by Dan on August 21, 2009
Picador Paperback have posted their fall catalogue to Facebook. Apparently they also did this with their spring list too . Needless to say, I think this is a great idea. Is any one else doing it? (via Arthur’s Design)
Control — An interview with Alan Rapp, former senior editor of art, design, and photography at Chronicle Books and the new Associate Director of Hey, Hot Shot!:
for all the possible flaws in the trade publishing model, one thing I always liked about it is the collaborative process. It defies the auteur model; the author is almost never the sole creator. I suppose that this could sound like the ex-editor making a case for the value of his role in an industry that is really undergoing massive and fundamental changes, but I stand by the principle: all content benefits from editing. The author, whether a verbal or visual one, is almost always too involved with the material to see how it can be best adapted to another form. And the design and production processes are also critical to making the best book possible; one thing [that] I think is in danger of getting lost in self-publishing is the production potential. The physical aspects of books make important, and often subliminal, effects on the reader, but we are getting a much more homogenized offering through the current self-publishing models.
Final Crisis — A short Q & A with Chip Kidd about designing comic book covers at the NY TImes‘ ‘The Moment’ blog.
And finally, thinking of comics, Will Kane (The World of Kane) recently posted some mind-blowing pop-art pages from French comic “La Vie Privée de Dyane” drawn by Michel Quarez, published in 1968 (pictured below). Also check out Will’s post on Quarez’s 1967 Mod Love.
Isotype — Gerd Arntz’s amazing pictograms and visual signs for the visual language Isotype at the beautifully designed The Gerd Arntz Web Archive (pictured above).
Jacket(s) — Much as I admire Chip Kidd’s book covers, most of them are just too familiar to re-post here. But I hadn’t seen this ingeniously layered design for Kenzo Kitakata’s Ashes before even though it was published by Vertical in 2003 (pictured above). Seeing it all laid out, it’s really hard to begrudge Mr. Kidd’s reputation for awesomeness.
We like to be part of something — Nick Harkaway on connections:
A paper book has a history. Somewhere, at some time, an author wrote it all down, printed it out, gave it to an editor, who also worked over it. The book was typeset – yes, on a computer, these days, but still — and finally pressed and packaged and distributed. There is a chain of physical events which leads from me to you. With old editions, it’s even more direct. With signed ones, it’s a handshake. We like to connect. And digital books feel as if they’re trapped behind glass. The book is in the machine, and we can’t open the cover and touch the pages.
Black, white and read all over — Creative Review looks at Faber & Faber‘s new editions of 20th Century poetry. The books feature specially commissioned woodcut and linocut cover illustrations. The new editions are part of the Faber’s 80th anniversary celebrations. You can see more of the cover images at designer Miriam Rosenbloom’s design:related page.
The Disappointment Brokers — I going to go out on a limb and say this is another must-read for book-industry types from Poets & Writers — Literary agents Anna Stein, Jim Rutman, Maria Massie, and Peter Steinberg have a fascinating conversation about their profession and the state of the industry:
here’s the silver lining: [The industry's] unhealthy enough that it’s an exciting time. It’s broken enough that publishers and agents and everyone has to change. Everyone has to rethink what they’re doing. So we have a group responsibility, and an opportunity, in a way that the industry has probably never seen before.
The Legacy of Modernism — Spiegel Online celebrates 90 years of Bauhaus (via @PD_Smith).
