary Art in London, captures the working environments of novelists, biographers and poets.

Book Industry Enters Shaky Chapter: NPR’s Lynn Neary looks at last week’s horrorshow.

The 10 Best Books of 2008 according to The New York Times Book Review. Interesting that they’ve also created a mini-site which has promotional material for the top 10 books, including shelf talkers, bookmarks, and posters for bookstores to download . There are also web banners and a video with author Toni Morrison. This is has to be a good idea.

“The news is still big. It’s the newspapers that got small”: A spectacular Roger Ebert rant about the death of criticism :

The celebrity culture is infantilizing us. We are being trained not to think. It is not about the disappearance of film critics. We are the canaries. It is about the death of an intelligent and curious, readership, interested in significant things and able to think critically. It is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down. It is about snuffing out.

Spot. On.  I actually met Roger Ebert a few years back in Pages bookstore. The Toronto International Film Festival must have been on. I had no idea who he was at the time (a colleague told me later), but he was very nice about it.

“The Most Dangerous Man in Publishing”:  A profile of publisher Barney Rosset in Newsweek:

Before Rosset challenged federal and state obscenity laws, censorship (and self-censorship) was an accepted feature of publishing. His victories in high courts helped to change that. Rosset believed that it was impossible to represent life in the streets and in the dark recesses of the heart and mind honestly without using language that in the mid-20th century was considered “obscene”—and therefore illegal to sell or mail. To a significant extent, the books he published convinced others that this was true.

The Well-Tended Bookshelf— Laura Miller on culling one’s book collection:

There are two general schools of thought on which books to keep, as I learned once I began swapping stories with friends and acquaintances. The first views the bookshelf as a self-portrait, a reflection of the owner’s intellect, imagination, taste and accomplishments… The other approach views a book collection less as a testimony to the past than as a repository for the future; it’s where you put the books you intend to read.

Which leads me rather nicely to…

Books At Home: A blog about bookshelves. It is possible that this just too nerdy. Even for me.

Relevance: Brian at daxle.net interviews author Tim Manners , editor and publisher of The Hub and Reveries.com. It’s a fascinating discussion that covers innovation, brands, and the consequences of overabundant advertising (amongst other things).

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Published November 26, 2008

Midweek Miscellany, Nov 26th, 2008

The Royal Mail British Design Classics: A set of first class stamps issued in January 2009 will commemorate ten icons of British design  including the Penguin paperback (pictured above).

“I wanted to put my money where my mouth is” — booktwo’s James Bridle discusses Bookkake at 3:AM Magazine:

“I’m a huge fan of ebooks, and read this way regularly, but I don’t feel the reading experience they offer is yet on a sufficient par with traditional books to offer them at any great price, and I also don’t feel there’s much overlap between those looking for ebooks and those who’d pay for the paper edition.”

Risk has its rewards: Barney Rosset — US publisher of Beckett and Chekhov — discusses Grove Press and his struggles against censorship in a rebroadcast interview from 1991 on NPR’s Fresh Air. Rosset received the Literarian Award for his service to the literary community at the National Book Awards ceremony last week.

“The Best Business Books of 2008” — A slideshow of Fast Company‘s picks of the year:

“The titles that follow run the gamut of what Fast Company covers: Innovation, creativity, design, sustainability, technology, advertising and marketing, global business, and entertainment.”

It’s a cutely eclectic list for sure — including travel books and a novel (and mercifully there’s no Godin or Gladwell) — but it’s not, perhaps, quite as imaginative as they think it is…

30 Inspiring Flickr Groups on Typography: A wonderful list for type geeks compiled by designer David Airey (pictured: “Big Yellow Bookshop” by ultrasparky seen in the Typography and Lettering Flickr pool).

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Published September 24, 2008

Mamet to Pinter to Beckett

The maverick publisher of Grove Press Barney Rosset is to receive a lifetime achievement award on November 19th, 2008, from the National Book Foundation in honor of his many contributions to American publishing, according to the New York Times:

In its heyday during the 1960s, Grove Press was famous for publishing books nobody else would touch. The Grove list included writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Che Guevara and Malcolm X, and the books, with their distinctive black-and-white covers, were reliably ahead of their time and often fascinated by sex.

Also the subject of a new documentary ‘Obscene’ about his life and work, Mr. Rosset said:

“All my life I followed the things that I liked — people, things, books — and when things were offered to me, I published them. I never did anything I really didn’t like. I had no set plan, but on the other hand we sometimes found ourselves on a trail. For example, out of Beckett came Pinter, and Pinter was responsible for Mamet. It was like a baseball team — Mamet to Pinter to Beckett… Should we have had more of a business plan?” he added. “Probably. But then the publishers that did have business plans didn’t do any better.”

Link

UPDATE:

More on Barney Rosset and ‘Obscene’ at New York Magazine

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