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Tag: nabokov

Nabokov’s 1964 Playboy Interview


Longform has posted a Playboy interview with Vladimir Nabokov from January 1964:

When I remember afterwards the force that made me jot down the correct names of things, or the inches and tints of things, even before I actually needed the information, I am inclined to assume that what I call, for want of a better term, inspiration, had been already at work, mutely pointing at this or that, having me accumulate the known materials for an unknown structure. After the first shock of recognition—a sudden sense of “this is what I’m going to write”—the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper; and to be aware of the stage it has reached at any given moment, I do not have to be conscious of every exact phrase. I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, if I stopped the machine and opened its inner compartment; but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me.

(read the full interview)

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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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Lip Service

The most recent cover of Playboy is, as some have been quick to point out, reminiscent of John Gall’s original cover design for the Vintage edition of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, reissued in 2005. John’s design is more subtle than the Playboy cover and more effective for it (but then Lolita is not Playboy after all):

Were Playboy inspired by the book cover? It seems unlikely. The image in John’s design was actually rotated for the final cover and looks quite different:

If I remember correctly the change was made because original orientation was too suggestive. For Lolita. (Just think about that for a minute.)

Is it also seems unlikely that they were inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe (Black Iris III pictured above) although there are some obvious similarities. Has anyone used O’Keeffe for the cover of Lolita?

Interestingly, the cover for the current Penguin edition of Lolita uses a similar colour palette to the Vintage edition and (to a lesser extent Playboy). The head is upright in this version as well. The vertical line of the nose is broken the horizontal features of the eyes and mouth, as well as by the title. Disconcertingly, the photograph and the round sans-serif font are suggestive of a YA novel. Perhaps that unsettling thought is the desired effect?

John’s design for Vintage replaced an earlier photographic cover by Megan Wilson which took an altogether different approach,  placing the book firmly in a historical context. It’s interesting, however, that John’s unused design echoes the crooked vertical line created by the legs in Wilson’s image:

While maintaining a vertical line, David Gee’s unpublished cover cuts to the chase in a far more clinical fashion…*

Inadvertently referencing spatialist painter Lucio Fontana

And one cannot talk about vertical lines and vaginas without mentioning Barnett Newman and his infamous “zip”. Or at least I can’t. But surely Mr Newman wasn’t thinking smutty thoughts was he?

Somehow I doubt Playboy was influenced by either Fontana or Newman. However, here is a 2003 poster for the Vagina Monologues designed by Chermayeff & Geismar that pre-dates both Playboy and Gall. The message is different, I think, but the photograph is clearly being used in a similar way. I’m sorry I don’t have a better image:

And finally, here is the cover of Nova 1965-1975, which utilizes an original cover from the innovative women’s magazine where Harry Peccinotti was art director. Is this the design that started it all?

*You can see many (many) more Lolita book covers here, and read Print magazine’s article ‘Recovering Lolita’ about John Bertram’s cover competition, here. The mighty Peter Mendelsund also weighs in on covering Nabokov here.

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Something for the Weekend

Imprint talks to John Bertram about his Recovering Lolita project:

For obvious reasons, of course, [Lolita] remains as controversial a novel as it was a half century ago, if not more so. And, probably helped along by Kubrick’s breezy film, and many very terrible covers, the term “Lolita” has come to popularly mean something quite the opposite of the novel’s namesake, so a designer has that to contend with as well. On the one hand, then, designers face the very real challenge of communicating some of that complexity in a cover, which can easily become overwhelming… On the other hand, I think there are also important ethical considerations that require careful negotiation since, whatever people may think, we are talking about a novel which has child rape at its core.

There is more about  the project here (pictured above: Lolita designed by Rachel Berger).

The Bare Specificities — A really lovely profile of Portland-based book-scout Wayne Pernu at The New Yorker:

On the job, Pernu keeps a few principles in mind—first and foremost, the importance of condition. For example, with its original dust jacket, the value of a first-edition “The Great Gatsby” can multiply from two thousand five hundred dollars to more than two hundred thousand. “That little piece of paper on the book is often worth thousands and thousands of dollars, much more than the book itself,” Pernu says. “Specificity is really crucial as well. A book called ‘World History’ isn’t going to do well, but a book called ‘Peruvian Shovel Makers in the Seventeenth Century,’ that’s going to be worth a lot of money to someone. You always get excited when you see something that specific, no matter what it is.”

Also really nice: An interview with English letter carver Fergus Wessel for I Love Typography:

Eric Gill is my hero! His lettering, in my opinion, remains unsurpassed, partly because of its honesty. We are all striving for perfection, but there really is no such thing of course. If we try to control it and attempt to be too artistic, we are in danger of losing that honesty. One has to let the letters flow a little.

There are certainly strict rules of good layout and lettering, but rules are there to be broken. But in order to bend the rules, one has to know them in the first place, and attain that initial discipline. This requires years of experience and practice; it is something that evolves and it is during this evolution that you develop your own individual style and form.

And finally…

Alexandra Harris, author of Romantic Moderns, on Modernism at The Browser:

To an extent, yes. But take [Nikolaus] Pevsner for example, who was one of the great exponents of the Bauhaus version of modernism in England. Because there’s such a strong German tradition of minimal, pared down, internationalist architecture, for him it was a kind of nostalgia. It wasn’t our English tradition but a German tradition, so it seemed to us very brutal and modernist. But to him it was laden with associations and emotions, as it was for the other émigré artists like [Laszlo] Maholy-Nagy and Naum Gabo.

Again, what seems very new is actually attached to a tradition, and is so much more interesting that an absolute break with the past. A lot of these buildings that seem very modern are deeply entangled with a tradition of classical architecture using the same classical symmetries and the sense of elegance and refinement that comes straight down from Greece and Rome, and it doesn’t get more traditional than that. So there’s always a traditionalism in the modern.

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Fictions | Peter Mendelsund

Knopf designer Peter Mendelsund has just posted the second of his meditations on designing book covers for fiction:

When setting out to design a book jacket for a work of fiction, whether we are aware of it or not, we designers are picking our subject matter from a limited set of bins. Though the choices we can make as designers are unlimited, the categories that define most of the choices we make when we pluck these ideas from their native fictions, are, on the face of it, quite easy to list.

Well worth reading all the way through, including the extensive footnotes.

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Mendelsund on Lolita

Knopf book designer Peter Mendelsund has written a fascinating essay on cover design and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov:

Book jackets these days, for reasons I won’t unpack, seem to revel, overtly, in wit, conceptual deviousness, unusual clever or droll juxtapositions — we, as a professional community, seem to have elevated the visual bon mot above all other virtues. Again, I won’t delve into the “why” of the matter here for want of space, but suffice it to say that clever work is the work that is celebrated in our community. Not that wit in itself isn’t valuable, and doesn’t have an appropriate place in design — but wit is not the same thing as insightfulness, and often insightfulness is what is called for in a book jacket. Our fetishizing of cleverness has taken a toll I believe, in that (quite often) these clever solutions work at cross-purposes to the (more often than not sincere) narratives they represent. A book in which an author has gone out on a considerable limb in order to write in a genuine and unaffected fashion does not want a cover that winks at the reader. Wit, when it becomes compulsive (as anyone knows who has a friend who puns too often) quickly becomes its opposite- dullness or predictability.

Peter says this is just the first in a series of posts about the process of “jacketing works of fiction”. One can only hope.

(pictured above: a proposed jacket for Nabokov’s Lolita by Emmanuel Polanco)

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Q & A with John Gall

John Gall is Vice President and Art Director for Vintage/Anchor Books, an instructor at the School of Visual Arts, and the author Sayonara Home Run! The Art of the Japanese Baseball Card.

Previously Art Director at Grove/Atlantic, Gall has been interviewed about his work by Step Inside Design, Design Bureau, and Barnes & Noble (video). He garnered even wider attention in 2009 when he commissioned a roster of high-profile designers — including Rodrigo Corral, Carin Goldberg, Chip Kidd, Paul Sahre, Megan Wilson and Duncan Hannah —  to redesign twenty-one Vladimir Nabokov book covers within the confines of specimen boxes (read more about the designs at Print Magazine).

I have wanted to interview John for a long time, but as he talked about book design extensively elsewhere and regular readers are more than likely familiar with his work already, I was waiting for the right subject. It was his colleague Peter Mendelsund, who suggested that rather than discuss his book covers, I should ask  John about his collages. John Gall makes collages? Yes, indeed he does. And, needless to say, they are very good.

I met John in Toronto in December last year, and we corresponded by email.

When did you first start making collages?

It’s something that I’ve been doing sporadically since forever. And when I say sporadic I mean, years or decades between doing anything.

Do you create them digitally or by hand?

All hand done. One of the reasons I do this is to get away from the computer, drop the design think and work with the hands. Its kind of liberating to not have the ability to resize things on the fly. I sometimes use a digital camera to keep track of the permutations since my brain no longer can.

Can you give me a sense of their size?

8 x 10 on up to 18 x 24

How do you chose your titles?

The titles come from things I may be thinking about, or reading, or songs I may be listening to at the time I am making them. Then I make an anagram. It now takes me a lot of time to decipher the original source and many times I cannot. Strangely, when I posted “Hot Elves,” I got a ton of hits, which made me briefly consider naming everything after comic-nerd fetishes.

Who are your artistic influences and where do you look for inspiration?

I like the same old dead people as everyone else: Kurt Schwitters, Marianne Brandt, Georges Hugnet, Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain (not dead yet!), etc. People working today who make me incredibly jealous: Fred Free, Mark Lazenby, John Stezaker, James Gallagher, Lou Beach and family, Wangechi Mutu, Clara Mata, Robert Pollard, Nicole Natri, Paul Butler, Charles Wilkin and a bunch of people I’ve met on Flickr who’s real names I do not know.

Not sure how influential any of these folks are but they do inspire me to get off my ass and get to work.

Is creating a collage a similar process to designing a cover?

Yes and no. In both cases you are moving things around on a page until they look “right”. For me, when I am doing the collage work I am eliminating the concept (and most of the time the typography) so it is reduced to forms on a page.

Graphic design is a total left brain/right brain thing. A combination of logical carefully considered thinking and intuitive personal expression. For the collage work I try to put the logical aside and exercise the intuitive muscle.

Has making collages informed your designs?

When I am stuck, I sometimes find myself thinking “What can’t I do on a book cover”? Its chance to make the wrong path and see where that leads. Force myself to make the wrong decisions. Trying to leave thoughts of what looks “good” out of the equation. Nearly impossible, but that is the goal. The hope was that these notebooks could fuel design ideas. Not so sure if that is still the case. They’ve become a thing unto their own.

Have you ever used one of your pieces in a cover?

I used them on a poster once. Attempted to use them on a skateboard design. A couple of people have tried to use them on book covers, to no avail.

Was creating a series of collages from recombined book covers cathartic?

Not really. More like, “hmmm…its 12:30 AM, I’ve spent all day working on book covers and now I’m tearing apart old covers to make new covers. Lo-ser”.

That said I’ve since started up this series again and will be posting them shortly. But I can only do these when I am away from work for a spell. Generally its like, “enough with the book covers already, is Food Jammers on yet?”.

Where do you gather your source materials from?

Most of what I work with comes in the daily mail: catalogs, magazines, etc. I intentionally try not to work with anything that is too vintage or too inherently beautiful—though I do break this rule all the time. My thinking is that all the great collage artists of the past used source material that was lying around in the trash or purchased at the local five and dime. Today we look at a Cornell piece or a Schwitters piece and marvel at the incredible printed material they had to work with. They were working with the Foodtown circulars and Bass Pro Shop catalogs of their day except, well, OK, more beautiful.

Do you still collect Japanese baseball cards?

The collecting has tapered of quite a bit since the book was published. I’m much more selective now. but if I see something particularly beautiful up for auction I’ll probably go for it. I’m not a super smart collector though. I tend to buy what I like and not what will be valuable.

Do you collect anything else?

I’m trying not to acquire to much stuff anymore and am getting ready to purge. I collect old snapshots, the occasional flashlight and I’ve recently acquired a hankering for old high school yearbooks. I’ve also been trading and collecting collage work.

Your collages are included in the recently released Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World’s Great Graphic Designers. How did that come about?

The author Steven Heller, asked me if I had anything that I’d want to contribute. I told him I keep two kinds of notebooks, one that is basically a to do list and idea book. The others are the collage notebooks. They were much more interested in those. By the way, its a beautiful book.

Untitled, James Gall (2008); Untitled, Owen Gall (2008)

You’ve collaborated with your kids on some collages. Can you tell me about ‘Dad’s Drawing Class’?

Kids are the best. The great thing about collage is that anybody can do it, but its hard to do well. Kids are naturals. They have no preconceived notions as to what looks good, just do what they like. So they are free to do whatever they want—that is, until they get old enough to become self conscious..

Dad’s Drawing Class is something I like to do with my kids while we are hanging out on vacation without cellphones and video games. We’ve done collage, some drawing exercises. I even had them drawing typographic forms one morning. My wife is also very creative and influential in this regard. She teaches a nature drawing program for children.

Where can we see your work next?

I had a couple pieces in a group show last year and some of my work will be in a book coming out next spring called “Cutters”. Showing this work is not something that I am actively pursuing. I’m not so convinced of its worthiness. I have a flickr stream, a typepad blog and if you find yourself wandering around in my attic any time soon, you will probably see some work.

Thanks John!

Images:

  1. The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov, designed by John Gall
  2. The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov, designed by Megan Wilson and Duncan Hannah
  3. The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov, designed by Rodrigo Corral
  4. Paper Souls, John Gall (2008)
  5. Less Bravos, John Gall (2008)
  6. Shack Wine, John Gall (2010)
  7. Yeast Grippe, John Gall (2009)
  8. Limeade Fans, John Gall (2009)
  9. Cover Combine #13, John Gall (2011)
  10. Cover Combine #8, John Gall (2011)
  11. Cover Combine #4, John Gall (2009)
  12. Amendable Boy, John Gall (2010)
  13. Spray Degree, John Gall (2010)
  14. Untitled, James Gall (2008)
  15. Untitled, Owen Gall (2008)
  16. Gas Diode Zoom, John Gall (2008)
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Something for the Weekend

Dieter Rams book by graphic design graduate Daniel Bartha:

This project was a book I created around the ten most important principles for what Dieter Rams considered was good design. Taking on board these elements myself, I took away as much as I could from his unique designs but to still leave them instantly recognisable.

And since I seem to be on a German theme this week…

Nabokov in Berlin — An essay by Lesley Chamberlain in Standpoint magazine:

As consumerism and Hitler rose together so Nabokov treated totalitarian politics principally as aesthetically repugnant. It was “another beastliness starting to megaphone” in Germany which in 1937 drove him and his half-Jewish wife Vera to leave Berlin for France and the US. It was almost too late. Berlin suited him. The anti-totalitarian novels Bend Sinister (1947) and Invitation to a Beheading (1938) which followed were remarkable, particularly the latter, for not insisting that totalitarianism’s victims were moral heroes, only men of taste. Nabokov, who saw in art the possibility of redemption, was tempted to think taste ruled out evil.

And from Germany, to France (via Norway)…

Master of Understatement — Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics, on Jason’s Werewolves of Montpellier:

[I]t’s possible to describe [Werewolves of Montpellier] by saying it’s a low-key domestic drama, with a Harold Pinter play’s worth of portentous silences, about a bored, disenchanted young man who’s in hopelessly in love with his lesbian best friend. Or you can say it’s about a jewel thief who discovers a secret cabal of werewolves. It’s true that you have to pay attention to catch the details: the fact that Jason draws everyone with animal heads makes it a little bit harder to read some of the characters’ interactions. But maybe Jason’s central joke is that you have to take extreme measures to create certain kinds of drama when a lot of the time people aren’t feeling anything in particular.

Techland also have  an exclusive preview of the book.

See also: The Beat’s review of Werewolves of Montpellier

Werewolves of Montpellier is about an art student/thief who dresses up as a werewolf before he goes out to break into people’s homes at night, which a society of actual werewolves is not amused about.

What that boils down to on the page, though, are scenes of people sitting next to each other at the laundromat, looking at each other in silence or talking about French actresses while playing chess—and each time, it’s utterly fascinating, and the scene draws you in almost immediately and you don’t want to stop.

Jason tells stories with comics in ways that never occur to a lot of people who make comics.

From Europe to Asia…

An Obsolete Practice — idsgn considers the end of movable type in China. Fascinating stuff:

The invention of movable type in China developed with Gutenberg’s mechanical press and hot type-metal, proved to have widespread and lasting success in Europe. But in practice, it was not suitable for Chinese—a language with over 45,000 unique characters. Typesetting in Chinese took “minding p’s and q’s” to a whole new level, and accuracy was challenging when characters were essentially compounds of many radicals and ideograms. Running a Chinese letterpress shop required an enormous storage space and basic literacy of at least 4,000 commonly used characters.

And on a strangely similar note…

Rudy Lehman’s Incredible Linotype Letterpress (via Coudal).

Have a great weekend!

Rudy Lehman’s Incredible Linotype LetterpressRudy Lehman’s Incredible Linotype Letterpress

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Midweek Miscellany

Eye, Eye! — The Creative Review looks at the vibrant work of printing studio/small press Nobrow.

It’s an Anagram! — Indigo’s e-book initiative Shortcovers has become ‘Kobo’. Much fuss has been made about the name (and the slightly iffy redesign), but what’s more interesting is that Kobo is being spun-off from its parent company in an attempt to expand its global reach… The intrepid Mark Bertils and PW have more on the international angle; Wired think Amazon should be worried; and The National Post have a good Q&A with Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis…

Collector’s Items — Vote for your favourite Nabokov cover from John Gall‘s set of individually commissioned redesigns for Vintage.

The Decade of Dirty DesignSteven Heller, author of Handwritten and New Vintage Type (to name just a couple) on the “anti-digital” Oughts (via Charles Brock):

With the increase of the D.I.Y. sensibility, with renewed emphasis on “making things from scratch,” designers were feeling a need to make physical (not virtual) contact with their materials and outcomes…

[Perhaps less “anti-digital” than “post-digital“? Any thoughts designers?]

And finally…

ryan-tym

The Hitchcock Collection — a self-initiated project by London-based graphic designer Ryan Tym (via FormFiftyFive):

After recently purchasing a badly designed Alfred Hitchcock
DVD box set, I set to work on creating my own collection of
original covers. Each design features an iconic image related
to the film it represents and includes a bold typographic
title.

I would love to see Ryan design some book covers… Wouldn’t you?

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Midweek Miscellany, November 11th 2009

The Nabokov Collection — Art Director John Gall on the Vintage Nabokov redesign at Design Observer:

Nabokov was a passionate butterfly collector, a theme that has cropped up on some of his past covers. My idea was also a play on this concept. Each cover consists of a photograph of a specimen box, the kind used by collectors like Nabokov to display insects. Each box would be filled with paper, ephemera, and insect pins, selected to somehow evoke the book’s content. And to make it more interesting… I thought it would be fun to ask a group of talented designers to help create the boxes.

John’s short essay is accompanied by a great slide show of the specimen boxes (above: The Luzhin Defense by Paul Sahre; below Speak, Memory by Michael Bierut).

And Joseph at The BDR has a nice follow up post, with a couple of nice vintage Nabokov covers.

So, do the specimen boxes (lovely as they are) work as covers? You tell me…

Amazon releases a Kindle app for PCs. But who cares? Hmm… I don’t know if I ‘care’ as such, but I do think it’s significant. Is it one more nail in the plastic coffin of single use devices? There’s more on the app at the Washington Post

And while we’re on the subject of e-books…

The Internet Isn’t Killing Anything — From Russell Davies:

Something That’s Growing Is Not The Same As Something That’s Big.

Something That’s Declining Is Not The Same As Something That’s Small.

…Worth remembering I think.

Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2009 — The New York Times choose their favourites (accompanied with a lovely slide show). The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik talks about the selection process with Sam Tanenhaus on the Book Review Podcast (pictured above: Tales From Outer Surburbia written and illustrated by the awesome Shaun Tan).

And finally…

A sneak peak at the new Krazy & Ignatz cover by Chris Ware for Fantagraphics.

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