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Tag: michael chabon

Monday Miscellany

Three new James Joyce cover designs, and one extraordinary post by Peter Mendelsund.  Brilliant stuff…

The Box — Author Michael Chabon on the films of Wes Anderson at the NYRB Blog:

Anderson’s films have frequently been compared to the boxed assemblages of Joseph Cornell, and it’s a useful comparison, as long as one bears in mind that the crucial element, in a Cornell box, is neither the imagery and objects it deploys, nor the Romantic narratives it incorporates and undermines, nor the playfulness and precision with which its objects and narratives have been arranged. The important thing, in a Cornell box, is the box… All movies, of course, are equally artificial; it’s just that some are more honest about it than others. In this important sense, the hand-built, model-kit artifice on display behind the pane of an Anderson box is a guarantor of authenticity; indeed I would argue that artifice, openly expressed, is the only true “authenticity” an artist can lay claim to.

The Same Curious Brain — A profile of author and artist Oliver Jeffers, at the National Post:

Jeffers doesn’t just tell stories. He’s an artist — paintings, printmaking, collage — and a commercial and editorial illustrator, with clients ranging from Anthropologie and Weight Watchers to the Guardian and Newsweek. His monograph Neither Here Nor There, which was published last summer, is a collection of his non-children’s work — a bust of Darth Vader; a satellite crash-landed in a cornfield; a hammer nailed to a wall — though it still feels like part of the same universe. Jeffers prefers it this way.

“My books are all about telling stories, and a lot of my art is about asking questions,” he says. “But they’re equally extensions of the same curious brain.”

And finally…

The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much — a New York Times story about the decidedly nasty-sounding 83-year-old French pulp novelist Gérard de Villiers so implausibly bonkers it probably has to be at least partially true:

Last June, a pulp-fiction thriller was published in Paris under the title “Le Chemin de Damas.” Its lurid green-and-black cover featured a busty woman clutching a pistol, and its plot included the requisite car chases, explosions and sexual conquests. Unlike most paperbacks, though, this one attracted the attention of intelligence officers and diplomats on three continents… “It was prophetic,” I was told by one veteran Middle East analyst who knows Syria well and preferred to remain nameless. “It really gave you a sense of the atmosphere inside the regime, of the way these people operate, in a way I hadn’t seen before.”

And it gets better from there…

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Chabon by Connie Gabbert

These stunning Michael Chabon covers are the work of Oregon-based designer Connie Gabbert. Although evocative in some way of faded ink, old-time letterpress, silkscreened posters and linocuts illustrations, interestingly these designs will never see actually see print themselves.

Connie knew from the start that they would be e-books and would not go to press, but apparently the design process was not that different, at least not to begin with. “It’s when the covers are approved that the process feels different,” she says. “There is no spine to build, no back cover copy, no print files to prepare. It is a bit sad to know that I won’t see the finals printed, but it’s also interesting to be a part of the e-book industry and to see the packaging exist only online.”

According to Connie, the challenge was actually making the approved cover direction work for the other four titles in the series. “The first approved cover was for Wonder Boys, and from there, I had to come up with new color palettes and new imagery for the rest of the series,” she says. “The goal was to make them look unified but individually unique. I really liked how Richard Bravery achieved this with his Chabon series, keeping the type in a fixed location, while the imagery changed from cover to cover… [T]he first stab at these covers was hand-lettered. While I love working illustrated type into cover designs, the final type feels very fitting for Chabon and the covers that he already has. I’m not often asked to create masculine covers, so it was a fun change of pace.”

You can read more about Connie’s type choices for these covers at Fonts in Use, and see more of her work on her website and design:related.

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