Cartoon by Graham Annabelle.
And just a reminder, Graham AKA Grickle has a new graphic novel for kids called Eerie Tales from the School of Screams coming out this summer.
Comments closedBooks, Design and Culture
Cartoon by Graham Annabelle.
And just a reminder, Graham AKA Grickle has a new graphic novel for kids called Eerie Tales from the School of Screams coming out this summer.
Comments closedDesigner David Pearson and friends have launched a new website for 500-word (or thereabouts) reviews of book covers from the past and present.
There are a lot names you will be familiar with among the reviewers. I particularly enjoyed John Gall‘s review of the cover for The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin designed by relative unknown Lawrence Ratzkin for Farrrar, Straus & Giroux in 1976:
“Cover design in the US went from being house-styled, design driven and idiosyncratic (think Grove Press or New Directions or whatever Push Pin was up to) to the ‘big book look’ of the 1970s defined by designers like Paul Bacon. Make the type as large as possible, centre it, and combine with some non-specific imagery. That look still defines what we see on the bestseller list to this day. It established a generic way for covers to look and a familiar shorthand for sales teams and booksellers to understand – ‘aah, this must be a … big book!’. It ignored design principles of layout, composition and conceptual thinking that had been codified over the previous 50 years in favour of a commercial literal-ness. It also took away a lot of the fun.”
Jamie Keenan’s review of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell’s naughty cover for The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie is also a good time.
2 CommentsA publisher’s helpful ‘suggestions’… A recent Tom Gauld cartoon for The Guardian.
Comments closedLucy Knisley for the New York Times Book Review.
Comments closedGrant Snider for the New York Times. (Oh, and Grant has a book out too)
Comments closedGeoff Dyer, whose new book The Street Philosophy of Gary Winogrand features personal essays inspired by Winogrand photographs, considers other books that combine images and essays in The New York Times:
John Szarkowski was for many years the head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2000, in the twilight of a provocative, highly influential career, he published “Atget,” a selection of 100 images by the French photographer Eugène Atget, each reproduced on the recto page with an accompanying caption-essay on the facing verso page. With Szarkowski as the best kind of guide — one whose itinerary allows interludes of undisturbed contemplation — we wind our way through the haunts of old Paris, emerging from time-shuttered streets into the open skies of the surrounding countryside. Szarkowski had always been a distinctive stylist, but this format enabled him to give free rein to his talents as a writer, which were usually securely tethered by curatorial obligation. He also drew confidence, I think, from an earlier assay at the same form, “Looking at Photographs” (1973), in which he used a single picture by each of the most important photographers in the museum’s holdings to compile a radically synecdochic survey of the medium’s history. The obligation to cover so much ground, to balance what he had to say about so many major figures on such slender plinths, rather limited Szarkowski’s range of literary and thematic movement. With Atget — whose photographs, appropriately enough, were originally offered as “Documents for Artists” — the combination of abundance of subject matter and limited space encouraged a kind of tight flourishing or contained extravagance. Szarkowski’s knowledge of Atget’s work was so extensive that he had scarcely even to think about what he knew. And so the photographs serve as starting-off points for reflections on all sorts of things, including how photography has changed our view of the world: “I do not think that empty chairs meant the same thing before photography as they mean to us now.”
You can find reviews of Dyer’s Winogrand book in the New York Times and The Guardian.
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