Books, Design and Culture
The London Review Bookshop visit Shepherds bookbinders in London to watch them put together a special limited edition of Tom McCarthy’s Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel Satin Island (yours for only £185):
Tom Gauld.
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Before turning his attention to graphics and advertising, Italian artist and designer Bruno Munari (1907-1998) made his mark as a member of the Futurists, an avant-garde art movement fascinated by modernity, mass production, and pushing at technological limits.
The influence of Futurism — not to mention modernism’s jokers Dada and Surrealism — is apparent throughout Munari’s Books, a collection of Munari’s book design recently published in English by Princeton Architectural Press. Munari relentlessly experimented with typography, photography, collage, and printing materials. There is a book made of metal, another that comes with a hammer. There is page after page of special papers, unique bindings, loose pages, punches, tears, and flaps. The breadth (and the volume!) of his work is staggering, and it all crackles with this restless sense of innovation, urgency, and provocation.
“A great children’s book, with beautiful expressive figures, the right story, printed simply, would not be accepted (by some parents), but children would love it.”1
But Munari’s designs and illustrations are also surprisingly full of warmth and wonder. This is most apparent in his expressive illustrations, and the large number of books Munari produced for very young children. Even readers familiar with Bruno Munari’s ABC and Bruno Munari’s Zoo, may find themselves astonished at just how many other extraordinary children’s books he created that aren’t currently available in English.
“we need to deconstruct the myth of the artist-hero who produces only masterpieces for the intelligent. We have to show that as long as artists are outside the problems of everyday life, only a few people will be interested. And now, in these days of mass culture, artists must climb down from their pedestals and be so kind as to design a butcher’s sign.”2
If Munari’s Books has a shortcoming, it is the rather academic introductory texts (they will be useful for better design writers than me, but I got little sense of the Munari’s life or the personality behind the designs from them). Fortunately, the book is peppered with lively quotations from Munari himself. The most pithy come from Arte come mestiere, a collection of Munari’s writing on design first published in English in 1971 as Design as Art (and reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2008). The short essays in Arte come mestiere were originally written for Milan daily newspaper Il Giorno, and they address everyday life as well as design. They’re witty, discursive (and sometimes even surprisingly practical), and a perfect accompaniment to the illustrations in Munari’s Books.
Something of a bumper post this month — a real mix of approaches, and a number YA titles to boot. Enjoy!
The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector; design by Paul Sahre (New Directions / August 2015)
Consumed by David Cronenberg; design by David A. Gee (Penguin Canada / September 2015)
Cooking as Fast as I Can by Cat Cora; design by Janet Hansen (Scribner / September 2015)
The Criminal Alphabet by Noel ‘Razor’ Smith; design by Edward Bettison (Penguin / August 2015)
Cut Both Ways by Carrie Mesrobian; design by Erin Fitzsimmons (HarperCollins / September 2015)
Dumplin’ by Julie Murphy; design by Aurora Parlagreco; illustration by Daniel Stolle (Balzer + Bray / September 2015)
Everything Everything by Nicola Yoon; design by N. C. Sousa (Delacorte / September 2015)
Fake Fruit Factory by Patrick Wensink; design by Alban Fischer (Curbside Splendor / September 2015)
Fear of Dying by Erica Jong; design by Olga Grlic (St. Martin’s Press / September 2015)
Generation by Paula McGrath; design by Harriet Sleigh (JM Originals / July 2015)
Love Love by Sung J. Woo; design by Jennifer Heuer (Soft Skull / September 2015)
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin; design by Justine Anweiler; photography Jonathan Simpson (Picador UK / Septembr 2015)
(You can read about the design process for this cover here)
The Man Who Remembered the Moon by David Hull; design by David Drummond (Dumgrad Books / September 2015)
The New Time and Space by John Potts; design by Palgrave Macmillan (Palgrave Macmillan / September 2015)
Night Owls by Jenn Bennett; design by Leo Nickolls (Simon & Schuster / September 2015)
Rooms by Lauren Oliver; cover art by Jeffrey Alan Love (Ecco / September 2015)
The Same City by Luisgé Martín; design by Simon Pates (Hispabooks / September 2015)
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli; design by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Allen Lane / September 2015)
Symphony for the City of the Dead by M. T. Anderson; design by Matt Roeser; illustration by Kikuo Johnson (Candlewick / September 2015)
Syriza: Inside the Labyrinth by Kevin Ovenden; design by Jamie Keenan (Pluto Press / September 2015)
Unbuttoning America by Ardis Cameron; design by Kimberly Glyder; illustration by Al Moore (Cornell University Press / May 2015)1
Vengeance Road by Erin Bowman; illustration by Teagan White (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt / September 2015)
Wall Flower by Rita Kuczynski; design by David Drummond (University of Toronto Press / August 2015)
Written in the Blood by Stephen Lloyd Jones; design by Alex Merto (Mulholland Books / May 2015)
Writing at NY Magazine’s Vulture, Boris Kachka, whose book Hothouse on Farrar, Straus & Giroux was published in paperback last year, profiles nonprofit literary publisher Graywolf Press:
Publishing just over 30 books a year, Graywolf has had authors win four NBCC awards, a National Book Award, two Pulitzers, and a Nobel Prize — all in the last six years. This year, it will exceed $2 million in sales for the first time. No other independent press, never mind a 41-year-old nonprofit, has come so far so fast. It didn’t happen by accident.
“I think of success as being able to say yes to something that doesn’t necessarily look like a commercial winner,” says Fiona McCrae, Graywolf’s publisher since 1994, over yogurt and decaf on one of her monthly visits to New York. “Knowing something is good and having to say no, that seems to me the bigger failure.” An affably owlish Brit, McCrae started out in London’s legendary literary Faber & Faber before transferring to its small American spinoff in Boston. Three years later, she heard that Graywolf’s founder was resigning.
Scott Walker began hand-sewing poetry chapbooks in Port Townsend, Washington, in 1974. While picking up poets like Tess Gallagher and Jane Kenyon, Walker turned Graywolf Press into a nonprofit and relocated to the Twin Cities, home to a thriving philanthropic base (which also supports nonprofit presses Milkweed and Coffee House). But in the ’90s, a publishing slump hit Graywolf particularly hard; Walker resigned and his board eventually hired McCrae. At the time, she had zero experience in nonprofits — possibly to Graywolf’s benefit, because she chafed at the complacency to which nonprofits are prone. “There’s got to be a way in which you absolutely value Graywolf,” she says, “but like, come on, everybody! Other small presses are not the measure. Do you say, ‘For our size, we get more attention, so that’s it,’ or do you say, ‘Where can we go?’
And speaking of Graywolf, I am looking forward to picking up a copy The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, which they are publishing in North America this month (can anyone tell me who designed the cover?)
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At the Creative Review blog, Jamie Keenan talks about his cover designs for Pushkin Press‘s new crime fiction imprint Pushkin Vertigo:
“From the beginning I wanted to come up with something that looked alien, as though someone had brought it back from a holiday in a country you’d never heard of”
They make for a stunning set.
Jamie also created that rather nice “PV” logo for the imprint. Nicely done Mr. Keenan.
Vertigo, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, The Disappearance of Signora Giulia and Master of the Day of Judgment will be published by Pushkin Vertigo on next month; two more titles, I Was Jack Mortimer and She Who Was No More, will be published in November.
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At the Penguin blog, the remarkable Coralie Bickford-Smith talks about The Fox and the Star, a new book she has written, illustrated and designed:
The inspiration comes from a place of personal experience that I wanted to document. It’s a life lesson that I found hard to learn; one of love, loss and the ability to adapt to the constant changes that are a part of life. On a visual level my inspiration came from my design heroes, William Blake and William Morris. My love of pattern and book design is evident in the illustrations.
It looks absolutely beautiful as you can see:
And here’s Coralie talking about the project:
The Fox and the Star is available from Particular Books August 27.
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Award-winning Australian designer and art directer W. H. Chong interviews David Pearson — who is giving a series of talks on book design in Australia this week — for his column Culture Mulcher:
I love the Gandhi quote, ‘There is more to life than increasing its speed’ (particularly reassuring words for a slow-working technophobe).
I do worry that many technological advancements are enabling us to achieve not very much, but at a much faster rate. For example, I cannot understand the very modern desire to produce work using a series of time-saving shortcuts when it is the duration of the working process itself that allows us to question, edit and fine-tune our output. To speed up or bypass this process is to give up on so much and risks the work lacking any discernible ‘human’ quality.
That said, I do work very slowly and sometimes think that a warm and welcoming hobbyist’s industry, like publishing, is the only place that would have me.
David is delivering a lecture, We Are What We Read, at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney tomorrow (Tuesday, August 25) at 6.30pm, and will be discussing contemporary book design at the Melbourne Writers Festival on August 29 and August 30, although I believe the second event is sold out.
Comments closedI wasn’t going to mention that New York Times article about Amazon. We already know the company treats its workers poorly (there are almost too many articles to link to at this point),1 it’s just that some people rather admire this kind of ruthlessness (or simply don’t care if they’re getting a good deal). Nevertheless, I did quite like this cartoon by Kaamran Hafeez for The New Yorker on the subject:
