Skip to content

Month: November 2009

Published November 4, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, November 4th, 2009

Fluid — John Gall discusses his brilliant cover design for the Vintage edition of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, which is still one of my favourite novels of the last few years.

Hamilton Wood Type Catalog No.14 (1899-1900) at Unicorn Graphics’ Wood Type Museum. I quietly obsessed with slab-serifs right now so this is like crack (via Draplin Design Co.).

And The Beat Goes On — Sarah Weinman (much missed at GalleyCat) is writing about publishing for AOL’s money and finance news blog DailyFinance.

Gigantic Robot — Awesome cartoonist and illustrator Tom Gauld has a new website (to accompany his excellent Flickr photostream).

BOOM! — PW talks to Mark Waid, Editor-In-Chief of independent comics publisher BOOM! Studios:

We’re great at getting a focused message out. Because we don’t publish eighty comics a month, our inestimable marketing department does a great job of making every title important in the marketplace and every launch an event. We’re also better than the big guys at taking risks because we don’t have stockholders to answer to, or lenders who would call us crazy… We’re very much a writer-driven, idea-driven company. We start with the story first (with a talented writer) and focus on getting that right.

30 Conversations on Design — Designers, including luminaries such as Massimo Vignelli, Erik Spiekermann, Ellen Lupton and Paula Scher, answer two questions: “What single example of design inspires you most?” and “What problem should design solve next?”

Unheimlich — Sam Leith argues for scary kids books in The Guardian (confession: I’m mostly linking to this story so I could type “unheimlich” which — rather disappointingly — means “unhomely” rather than “the act of undoing the heimlich manoeuver”).

And finally…

Dutch Picture Books 1810 – 1950 at BibliOdyssey (above: ‘De Gouden Haan’ by Marietje Witteveen, 1940).

‘De Gouden Haan’ by Marietje Witteveen, 1940
Comments closed
Published November 2, 2009

Monday Miscellany, November 2nd, 2009

Unpublished concept jacket designs by London-based print designer Allan Sommerville for the Penguin’s Bill Bryson books (via Cosas Visuales).

Fonts — This is AWESOME: Wisconsin Public Radio’s To The Best of Our Knowledge talk fonts with Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, designers of Gotham, Matthew Carter, designer of Verdana, author Nicholson Baker, Tracy Honn, director of the Silver Buckle Press, and Kitty Burns Florey, author of Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting. Listen NOW.

Many Happy Returns — Author, academic and newspaper columnist John Sutherland (The Boy Who Loved Books) on 30 years of The London Review of Books for The Financial Times:

The LRB front cover logo was “THE LONDON REVIEW of Books” – the last two words being smaller. As the typography signalled, it was the review that mattered as much as the book under review. Articles in the LRB were, and are, long: anything between 2,000 and 5,000 words. On special occasions they can run into the tens of thousands. Rates of pay seemed to me startlingly high: three or four times, in the early years at least, what the TLS paid. Miller personally appeared austerely indifferent to money. I suspect he worked for little or nothing. Nor did rises or falls in circulation appear to trouble him overmuch. Quality was all.

(There’s also a rather lovely addendum about the LRB’s personal columns, so read to the end!).

Somewhere Towards The End — A wonderful essay on editor and author Diana Athill by Ian Jack,former editor of Granta, in The Guardian:

[W]hat held me about the writing was its candour. The quality has since become an Athill trademark, though in itself candour is no guarantee of literary pleasure or interest: frank books aren’t always good books and can often be tedious by boasting of their frankness. Athill’s way of being candid is more subtle and its effect more persuasive… Part of this comes from her considerable gift as a maker of sentences, which are so lucid and direct; some of it is owed to the breaking of taboos that then surrounded female sexual behaviour; most of it, though, stems from her triumphant struggle to “get it right”, a lesson she learned from two of the writers she edited. Rhys told her that the trick of good writing was “to get it as it was, as it really was”. Naipaul said that “provided you really get it right, the reader will understand”.

The Internationalist — An all too short interview with Penguin Canada’s David Davidar, who was recently appointed CEO of Penguin’s new division Penguin International, in the Globe and Mail.

And finally… I do love Tom Gauld:

eric gills busy day

(More on Eric Gill)

Comments closed