Books, Design and Culture
China Miéville, author of one of my favourite novels this past year The City and the City, talks to Claire Armitstead about the six books that inspired him for a new Guardian Books podcast series ‘The Books That Made Me’. The books range from Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Jeremy Fisher to Max Ernst’s surrealist Une Semaine de Bonté:
The Books That Made Me: China Mieville
Miéville latest novel is Kraken.
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Best known previously for his art-house novel Remainder and saving literature from itself, author Tom McCarthy has been pretty much everywhere since the somewhat surprising inclusion of his new novel C on the Booker long-list. Tom may not actually be bigger than Jesus — or the bookies favourite — but he certainly does give good interview…
To James Purdon for The Observer :
“The avant garde can’t be ignored, so to ignore it – as most humanist British novelists do – is the equivalent of ignoring Darwin. Then you’re just a creationist. It’s ostrich-like. It needs to be worked through – which is not the same thing as imitation…
People use [‘experimental’] when what they actually mean is ‘not conforming to a certain type of realism’, and that’s just as much a literary convention as anything else. Burroughs said his ‘cut-up’ writing was more realistic than Jane Austen. I think he was right. You’re being assailed by associations and networks. Everything is a code…”
To Tim Robey for The Telegraph :
“We exist because we are awash in a sea of transmission, with language and technology rushing through us…”
And to Stuart Evers for The New Statesman:
“Commentators and critics seem to want fiction either to be blatantly avant-garde and postmodern, or to be realist and 19th century; but really most literature is neither nor… ‘The avant-garde’ describes a specific historical moment that belongs to the early part of the 20th century. Certainly in C there is a huge amount of that moment behind the writing; the avant-garde is definitely embedded in it. But at the same time I think it gets used as catch-all term now for something that isn’t retrograde, anything that’s not a kind of nostalgic, kitsch version of the 19th-century novel, which is what much of middlebrow fiction right now is.”
C has been reviewed by Christopher Taylor at The Guardian and by John Self at Asylum, and you can keep track of Tom various comings and goings at Surplus Matter.
My interview with Tom McCarthy and book designer Peter Mendelsund is here.
Update: The fine folks at 3:AM Magazine have also posted an interview with Tom about C.
In the early days of The Casual Optimist I scribbled out a short list of book designers I wanted to interview. More designers have been added since then, but a few of the original list remain un-interviewed. At the top of the list has been the name I actually wrote down first: Peter Mendelsund.
As Senior Designer at Knopf, Mendelsund’s designs feature here regularly. Much as I love his covers, however, Peter has been interviewed extensively elsewhere. I just haven’t known how to approach his work in a way that he would find interesting.
That was until I saw the shockingly subversive jacket design for Tom McCarthy‘s new novel “C”. The pairing of Mendelsund, the designer who is a musician, and McCarthy, the author who is an artist, was — it seemed to me — inspired.
A perfect opportunity…
What follows is primarily an interview with Peter about that design for “C”. But over the course of a few emails, Peter and I both decided to bring Tom into the conversation. I had met Tom shortly after the release of his debut novel Remainder and Peter had, it transpired, met Tom in New York after Knopf had signed “C”. It made sense to both of us.
It is a long, but absolutely fascinating exchange. Peter kindly answered my questions more fully than I had any right to expect and Tom, who was contributing from Stockholm, was more than gracious in less than ideal circumstances. I’m grateful to them both.
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Abecediary — Steven Heller on alphabet books (Die Flucht Nach ABECEDERIA by the French comic artist Blexbolex pictured above).
Imprints in the 21st Century — Admittedly HarperCollins new Imprint It Books is an easy target (NB use of “tap into the zeitgeist” in a sentence = fail), but Mike Shatzkin does a good job of explaining why their strategy is past its sell by date (and beginning to smell):
General trade publishers need to see, and apparently don’t, that their legacy brands are B2B [business-to-business]. They should be exploited that way. They need brands that can work B2C [business-to-consumer], but it will require discipline, focus, and an audience-first picture of what to publish to accomplish that.
Writing for a Living — Luminaries such as Will Self, Joyce Carol Oates, and AL Kennedy (quoted below) discuss whether writing is a joy or a chore in The Guardian:
“The joy of writing for a living is that you get to do it all the time. The misery is that you have to, whether you’re in the mood or not.”
Hugh at BookOven is angry this week. He wants to know why publishers are not selling directly to customers from their website and why they make e-books so complicated. I think Hugh underestimates the time/money/skill-deficit obstacles publishers face in regard to both problems. I suspect Hugh thinks I’m an apologist and will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Book Design Made Easy — cartoonist Tom Gauld is making his genius cartoons from The Guardian available on Flickr (via Drawn!, source of so many life-improving things).
4 CommentsApologies for a delayed entry in the Monday Miscellany category, but here we go (better late than never)…
Eric Carl‘s Flickr photostream has some nice classic sci-fi and fantasy book covers (the rather fine looking Death of a Doll and New Writings in SF 5 pictured above). (via but does it float)
Re-envisioning the American small press — Fiona McCrae, director and publisher of Minneapolis independent Graywolf Press, profiled in PW (via @sarahw):
McCrae believes the publishing business is changing in favor of smaller presses, which can have close contact with their audiences and realistically support the smaller sales that typify many literary books: “I think that’s been true for a long time, and it’s just getting truer and truer and truer. There’s still obviously a layer in which we don’t compete, and it’s not our job to”
Rearrange, Rewrite, Redefine and Reimagine — Chicago-based indie Featherproof Books would like you to “remix” parts of their forthcoming titles, starting with Tour of the Drowned Neighborhood a short story taken from Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas (via @R_Nash).
Overdue! — The Central Library in Atlanta, the last building by “Modernist master” Marcel Breuer, is under threat according to Jonathan Lerner in Metropolis Magazine (pictured above).
A fair share — In the final installment of a 3-part series for the Globe and Mail on the publishing industry in Canada, James Adams looks at the thorny issue of digital rights.
Wild Hair, Wilder Ideas — The Guardian profiles Alan Moore (and — on a related note — novelist Lydia Millet’s somewhat ill-considered assessment of Watchmen for the WSJ)
From Caveman to Spray Can: A Graphic Journey — Mike Dempsey’s gently meandering history of graphic design which not only features one or two books, but also the lovely Gill Sans typeface (picture above) which was used on the early Penguin paperbacks (via Noisy Decent Graphics).
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