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Russian Plays in Translation Designed by John Gall

The brilliant John Gall has designed a wonderful set of minimal book covers for Theater Communications Group’s Russian drama series:

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A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev (Theatre Group Communications / February 2015)

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The Inspector by Nikolai Gogol (Theatre Group Communications / June 2015)

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The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (Theatre Group Communications / August 2015)

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Q & A with Misha Beletsky, Part Two

In part one of our conversationMisha Beletsky, art director at Abbeville Press, discussed his interest in the work of German-born designer and calligrapher Ismar David, the subject his recent book The Book Jackets of Ismar David, published by RIT Press. In this second and final part of our interview, Misha and talks about his own work as a designer and an art director:

How did you become interested in design?

The father of a boyhood friend in Russia was a book designer. He had a photo lab set up in his closet, took pictures of letters, and pasted them up with rubber cement. Having access to creation of the book, that holy of the holies of the bookish world I grew up in seemed like magic. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. One day I tagged along with this friend to take night classes at the Moscow Printing Institute. Suddenly, I felt it was no longer a world I could enjoy as a guest, but a world I could be a part of. I felt it was not only something I liked doing, but an area where I could make a real difference. When I arrived in the US, one particular image from a RISD catalog influenced my decision to choose this school over others: a photograph of a calligraphy class. The unassuming black-and-white image spoke to me more than all lavish and clever full-color catalogs of other schools not because I wanted to become a calligrapher, but because I knew this was a place that based its design education on a solid ground. The essential training in typography I received at RISD laid the ground for my summer internship with David R. Godine, Publisher in Boston. This small press started out as a letterpress printing shop in a barn and over the years has been responsible for more important books on book design and typography than any single publisher in this country. There I caught the bug of fine printing. I began appreciating printer’s ink, impression, and paper, and there I was indoctrinated about the proper use of old style figures and small caps. I learned to consider all elements of the book as a part of one system where the whole is more than a sum of its parts and each part is integrally related to each other. Empowered by my discovery of the letterpress, I went back to school to spend my Senior year hand-setting metal type, carving woodcuts, and printing my own limited-edition books. My first job after school designing book interiors for Alfred A. Knopf was the best way to apply the ideals of fine printing to real-life trade publishing. Knopf house style had changed little since the heady days of W.A. Dwiggins, George Salter, and Warren Chappell. I explored every nook in the corporate library, taking in every book designed by the best designers of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Their lessons are still with me today.

Could you describe your book cover design process?

Most of the books I design are art books, which usually implies I am responsible for both the cover and the interior design. This means I have a rare privilege of making sure the cover and the interior design agree. I usually start from the inside out: I decide on the interior typography first, and then move on to the jacket. Unlike most trade books, where cover designers are only limited by their imagination and their budget in the choice of the artwork, the cover image for illustrated books usually comes from within the book. I select an image, crop it, and design the typography. This limitation made me keenly aware of how much you can do with type alone and sympathetic to the designers of the past who were able to achieve great results with limited tools.

What do you look for in a designer’s portfolio?

I look for understanding of and an eye for traditional book typography. Only a handful of portfolios out of hundreds I reviewed had it.

Do you see any prevalent trends in contemporary book design?

There is a relatively new trend of purely decorative covers and bindings by Coralie Bickford-Smith and others that seems to be a reaction to the overwhelming number of clever designs. As far as interiors go, by and large, I see a lot of unexciting work of decent quality and very little great work. I keep waiting for a resurgence of good typography, but it has not arrived yet.

What advice would you give a designer starting their career?

Read Ben Shahn’s The Shape of Content. Learn calligraphy, drawing, and printmaking. Learn letterpress printing from metal type. Manual skills cannot be emphasized enough.

Who are some of your design heroes?

Bruce Rogers, the subject of my new book. He had an almost unfathomable sensitivity to typography. In his lifetime he was famous to a point of embarrassment. Today he is hardly ever talked about. Yet, to me he remains the most versatile and the most accomplished practitioner of our craft.

Another name is Vladimir Favorsky, a towering genius of Russian graphic arts, completely forgotten outside of Russia. For many years he taught at VKhuTeMas, the Russian sister-school of the Bauhaus (which evolved into the design department of Moscow Printing Institute where I briefly studied), yet he was in opposition to the Constructivist ideas espoused by most professors there. He developed an original design philosophy of his own that integrated Avant-garde ideas with the traditional craft of wood engraving. Ironically, his fusion of the old and the new may prove more relevant today than the radical rejection of the old by his famous modernist colleagues.

What does the future hold for book cover design?

Who knows? What does the future hold for visual art or for our culture at large? It seems we’ve been living in a cultural twilight zone. We’ve tried Modernism and we came to a logical dead end, we’ve tried revolting against Modernism, and we’ve become tired of that, too. What’s next? I hope we can learn to build on top of what the previous generations learned instead of rejecting whatever the last fashion was and trying to outdo it. In the words of Goethe that Ismar David loved to quote, “What you inherited from your fathers, acquire it to make it your own.”

Thanks Misha! (And I couldn’t resist including this…)

Read part one.

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Something for the Weekend

Words and Pictures — An interview with cartoonist Tom Gauld at The Rumpus:

Format, words and pictures all work together to make a good comic. I started at college doing pure illustration and only gradually got into making stories and using words. I’m still more comfortable with pictures than words: I’m happy doodling away on drawings for hours, but putting words together is always more of a struggle. I  usually like to keep things as simple as I can so it’s interesting seeing what I can remove and still keep the story: you don’t want to say something in words which is better said in the pictures (and vice versa).

There is also a preview of Tom’s new book, Goliath, on the D+Q blog and you can read my interview with Tom here.*

A General Contempt for Small Talk — Edward Docx, author most recently of The Devil’s Garden, on Tolstoy, Russia, and literary prizes. So much good stuff here:

[I]f there’s one thing that novelists love to talk about, it’s how to make things real when, obviously, they are not. This in turn leads naturally into something novelists like to talk about even more: the terrible struggle of writing itself. (My favourite line about writers: “Writers are people who find writing more difficult than other people.”)… Metaphors rise from the table like disturbed lepidoptera. Writing a novel is like attempting to solve an extremely complicated maths equation, which seeks to represent reality, and through which you are trying to lead the public without them ever getting wind that said equation is, in fact, impossible to solve or that, actually, it might not represent reality at all. We are getting carried away. Deciding to write a novel is like visiting an obscure, half-forgotten and slowly-evaporating planet entirely comprised of swimming pools and deciding that what is needed is… yes, another swimming pool! But, for obscure reasons, a swimming pool that must be built single-handedly from scratch and then filled using only a syringe.

And finally…

Critical Authority — New York Times film critics A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis discuss Brian Kellow’s new book Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark and the ongoing legacy of the (in)famous New Yorker film critic. Here’s A.O. Scott:

[T]he idea of critical authority has always struck me as slippery, even chimerical. Authority over whom? Power to do what? The importance of particular critics can’t be quantified in lumens of fame, circulation numbers or box office returns, though by all of these measures Kael, in her heyday, certainly enjoyed unusual prominence. But like every other critic, she was above all a writer, and a writer only really ever has — or cares about — one kind of power, which is the power to engage readers.

I think Kael is remembered not for her particular judgments or ideas, but rather for her voice, for an outsized literary personality that could be enthralling and infuriating, often both. A lot of people read her for the pleasure of disagreement, and the resentment she was able to provoke — in critical targets and rival critics — is surely evidence of power. An awful lot of our colleagues are still, in both senses, mad about her. To reread her is to understand why.

*Just so you know: D+Q are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books.

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The Beauty and Horror of Vasily Grossman

The Economist’s international editor,  Edward Lucas, discusses the work of Vasily Grossman and the BBC adaptation of his novel Life and Fate:

The Economist: The Beauty and Horror of War

The Economist reviews the BBC adaptation here.

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Midweek Miscellany

Reading a Book is Reading a Book — Peter Ginna has another thoughtful post on about the Random House e-book rights controversy (which better articulates some of what I was trying to get at here).

A Decade of Fear — David Ulin, book editor of The LA Times, looks back at the last 10 years (and forward to the next).

Book Lovers Never Go To Bed Alone — a Tumblr collection of  bookshelves (via index//mb)

Hello, I’m Robot! — A somewhat surreal — but definitely awesome — Soviet kids’ book at A Journey Round My Skull

And…

Russian Artists and The Children’s Book 1890-1992 — 512 pages, full color with over 1100 images. Written and privately published by Albert Lemmens and Serge Stommels in The Netherlands. Yours for only $195 plus shipping (seen at The Daily Heller).

And…

Three Designers from Moscow — MyFonts interviews Russian type designers Vera Evstafieva, Alexandra Korolkova and Elena Novoselova.

And… Thinking of MyFonts…

…They’ve just released the rather lovely exljbris slab serif Museo Slab. Regular Museo Slab and Museo Slab Italic are free downloads.

The Book Design Review‘s Favourite Covers of 2009 — All good choices. Go vote. Now.

And… Have I mentioned just how incredible Peter Mendelsund’s new Foucault covers are…? I did? OK. Just want to make sure…

RUSSIAN ARTISTS AND THE CHILDREN’S BOOK 1890-1992.
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