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Published March 1, 2013

Something for the Weekend

Impressionable Minds — Edward Tenner on Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary and the legacy of the controversial cartoonist, at The Atlantic:

I still think of Fosdick as Capp’s masterpiece, running postmodern-style as a comic strip within a strip and accepted good-naturedly by Chester Gould, creator of its target Dick Tracy, for whom Capp always professed the highest regard. Its greatness exists even if Capp bowed to 1950s social conservatism in marrying Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae (which his emerging rival Charles Shultz called the worst comic-strip decision ever) in 1952. Even Disney didn’t hitch Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

Yet Fosdick, who had been introduced a decade earlier, was a pivotal character, probably the most subversive of authority of any of the comic personalities, but presented with such engaging absurdity that even Dr. Fredric Wertham’s anti-comic crusade could not stop him. As Shumacher and Kitchen say, it was an adult strip—and yet it was one acceptable on a Sunday morning around the family dining table, whatever its effects on impressionable young minds.

Friends Electric — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on the difference between online and offline experiences:

The reason people struggle with the tension between online experience and offline experience is because there is a tension between online experience and offline experience, and people are smart enough to understand, to feel, that the tension does not evaporate as the online intrudes ever further into the offline. In fact, the growing interpenetration between the two modes of experience—the two states of being—actually ratchets up the tension. We sense a threat in the hegemony of the online because there’s something in the offline that we’re not eager to sacrifice.

And finally…

Who says publishing is full of over-caffeinated alcoholics? — Prospero on the future of bookstores:

For a bookstore to remain successful, it must improve “the experience of buying books,” says Alex Lifschutz, an architect whose London-based practice is designing the new Foyles. He suggests an array of approaches: “small, quiet spaces cocooned with books; larger spaces where one can dwell and read; other larger but still intimate spaces where one can hear talks from authors about books, literature, science, travel and cookery.” The atmosphere is vital, he adds. Exteriors must buzz with activity, entrances must be full of eye-catching presentations and a bar and café is essential.

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Published January 9, 2013

Midweek Miscellany

Ghost Shapes — Writer Warren Ellis talks comics and, very briefly, his new novel Gun Machine at Robot Six:

Gun Machine is as much about the ghost shape of Manhattan’s previous settlements and roadways as it is about its modern architecture, and the invisible channels of wireless communication around which that structure now bends. I see — or at least I look for — the foundations of deep time, and the deals we do with it.

See also: A.V. Club’s review of Gun Machine:

In Ellis’ world, everything is all-caps, all the time, and any character who can ask for a cup of coffee in a way that doesn’t call for at least one exclamation point is a spoilsport. Gun Machine, Ellis’ second prose novel, is in exactly the same style and spirit as his comics; like his first novel, Crooked Little Vein, it gives the impression that Ellis didn’t write it as a comic only because pictures would have slowed down the action.

Sounds about right. The book is also reviewed at The New York Times. (That fabulous cover for Gun Machine was designed by Keith Hayes designed by Oliver Munday with art direction by Keith Hayes by the way).

Be Still My Exploding Heart — Stephen Page, head of Faber & Faber, on the Penguin-Random House merger and what it means for the industry at large, at The Guardian:

Authors are talked about as brands in their own right, and this is correct. Publishers rarely achieve the status of becoming consumer brands of scale and significance. Is the next story for publishing going to be one dominated by global and local author and publisher brands, especially in niches? Authors and readers are at the centre of the world of books, and finding new ways to serve them will create further different structures. This merger may be seen as a starting pistol or perhaps an explosion in the heart of the old order dominated by the book trade.

Disposable by Design — Nicholas Carr on e-books and the apparent resilience of print books, at the Wall Street Journal:

From the start, e-book purchases have skewed disproportionately toward fiction, with novels representing close to two-thirds of sales. Digital best-seller lists are dominated in particular by genre novels, like thrillers and romances. Screen reading seems particularly well-suited to the kind of light entertainments that have traditionally been sold in supermarkets and airports as mass-market paperbacks… Readers of weightier fare, including literary fiction and narrative nonfiction, have been less inclined to go digital. They seem to prefer the heft and durability, the tactile pleasures, of what we still call “real books”—the kind you can set on a shelf. E-books, in other words, may turn out to be just another format—an even lighter-weight, more disposable paperback. That would fit with the discovery that once people start buying digital books, they don’t necessarily stop buying printed ones.

An alternative, more circumspect, version of the article can be found on Carr’s blog:

None of this means that, in the end, e-books won’t come to dominate book sales. My own sense is that they probably will. But, as we enter 2013, I’m considerably less confident in that prediction than I was a few years back, when, in the wake of the initial Kindle surge, e-book sales were growing at 200 or 300 percent annually. At the very least, it seems like the transition from print to electronic will take a lot longer than people expected.

And perhaps most interesting of all, Carr has posted a series of exchanges with Clay Shirky and Kevin Kelly about the post.

Covering some similar ground, only bleaker, Dennis Johnson’s striking post on the slow death of Barnes & Noble is also essential reading:

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about all this is the fact that, as with the demise of Borders, the demise of B&N has nothing to do with what its customers actually wanted, what’s best for mother literature or free speech, or anything other than made-up trends covering for killer capitalism. There’s still plenty of evidence that people like bookstores, for example, and even sales of hardcovers — let alone print books — are holding on. And so the lust for higher margins — whether from Godiva chocolates or ebooks — turned into fool’s gold for B&N. It’s perhaps a typical death in the Free Trade era, when companies lose all sight of their identity in the blinding light of the bottom line … but it’s the wrong death for a bookseller.

Somewhere in there, Johnson quotes this article by David Streitfeld in the New York Times, which makes the rather chilling point about a demise of Borders in 2011. Not only did it have a negative effect on the sale of print books, it was bad for e-books too. “Readers could no longer see what they wanted to go home and order.”

Sigh…

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Published March 5, 2012

Monday Miscellany

It is all hands to the pump at The Optimist HQ right now (meetings, deadlines, house maintenance, and vomit-propelled kids), but apologies for the missing links on Friday. Here’s a very quick Monday round-up to make up for it:

Designer Stuart Bache talks to Faceout Books about his John Le Carré covers.

I also talked to Stuart about his designs here.

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, chooses five books on the impact of the information age at The Browser.

The Writer’s Job — Tim Parks on writing as a career choice:

Creative writing schools are frequently blamed for a growing standardization and flattening in contemporary narrative. This is unfair. It is the anxiety of the writers about being excluded from their chosen career, together with a shared belief that we know what literature is and can learn how to produce it that encourages people to write similar books. Nobody is actually expecting anything very new. Just new versions of the old. Again and again when reading for review, or doing jury service perhaps for a prize, I come across carefully written novels that “do literature” as it is known. Literary fiction has become a genre like any other, with a certain trajectory, a predictable pay off, and a fairly limited and well-charted body of liberal Western wisdom to purvey. Much rarer is the sort of book… where the writer appears, amazingly, to be working directly from experience and imagination, drawing on his knowledge of past literature only in so far as it offers tools for having life happen on the page.

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Published February 9, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Beautiful children’s book and magazine covers from Korea in the 1950’s and 1960’s at the amazing 50 Watts.

Not a Pretty Scene — Tess Thackara on design and the future of printed books at Guernica magazine:

Amy Martin’s illustrations for Symphony City [published by McSweeney’s McMullens imprint 2011] create a layered multidimensional and richly textural world, which often appears like original paper collages. In some places the visual environment of an urban landscape full of music she creates is so absorbing that I wondered what an e-book or iPad app could offer that print couldn’t… McSweeney’s art director and editor Brian McMullen, who developed and gave his name to the imprint, offered a more practical reason for keeping to printed matter for kids: “Those of us who are parents aren’t convinced that kids need to be encouraged to spend more time than they already do in front of screens… Have you ever tried to tell a three-year-old it’s time to stop looking at one of these devices and hand it back to Daddy? It’s not a pretty scene. These devices are just not compatible with bedtime, in my experience, whereas a printed picture book, for whatever reason, is.”

See also: Designers on Book Covers of the Future at Publishing Perspectives.

Publishing’s Ecosystem on the Brink — An interesting summary by the Author’s Guild of recent articles in Bloomberg Business Week, The New York Times and Harpers about the perilous state of the  book industry.

And finally…

Attention Deficit — Lars Mensel interviews Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, for The European:

There’s no question that the internet offers all sorts of benefits – that is the reason why we use it so much. It is an incredibly powerful and useful technology that makes all sorts of information immediately available to us. Things that used to be impossible, hard or expensive to find are now right there. And we all know how to improve our ability to make decisions with it. But accompanying that, incredibly, is the fact that we become so intent on gathering information that we never slow down and think deeply about the information we find. We gain the ability to harvest huge amounts of data but we lose the ability to engage in contemplation, reflexion and other modes of thinking that require a large amount of attentiveness and the ability to filter out distractions and disruptions.

 

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Published August 5, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, reviews Retromania by Simon Reynolds for The New Republic:

Who wants yesterday’s papers?” sang Mick Jagger in 1967. “Who wants yesterday’s girl?” The answer, in the Swinging 60s, was obvious: “Nobody in the world.” That was then. Now we seem to want nothing more than to read yesterday’s papers and carry on with yesterday’s girl. Popular culture has become obsessed with the past—with recycling it, rehashing it, replaying it. Though we live in a fast-forward age, we cannot take our finger off the rewind button.

And Mr. Reynolds has been a busy man. Not only is his book also reviewed at the A.V. Club, he is interviewed about it at Pitchfork, The Quietus and The Second Pass.

Shiny and New — Designer Matt Roeser talks about his New Cover project with Ian Shimkoviak at Covered Up:

I love physical books. I have more books than I have space for in my house, but there’s just something about a physical book that is so appealing to me that an e-book will never be able to replicate. Now, whether the rest of the world feels that same way is yet to be seen. I definitely think there is a large population that doesn’t care how they’re experiencing the book; they just want to be able to read it.

And finally…

Drinking, Gambling and Grandma — Lorrie Moore, author of A Gate at the Stairs, on the TV show Friday Night Lights for the NYRB:

The series wants Dillon [Texas] to function as a microcosm of larger working- and middle-class America: it takes its fifty or so hours and opens a window on American family, education, community race relations, athletics, social class and its various brokennesses. But lest you go away, it keeps you involved with the drama of high school—its romantic student soap operas, its tense and dire administrative politics, plus the multigenerational home life that has dads in prison, dads in Iraq, dads gambling and drinking and roaming around the country while Grandma sits in the front room.

 

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Published March 9, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Two stunningly minimal designs by Rodrigo Corral for New Directions.

Faceout Books is back after a hiatus. First up, an interview with Jennifer Heuer about her design for Down and Delirious in Mexico City by Daniel Hernandez.

Haystacks of Needles — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on situational overload versus ambient overload:

Situational overload is not the problem. When we complain about information overload, what we’re usually complaining about is ambient overload. This is an altogether different beast. Ambient overload doesn’t involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles. We experience ambient overload when we’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all. We keep clicking links, keep hitting the refresh key, keep opening new tabs, keep checking email in-boxes and RSS feeds, keep scanning Amazon and Netflix recommendations – and yet the pile of interesting information never shrinks.

The cause of situational overload is too much noise. The cause of ambient overload is too much signal.

The Case for the Novella — The New York Times Magazine has an excerpt from “The Three-Day Weekend Plan,” an essay by John Brandon from the new book The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books (Soft Skull):

Bluntly, the novella is in its Golden Age as a form right now because no one is beating it with a stick until nickels fall out. So my plan for the novella is — drum roll: Do nothing. Or do whatever little is required to steward the status quo. Let’s agree, shall we, to keep throwing around the inane term Great American Novel, and to never, ever utter the phrase Great American Novella.

And on the subject of The New York Times Magazine…

The Speed of Change — Former Design Director for NYTimes.com Khoi Vinh on the new design of the New York Times Magazine:

Digital publishing is supposed to be much quicker than print publishing, but this… suggests that more important than the speed of medium is the nimbleness of the business behind it. The print side of The New York Times takes a lot of good natured ribbing for being slow to publish news, but it’s still very, very good at what it does. Which is to say that few organizations can publish on a weekly basis and still effect the kind of major change that this redesign represents.

In some ways, the digital side of the business is not as nimble as that. To be sure, few companies can execute digital publishing as well as The New York Times… But partly because the medium is much younger and constantly changing, partly because best practices are less well-defined, and partly because the mission is more diffuse, execution is a more intricate, protracted and, often, inefficient affair on the digital side.

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Published March 4, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Beep Beep — Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) reviews The Information by James Gleick:

As a celebration of human ingenuity, The Information is a deeply hopeful book. But it ends on an ambivalent note. The mathematical analysis of information, Gleick points out, entails the “ruthless sacrifice” of meaning, the very thing that “gives information its value and its purpose.” To the number-crunchers and code-wranglers who design our world-engirdling information networks, a message’s meaning is beside the point. A bit is a bit is a bit. As Shannon himself dryly noted, meaning is “irrelevant to the engineering problem.”

And yes, that cover was designed by Peter Mendelsund.

Beginners Edited — The original draft of Beginners by Raymond Carver compared with the final version of the story, retitled and published as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, edited by Gordon Lish. It’s from a couple of years ago, but still fascinating if you’ve never seen it (via Biblioklept).

Collector’s Items — The Guardian on the renaissance of chapbooks:

The 16th century merriments that became the chapman’s stock in trade were historically cheap, crudely made and illustrated using recycled woodcuts.

Today’s chapbooks, which are enjoying a revival along with independent regional publishing, bear little resemblance to the roughly produced books of the past. They are objects of beauty in their own right, with emphasis on original design as well as being a showcase for original writing. Pamphlet-sized but glossy, and more book than leaflet, they are highly covetable, which partly explains their appeal.

And finally…

A Curious Journey— The story of Margret and H.A. Rey, the creators of Curious George, at More Intelligent Life:

On June 12th 1940, the couple left Paris. The Nazis arrived less than two days later.

The Reys made their way to the south of France, and spent several weeks in a makeshift refugee camp in a high-school gymnasium before proceeding to Lisbon. From there they arranged passage to Brazil, and months later to New York. They carried with them the first drawings for the Curious George books, and showed them to police as proof of their occupation. The first book, “Curious George”, was published in 1941. The little monkey arrives in New York and strolls off of the ship with a smile, holding his papers in one hand and a little red valise in the other. A policeman salutes in welcome.

An exhibition of art by the Reys is on display at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco until March 13th.

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Published March 2, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

The Death Ray by Daniel Clowes

The new cover for Daniel Clowes’ The Death Ray available this fall from Drawn + Quarterly. (The usual disclosure: D+Q is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books).

The Enemy of Creativity — Jim Holt reviews Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows for London Review of Books:

It’s not that the web is making us less intelligent; if anything, the evidence suggests it sharpens more cognitive skills than it dulls. It’s not that the web is making us less happy, although there are certainly those who, like Carr, feel enslaved by its rhythms and cheated by the quality of its pleasures. It’s that the web may be an enemy of creativity. Which is why Woody Allen might be wise in avoiding it altogether.

A Machine To Think With — Paul Duguid reviews Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson, Publishing as a Vocation by Irving Louis Horowitz and The Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet  for the TLS:

I. A. Richards called the book “a machine to think with”, yet it is curiously resistant to technological standardization. That point escapes many digitizing technologists, who are not perhaps the anti-book boors as sometimes portrayed… Rather they may be the last romantics, idealizing the book as a simple carrier of information and so one that submits unproblematically to their computer algorithms.

Unsolving the City — BLDGBLOG talks to author China Miéville about architecture and his recent novels The City and The City and Kraken. Fantastic stuff:

My intent with The City and The City was… to derive something hyperbolic and fictional through an exaggeration of the logic of borders, rather than to invent my own magical logic of how borders could be. It was an extrapolation of really quite everyday, quite quotidian, juridical and social aspects of nation-state borders… But I’m always slightly nervous when people make analogies to things like Palestine because I think there can be a danger of a kind of sympathetic magic: you see two things that are about divided cities and so you think that they must therefore be similar in some way.

The new covers for Miéville’s forthcoming book Embassytown, and his entire back catalogue with Pan Macmillan UK, were designed by Crush Creative.

And finally…

Handsome Boy Modeling School — A profile Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, in The New York Times’ Fashion and Style section:

Mr. Stein, an unabashed bon vivant who favors bespoke shirts and tailor-made suits by Kirk Miller, appears indifferent to accusations of pretension or dandyism… He has already cemented his status as a somewhat unlikely sex symbol (though among New York’s literary crowd, being pale, thin and occasionally bespectacled doesn’t count against you) with a practiced charm and habit of leaning in close and locking eyes intensely in conversation.

There is hope for us all yet… I just wish I could afford the bespoke shirts and tailor-made suits…

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Published February 9, 2011

Too Much Information

That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the technological shifts in communication we’re living with are unprecedented… The scale of the transformation is such that an ever-expanding literature has emerged to censure or celebrate it. A series of books explaining why books no longer matter is a paradox that Chesterton would have found implausible, yet there they are, and they come in the typical flavors: the eulogistic, the alarmed, the sober, and the gleeful.

The New Yorker‘s critic-at-large Adam Gopnik reviews the recent spate of books about the internet and our minds — including Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, and Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers — neatly dividing them into the categories “Never-Betters”, the “Better-Nevers”, and the “Ever-Wasers”:

The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.

It is an article unlikely to satisfy either the evangelists or doom-mongers, but it sounds about right to me in a smart-alecky sort of way…
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Published January 20, 2011

Technologies That Changed Our Brains

I think what the book… gave us a more attentive way of thinking. What the book does as a technology is shield us from distraction. The only thing going on is the, you know, the progression of words and sentences across page after page and so suddenly we see this immersive kind of very attentive thinking whether you are paying attention to a story or to an argument, or whatever. And what we know about the brain is the brain adapts to these types of tools.

And so the ways of thinking that we learned from the tools we can then apply in other areas of our lives. So we become, after the arrival of the printing press in general, more attentive more attuned to contemplative ways of thinking. And that’s a very unnatural way of using our mind. You know, paying attention, filtering out distractions. So the book, I think, like the map before it, like the clock, created or help create a revolution in the human mind in the way our habits of mind and ultimately the way we use our brains.

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, discusses how the map, the mechanical clock, and the printed book have shaped human thought, and how the human brain adapts to new technology at The Big Think:

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Published December 31, 2010

Favourite New Books of 2010

Ducking in just under the wire, here is my list of favourite of new books of the year. It’s not meant to represent the “best” of 2010. Rather, it’s a completely unscientific, very subjective list of books (arranged in alphabetical order) that I enjoyed. As I mentioned in my previous post, I found compiling the list a bit of a challenge and yet, for all that, there’s an air of withering predictability about the selections. There are no surprises. But even if this wasn’t a particular stellar year for reading, there were still lots of books I was excited about and that can only be a good thing.

I should also mention, for the sake of disclosure and all that, the top 10 includes one book distributed by Raincoast Books in Canada, and the list of honourable mentions refers to a couple of other titles I have helped promote in some minor capacity. They’re included here because I actually like them, not for any nefarious marketing reasons, but I guess you’ll just have to take my word for that. In any case, all these titles are identified with an asterisk…

And with that out of the way, on to the list!

Born Modern: The Life and Work of Alvin Lustig*
Elaine Cohen Lustig & Steven Heller
Chronicle Books
ISBN 9780811861274

I am a little embarrassed to start this list with a title distributed by Raincoast, but it comes first alphabetically and, I can honestly say tat Born Modern was the book I was most looking forward to this year. And I was not the only person excited about the book. When I tweeted about it from the Raincoast sales conference, the response was immediate. Almost every North American book designer I’ve ever spoken to cites Lustig — who designed covers for New Directions Press in the 1950’s — as an influence. The book designer’s book designer, then… A must-have.

C
Tom McCarthy
Knopf
ISBN 9780307593337

Tom McCarthy’s C was, as mentioned previously, one of the defining books of the year for me, standing — perhaps unfairly — opposite the ubiquitous Freedom. If I am honest though, I liked it less than McCarthy’s previous novel, the starkly compact Remainder (one of my favourite books of the last 10 years). At times, the sprawling, crawling C felt like it was held together with the sticky-tape of McCarthy’s singular intellect (a thought reaffirmed by seeing him in conversation with Douglas Coupland in Toronto). But somehow, in the end,  it still works in some sort of baffling, gorgeous way.

The book was also perfect excuse to finally talk to Knopf cover designer Peter Mendelsund for the blog. The Q & A with Peter and Tom about C is here.


The City and the City
China Miéville
Del Rey
ISBN 9780345497529

I am cheating a little by including The City and the City because it was first published in 2009. It was, however, published in paperback in 2010, and as that’s how a lot of us still buy our fiction, I’m bending the rules to include it.

The novel itself is essentially a detective story, but what lifts out of the ordinary is the imaginary space in which it takes place. Architecture, geography and maps are clearly important to Miéville, but where, for example, Perdido Street Station creates a fantastically baroque city of ghettos and towering alien architecture, The City and the City is only slightly off-kilter — familiar but unsettling — and the book is even better for it.

Joy Division
Kevin Cummins
Rizzoli
ISBN 9780847834815

This was my Christmas present (thank you Mrs C.O.!) and it is — pretty obviously I would think — for fans only. Still, I’m guessing there’s quite a few out there. In any case, the book is a collection of beautiful black and white photographs of Joy Division and the late Ian Curtis by Manchester-born photographer Kevin Cummins. It includes Cummins’ iconic pictures for the NME of the band standing on a snowy bridge in Hulme, Manchester, as well as photographs of live performances and the band back stage. The book was stylishly designed — with more than a whiff of Peter Saville — by London design agency Farrow.

Just Kids
Patti Smith
Ecco
ISBN 9780060936228

Other than owing a copy of Horses,  I can’t say that I’m particularly familiar with the work of Patti Smith, or Robert Mapplethorpe for that matter (other than the sort of stuff must people know about his art, and that he was connected to Sam Wagstaff, no relation). But, it doesn’t really matter. Smith’s memoir about her relationship with Mapplethorpe is a touching and self-deprecating look at their early years together in New York and their adventures in the art/music scene of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

Memories of the Future
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull
NYRB
ISBN 9781590173190

I am definitely cheating by including this in the list as it was published in 2009. That said, it was published late in 2009, I missed it, and it’s too good not to be in this year’s top 10.

The book itself  is a collection of seven short stories written between 1922 and Krzhizhanovsky’s death in 1950,  all of which were suppressed by Soviet censors. The stories are reminiscent of Gogol’s short fiction and Bulgakov’s novellas, and suffice to say, they’re all bonkers. But in a good way. I loved the story Quadraturin about the man who gets lost in his black, ever-expanding apartment, and the strange time travel title story which concludes the book.

Penguin 75: Designers, Authors, Commentary (the Good, the Bad…)
Paul Buckley
Penguin
ISBN 9780143117629

Seeing as I spend so much time talking about cover design, I would be remiss if I didn’t include Penguin 75 in my top 10. Released to celebrate Penguin’s 75th anniversary, it’s a surprisingly diverse and candid look at the recent cover designs from Penguin’s US outpost in New York.  I talked about Penguin 75 with art director Paul Buckley and book designer Christopher Brand here.

Parker: The Outfit
Darwyn Cooke
IDW
ISBN 9781600107627

The previous book in Darwyn Cooke’s Richard Stark adaptations, The Hunter, was on last year’s list, so perhaps it is hardly surprising that the sequel, which I think is better,  is in this year’s top 10 as well. In new book, the formidable Parker — now with a new face — turns the tables on ‘the Outfit’, who quickly wish that they’d let sleeping dogs lie. Cooke seems in more confident form with this adaptation and the result is a stylish and fast-paced noir that looks incredibly cool. My pithier Advent Book Blog pitch for The Outfit is here.

The Shallows
Nicholas Carr
W.W. Norton & Co.
ISBN 9780393072228

I had a frisson of recognition reading Carr’s description of internet affected attention spans and I doubt I was the only one who thought “oh god, that’s happening to me” while reading The Shallows. The book is too long — a shorter book would’ve been even more effective — but it is still compelling. Carr doesn’t say technology is wrong, but reminds us that for all its benefits, we should be mindful of the consequences and what we might be losing.

Werewolves of Montpelier
Jason
Fantagraphics
ISBN 9781606993590

I wrote about my love for Jason’s comics when Werewolves of Montpellier was about to be released earlier this year, and the book itself didn’t disappoint. Ostensibly the book is about a thief called Sven who disguises himself as werewolf to rob people’s apartments and incurs the wrath of the town’s actual werewolves. It is, however, as much about friendship, identity, loneliness, and, ultimately, Sven’s unrequited love for his neighbour Audrey. In a lovely one-page scene, Audrey stands behind Sven, hugging his shoulders.  “Do women come from another planet?” she asks. “Yes, women come from another planet,” Sven replies. The whole book is achingly brief, but Werewolves of Montpellier is possibly my favourite Jason book to date.

Honourable Mentions

American Trademarks edited by Eric Baker and Tyler Blick*
Footnotes In Gaza by Joe Sacco (December 2009)
I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester (published in the UK as Whoops!)
KENK by Richard Poplak and Nick Marinkovich*
Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960’s and 1970’s by Jonathan Lippincott*
The Lost Rolling Stones Photographs: The Bob Bonis Archive, 1964-1966 by Larry Marrion
The Rocketeer: The Complete Collection by Dave Stevens (December 2009)
Shirley Craven and Hull Traders: Revolutionary Fabrics and Furniture 1957-1980 by Lesley Jackson (October 2009)

So there you go. If  this hasn’t met your requirements, Largehearted Boy is aggregating every online “best of 2010” book list he can find, and Fimoculous is aggregating all of the lists related to 2010 in categories ranging from ‘Advertising’ through to ‘Words’. That should keep you busy…

Happy New Year!

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Published December 10, 2010

Something for the Weekend

Past and Present — An excerpt from Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig by Steve Heller and Elaine Lustig Cohen at Design Observer*:

Lustig’s designs fluidly shift from past to present. For his early “experimental” work he built upon an armature of old technologies… and techniques…, which evolved through new technologies… into unprecedented styles… Toward the end of his life, his typography turned into a playful amalgam of vintage letters composed in contemporary layouts with vibrant colors. In “Personal Notes,” he wrote, “As we become more mature we will learn to master the interplay between past and present and not be so self-conscious of our rejection or acceptance of tradition. We will not make the mistake that both rigid modernists and conservatives make, of confusing the quality of form with the specific forms themselves.”

The Authentic — Chuck Klosterman, author most recently of Eating the Dinosaur, profiles Jonathan F., author of Freedom, for GQ Magazine:

It’s a present-day problem: There’s just no escaping the larger, omnipresent puzzle of “reality.” Even when people read fiction, they want to know what’s real. But this, it seems, is not Franzen’s concern. He disintegrates the issue with one sentence.

“Here’s the thing about inauthentic people,” he says on the train, speaking in the abstract. “Inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity.”

Telling Stories — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on interactive storytelling:

The ability to write communally and interactively with computers is nothing new… Digital tools for collaborative writing date back twenty or thirty years. And yet interactive storytelling has never taken off. The hypertext novel in particular turned out to be a total flop. When we read stories, we still read ones written by authors. The reason for the failure of interactive storytelling has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with stories.

Footnotes — Part one of a long interview with journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco, author most recently of the remarkable Footnotes in Gaza, at Art Threat (via Drawn):

[T]he biggest influence on me journalistically speaking has been George Orwell. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book Road to Wigan Pier, but Orwell spent time in the industrial areas of Britain during the depression and took a room with a miner, lived with miners. He went down into the mine shaft with the miners. His ability to go to these places and really look at things from a ground level, that was impressive to me. And for other reasons too: because he was so dedicated to his work, and he felt that his work was sort of bigger than himself as a human being. I appreciated that dedication.

Part two will run on Monday apparently…

And finally… Superhero WikiLeaks:

(Thanks Shawn)

*Born Modern is published by Chronicle Books and is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books.

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