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Tag: james bridle

Midweek Miscellany

Mambo for Fonts — Flora Mambo is a new font from the P22 Type Foundry based on Jim Flora’s hand-lettering for the 1955 Mambo For Cats RCA Victor album cover.

Character — Type designer Matthew Carter profiled in The Boston Globe:

Around 1994, he started developing Verdana, a revolutionary font for having prevailed over technical constraints of that time, like coarse computer screen resolution. To hear Carter recall it, it was a pivotal moment: People were on the brink of reading as much — or more — on screen than on paper. And that transition has had a profound effect on the design process.

Carter also talks about his work in this short video for the Globe (via Eightface):


The Paris Review has made it’s entire interview archive — from the 1950’s to the present — available online (via The NY Observer).

An Education — James Bridle of BookTwo and Bookkake interviewed at Publishing Perspectives:

“There’s still a reluctance in the industry to give [e-books] their own space. They are still subsidiary to the traditional book forms… There still an incredible lack of understanding about them and the people who are doing the educating are Apple and Amazon, which means they are taking the market very quickly and we’re kind of letting them do that.”

The Likely Lads — Authors Lee Rourke (Canal) and Tom McCarthy (Remainder, C) in conversation at The Guardian.

And finally…

Writers from The Guardian and Observer newspapers talk about the books that sparked their passion for literature:

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Something for the Weekend

An illustration by Pascal Blanchet, author of the charming White Rapids*, for the National Post’s Spring Books Quarterly.

Text Without Context An interesting article on reading and the web by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, which discusses books by David Shields, Jaron Lanier, Cass Sunstein, Farhad Manjoo and others (and yes, I appreciate the irony of me of linking an article about the fragmentary nature of reading online and only quoting one paragraph):

THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.

The Bkkeepr — Book Oven’s Hugh McGuire interviews James Bridle of BookTwo and Bookkake:

We can berate publishers for making what we think are bad decisions about digital, but to accuse them of cluelessness just inflates a very dangerous animosity. Publishers love books as much, if not more, than most readers. It’s one of the very few industries where this is true almost all the way up. And we should be working together for the best of all possible futures for books and authors and readers.

(And you can read Hugh’s response to the Michiko Kakutani article — which he takes issue with — here)

Route One — Sarah Weinman at Daily Finance looks at indie publishers experimenting subscription models that reach readers directly.

And finally…

Designer Matt Avery talks about his beautiful design for Chicago by Dominic Pacyga (University of Chicago Press) at Faceout Books.

* White Rapids is published by D+Q and distributed in Canada by my employer, Raincoast Books.

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Midweek Miscellany

The Backwards Novel Seen Backwards by Tom Gauld.

I also love Tom’s Lost Fairy Tales for a promotional concertina booklet made by his agent Heart (surely there’s a full length book to be had here?).

Ways of Reading from A Working Library:

Every book alights a path to other books. Follow these paths as far as you can.

Lovely.

Back to BasicsBooktwo.org‘s James Bridle on the Apple tablet (what else?):

I’ve spent several years urging publishers to get on board with new technologies and try new things, but equally I hope there’s space for a lot of publishers to get back to concentrating on what they do best: acquiring, editing, producing and publishing books… [W]e should probably stop scrambling to get on the latest bandwagon (vanilla Books-as-Apps, I’m looking at you), and concentrate on the basics: ebook production, metadata, integrated marketing, quality and consideration. There is a lot to be done, but this or that device will never be the be-all-and-end-all of the future of publishing.

I think James has a point. But honestly, no one I know (and that is an admittedly limited sample) believes “this-or-that device” will magically “save” publishing. Surely it is only bloggers in need of straw men and ‘journalists’ paid to hyperventilate who say that kind of shit?

Moving (swiftly) on…

Modern Myths — Will Self on H. G. Well’s The War of the Worlds in The Times:

The War of the Worlds is one of those books that demonstrates our culture’s surprising ability to continue the manufacture of myth. I say surprising, because one would think, with all the technological reproducibility of art now at our disposal — from raw print, to film, to digitisation — that there would be no room left for that hazy instability within which myth thrives.

(Pictured above: The NYRB edition of The War of the Worlds with illustrations by Edward Gorey)

And finally, completely unrelated to books…

Dear Coffee I Love You… Yes, yes, I do. (Pictured above: What I’d Rather Be Doing)

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Something for the Weekend, November 13th, 2009

Is this a new cover for J G Ballard’s Crash? HarperCollins Canada have a release date of November 2nd, so I guess so. And I would assume The design/illustration is by the immensely talented David Wardle who did the previous covers in this seriesCan anyone confirm?

In any case, I think the Warhol/Banksy Elizabeth Taylor illustration fits the book pretty well and it’s a nice counterpart to the Marilyn Monroe on the cover of Atrocity Exhibition.

Moving the Needle — Literary agent Nathan Bransford on the challenges facing publishers in the HuffPo:

One of the big recent surprises in the industry… is a newfound difficulty making a splash… with adult nonfiction. Now, to get an idea of what a huge problem… this is, bear in mind that for many years adult nonfiction was the bread and butter workhorse of the industry. Fiction, except for very very established authors, has always been regarded as something of a crapshoot. Nonfiction, on the other hand, was a source of relative stability, and… healthy margins.

Not so much anymore. Everything is difficult to break out.

Artists’ eBooks — a new project from James Bridle and booktwo.org (now, James, if you could only get my bkkeepr badge work properly…)

I Don’t Know WhyUnderConsideration‘s FPO (For Print Only) looks at the quirky and deliciously creepy There Was An Old Lady by Jeremy Holmes, published by Chronicle Books (and — full disclosure alert — distributed by Raincoast in Canada)

And finally…

The (slightly bonkers) illustrator and musician mcbess has a new book (and vinyl record!) called Malevolent Melody coming out from Nobrow:

(If you haven’t seen the insane mcbess/The Dead Pirates Dirty Melody/Wood animated video, you can find that here if you are so inclined).

Update: Thanks to Deanna McFadden of the Tragic Right Hip and HarperCollins Canada for confirming with her UK counterparts that the Ballard cover was designed by David Wardle.

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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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