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Category: Books

Published September 12, 2013

Sarah McNally in The Lab Magazine

The Lab Magazine interviews Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Jackson Books in New York:

From Winnipeg, Canada, McNally was born to a bookselling family, but made her way New York-wards after college, eventually working as an editor at Basic Books – “I loved editing because I had never done anything deeply collaborative before, and to be trusted inside a writer’s vision of his or her art 
is a profound and moving privilege.” She then branched out on her own, and whether 
by nature or nurture, she’s clearly found where she’s meant to be. “I love bookselling because I can run around thinking about a million things, from the mundane to the transcendent, and it all matters… The dirt in the corner 
is my problem. What Proust’s birthday means in downtown New York is my problem. I have to walk through the store allowing every book 
I see, even if I haven’t read it, to resonate deeply within me, and if it saddens or irritates even the most inconsequential part of my soul, 
I have to take it off display.”

I miss being a bookseller. I really do.

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Published September 9, 2013

Jonathan Lethem: The Author Looks Inward

Jonathan Lethem talks about writing his new novel, Dissident Gardens, with Brian Gresko at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Of course, in the writing, Dissident Gardens couldn’t bear much of what I’d learned. Novels don’t want to be crammed with factual stuff. I mostly left it aside, including some astonishing truths, which when you first come across them, you think, holy shit, I’ve learned this crazy thing and now I’ll blow people away by revealing this knowledge in the book! But at the juncture where you’d insert such a thing, you flinch, seeing the cost is too high. The facts will intrude — either on the reader’s experience, or my own relationship to the page, to the dream. You’ve heard of killing your darlings? You’ve got to kill plenty of the world’s darling’s too

Dissident Gardens is out this week in the US & Canada (I believe you have a bit longer to wait in the UK). The book was reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.

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Published September 6, 2013

Close Not Touching: Penguin Designer Gerald Cinamon

Close Not Touching is a beautiful short film by DILLONROSE.COM about the work of designer and typographer Gerald Cinamon.

Born in Boston in 1930, Cinamon moved to England in 1960, eventually becoming chief designer at Penguin Books. Strongly influenced by Swiss design, Cinamon utilized a combination of bold colour, clean lines and sans serif typography that was unique in British book design at the time. Now an influence on a new generation of type-inspired designers, the film includes a conversation between Cinamon and David Pearson:


An exhibition of Cinamon’s work, Gerald Cinamon: Collected Work Since 1958, opened at the ICA in London this week, and new book Graphic Design Gerald Cinamon, designed by Danny McNeil at SEA design, is available here.

Although a live appearance by Cinamon has had to be cancelled, Pearson will be discussing text design at Penguin at the institute on September 13.

A full-length feature documentary about Cinamon by DILLONROSE.COM will be available to download from iTunes in February 2014.

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Published September 5, 2013

Robert Walser: The Monotony of Things

Colors fill up your mind too much with all sorts of muddled stuff. Colors are too sweet a muddle, nothing more. I love things in one color, monotonous things. Snow is such a monotonous song. Why shouldn’t a color be able to make the same impression as singing? White is like a murmuring, whispering, praying. Fiery colors, like for instance Autumn colors, are a shriek. Green in midsummer is a many-voiced song with all the highest notes. Is that true? I don’t know if that is right. Well, the teacher will surely be so kind as to correct it.

At The New Yorker, Ben Lerner considers the writing of Robert Walser:

There is the typically Walserian statement “I love things in one color, monotonous things.” Praise for the monotonous, the uniform, the mundane, the insignificant—such sentiments are everywhere in Walser’s work, and maintain a crucial ambiguity. On the one hand, they are expressions of poetic attunement to those aspects of the world we too readily overlook, and for which writers concerned with heroic exploits often have no time. On the other hand, Walser’s celebration of the monotonous or uniform returns us to his fascination with subservience, with relinquishing all personality to imposed order: “Modestly stepping aside can never be recommended as a continual practice in strong enough terms.”

The force of Walser’s writing derives from this simultaneous valorization of irreducible individuality and of sameness, smallness, interchangeability.

Lerner has written the introduction to a new NYRB collection of Walser short stories, A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories, translated by Damion Searls.

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Published September 4, 2013

Paul Rand’s Book Jackets and Covers

Steven Heller’s fascinating School of Visual Arts lecture on the book covers of Paul Rand:

(via David Pearson)

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Published September 4, 2013

The Last Bookstore

At The Paris Review, Casey N. Cep visits  The Last Bookstore in (where else?) Los Angeles :

The Last Bookstore has some of the most beautiful book art I’ve ever seen. You can wander and wander through this wonderland of cuttings, foldings, installations, and sculptures. Some pages are folded, others torn; the books are shaped into birds and windows, transformed into storyscapes independent of their original stories.

Book art might be called an epitaph for our relationship with the printed word. Its power comes almost entirely from the materials that it memorializes. Without the bindings or the recognizable spines, these works of art would cease to invoke their source. And in order to be moved by the work of art, we need to recognize the book, or even the idea of the book.

The setting, the Last Bookstore—apocalyptic, but also an increasingly plausible—makes this association easier, but it still seems clear that none of these works can succeed if they transform the book beyond recognition. The epitaph works only when we recognize its referent. There is both terror and beauty in every work of book art: the printed word mangled, but also memorialized; pages destroyed, but also preserved; books dead, but also resurrected. The Last Bookstore is equal parts mausoleum, shrine, and warehouse.

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Published September 2, 2013

Will Self on J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World


Will Self on J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World at The Telegraph:

To coincide with the 1962 publication of The Drowned World – his own post-apocalyptic novel in which men of the future also venture into a flooded London, intent on looting the city of its treasures – JG Ballard wrote an article for The Woman Journalist in which he explained the mise en scène thus: “On reflection it seems to me that the image of an immense half-submerged city overgrown by tropical vegetation, which forms the centrepiece of The Drowned World, is in some way a fusion of my childhood memories of Shanghai and those of my last 10 years in London.”

According to Ballard, “My own earliest memories are of Shanghai during the annual long summer of floods, when the streets of the city were two or three feet deep in brown silt-laden water, and where the surrounding countryside… was an almost continuous mirror of drowned paddy fields and irrigation canals stirring sluggishly in the hot sunlight.”

There seems no reason to doubt Ballard at his word on this question; one that he proposes himself rhetorically at the outset of the piece: “How far do the landscapes of one’s childhood, as much as its emotional experiences, provide an inescapable background to all one’s imaginative writing?”

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, with an introduction by Will Self and illustrations by James Boswell is published by the Folio Society.

A paperback edition of The Drowned World published by W.W. Norton, with a cover design by Darren Haggar (pictured above), is also available.

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Published August 30, 2013

Art Spiegelman: Mixing Words and Pictures

Cartoonist Art Spiegelman interviewed at NEA Arts Magazine:

It never occurred to me that comics were anything other than worthy. They were in fact among the most worthy endeavors I could imagine. They were how culture got introduced to me, more than through other media…. I always assumed they were a container big enough to hold whatever I could hold.   

Spiegelman’s somewhat delayed book Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps will finally be widely available in September. (Full disclosure: Co-Mix is published by Drawn + Quarterly and distributed in Canada by my employers Raincoast Books)

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Published August 27, 2013

Stories from the Fold


If you are going to be in London on September 25th, Stories from the Fold, a mini-conference about book design at the St. Bride Library looks terribly interesting. Curated by designer Becky Chilcott, speakers include Jon Gray (AKA Gray318), Clare Skeats, and host of others.

Sounds like a great way to spend an evening to me.

Tickets are £25.00 (£20.00 for students).

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Published August 26, 2013

Inside The Daniel Clowes Reader


At The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon talks to the editor of The Daniel Clowes Reader Kevin Parille about compiling the book. The interview will be too esoteric for some, but it’s great to see Parille draw attention to the work of the book ‘s designer Alvin Buenaventura, and place Clowes work in a wider cultural context than just comics:

[It] was crucial that the book alternate between comics and critical materials, and that within the essays, text and images would be carefully integrated — and Alvin’s design does that. I also wanted a diversity of secondary materials: full interviews; interview expects; a piece on Clowes’s children’s literature precursors; a short feature on Clowes’s revisions of character faces (how he changes them from comic to graphic novel); full lyrics to songs that Enid listens to and sings; excerpts from a zine mentioned in Ghost World; and more. When I couldn’t find an essay on a topic I thought should be included, I asked someone to write it. I also thought it would be helpful if Ghost World, a comic more visually and thematically dense than some might recognize, had an index; so I created one with entries for key themes, words, phrases, and objects.

Since Clowes’s comics come from so many different artistic and social perspectives, I include essays that employ distinct critical approaches: personal narrative, literary theory, close reading, historical context, psychoanalytic, etc. In order to addresses a wide readership, I selected writers who are smart and write accessible prose. In unexpected ways, many recurring issues tie the essays together: gender, adolescence, music, punk, grunge/gen x/the ’90s, Clowes’s aesthetics, urban environments, etc. . . . The essays present readers with an expanded sense of what Clowes is about and offer new ways to appreciate his work.

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Published August 26, 2013

The Mounting Tide of a Mass Avant-Garde

Phil Ford, author of Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture, reviews Loren Glass’ new book on Grove Press, Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde, for the LA Review Books (which is, by the way, probably the most consistently interesting place around to read about books right now):

Grove Press and its charismatic owner, Barney Rosset, sit right at the center of postwar intellectual history. Glass notes early that if Rosset made a lot of impulsive bad decisions, he was guided steadily by a shrewd understanding of where American culture was headed. In the 1950s, Americans were beginning to go to college en masse, and when they got there they would seek out whatever was chic, daring, avant-garde, experimental — in a word, hip. Counterculture, the notion of seceding from the mainstream and dwelling in an autonomously created realm of liberated culture, was perhaps the most potent dream of the postwar age. Everybody wanted in. Against the mounting tide of a mass avant-garde, the old censorship codes could not long endure.

But while it’s hard not to be inspired by the story Grove Press, it’s also important to note the less savoury side of it, and how it was overtaken by the cultural changes Rosset helped start:

Those who harkened to Evergreen Review’s call to “join the underground” constituted the higher-brow version of the man who read Playboy: a 1966 advertising survey discovered that he was “a 39-year-old male, married, two children, a college graduate who holds a managerial position in business or industry, and has a median family income of $12,875.” (That’s about $92,000 in 2013.) It turns out that “Chuck,” the everysquare in a 1965 Evergreen Review spoof of Charles Atlas ads, painted a pretty realistic portrait of the Grove readership. But with the emergence of a feminist critique made possible by the very cultural revolution Rosset served, the masculine literati no longer enjoyed the privilege of guiltless consumption, and modernist experimentalism no longer provided a dignified alibi for it. In the 1970s, the Evergreen Review image of the hip intellectual soured. We might imagine Chuck a decade later, up to his ears in alimony, parted hair modishly grown out though thinning and combed-over on top, paunch swelling under a safari suit coat, leering at younger women who wish he would drop dead.

Read the whole review.

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Published August 20, 2013

Joost Swarte: Tumult in the Book World


This wonderful illustration by Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte accompanied a discussion on traditional bookstores in the digital marketplace in last Sunday’s New York Times.

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