Books, Design and Culture
The always dependable Fresh Signals alerted me to this French video for a new horizontal book format:
This is apparently the “flipback” format that had The Guardian so hot under the collar a few weeks ago. Please feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment if you have more details about it.
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Defending the Unusual — Designer Allison Saltzman, art director at Ecco, interviewed at Caustic Cover Critic:
Everywhere else I’ve worked, the books’ content still informs the cover design, but the overall aesthetic is subject to the publisher’s (and their art director’s) taste. I think the trick to happiness, in this business, is to find yourself a publisher or an art director whose taste you’re comfortable with. And you also need them to trust your instincts as a designer. I am so content at Ecco because the publisher and editors tell me about their books and the audience they’re aimed at, but then they just want me to read them and come up with cover ideas myself. Another good thing about Ecco is that the publisher wants and defends interesting and unusual covers; that’s rare.
Burying the Book — Laura Miller interviews legendary editor and writer Robert Gottlieb for Salon:
[S]ince I’ve been in publishing since the mid-’50s, I’ve lived through all the moments when doom was cried, going right back to “the medium is the message.” The book was dead — I can’t tell you how many times we’ve buried the book in my lifetime. The fact is that we haven’t buried the book, and however all this works out, we’re still not going to be burying the book. People are still going to be reading books, and whether they’re going to be reading them on a Kindle or as a regular physical hardcover book or a paperback or on their phones or listening to audiobooks, what’s the difference? A writer is still sending his or her work to you, and you’re absorbing it, and that’s reading.
Seeing the Pain — Mark Medley talks to Michael Pietsch, editor of the late David Foster Wallace, about constructing the recently released The Pale King:
“This project has been kind of all-consuming,” says Pietsch, whose only other experience editing a posthumous work came in 1985, when he worked on Ernest Hemingway’s bullfighting memoir The Dangerous Summer.
There was no outline, no list of chapters, no clues as to where Wallace planned to take the narrative. The chapters were not in sequence. The names of characters constantly changed. Pietsch thought he’d discovered the novel’s first chapter — the one which begins “Author here” — until he found a footnote explaining precisely why it wasn’t the first chapter. He laughs: “I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t even have a starting point!’ ” Still, the process “was sometimes exhilarating, delightful and joyful because I felt in his presence. And at other times heartbreaking because I saw how hard it was for him. You can’t read this book without seeing pain.”
The War of Independents — Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, on how online piracy is damaging independent filmmakers more than Hollywood:
One of the Internet’s greatest fallacies, its fishiest tale, is the idea of the “Long Tail.” Popularized by Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, first in a 2004 magazine article and then in the bestselling 2006 book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, it argues that the Internet is an ideal distribution platform for independent filmmakers, musicians, and writers struggling to compete against the financial might of mass media conglomerates… But Anderson’s argument has a fatal flaw. He forgets about Internet theft — the online cesspool of illegal peer-to-peer networks and illegal streaming services that has already decimated the music business and is now doing potentially irreparable damage to the motion picture industry. And in the face of piracy, I’m afraid, the belief that all the value in the Internet economy can be located in its tail is, literally, turned on its head. Rather than a long tail, Internet theft’s mass looting of the content industry is transforming the Internet into a fat-headed economy with everything on top — an increasingly unequal medium which discriminates against independent filmmakers and makes it harder, rather than easier, for them to make a living from today’s digital economy.
Before people yell at me, I’m sure that there are counter-arguments to Keen. Constructive ones are welcome in the comments (just leave ad hominem stuff at home).
And finally…
RUR — NPR discusses the origin on the word ‘robot’:
It was the brainchild of a wonderful Czech playwright, novelist and journalist named Karel Capek. He lived from 1880 to 1938. And he introduced it in 1920 in his hit play “RUR,” or “Rossum’s Universal Robots.”… [It] comes from an Old Church Slavonic word, rabota, which means servitude of forced labor. The word also has cognates in German, Russian, Polish and Czech. And it’s really a product of Central European system of serfdom, where a tenants’ rent was paid for in forced labor or service.
And he was writing this play about a company, Rossum’s Universal Robots, that was actually using biotechnology. They were mass-producing workers using the latest biology, chemistry and physiology to produce workers who lack nothing but a soul. They couldn’t love. They couldn’t have feelings. But they could do all the works that humans preferred not to do. And, of course, the company was soon inundated with our orders.
Well, when Capek named these creatures, he first came up with a Latin word labori, for labor. But he worried that it sounded a little bit too bookish, and at the suggestion of his brother, Josef, Capek ultimately opted for roboti, or in English, robots.
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After watching Lauren Panepinto’s how-to video yesterday and talking with designer Jacob Covey about op-art book covers, I was reminded of Chip Kidd’s amazing designs for the Vertical editions of Koji Suzuki’s Ring books:
Vertical are apparently releasing Edge by Koji Suzuki this fall with a cover by Peter Mendelsund that sticks with the visual theme of the series:
The design is from a few years ago according to Peter (it still looks fresh to me), but clearly I should have nagged him for a better quality image rather than relying on the internet!
Update: Thanks to Peter for sending me a higher-res cover image for Edge. Beauty.
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Designer Catherine Casalino discusses her cover design for Darren Shan’s Procession of the Dead at Faceout Books.
50 / 50 — An interesting Design Observer piece by Ernest Beck on the controversy around AIGA’s 50 Books/50 Covers and the changing roles of book designers:
“The design aspect hasn’t changed, but it will,” notes [Chris] Sergio, who like other book designers believes that books and covers will endure in both print and electronic versions. “Digital versus print is a zero-sum argument,” he says. “These roads are not mutually exclusive. If anything, we want to see more competition and more critical exploration [of book design]. That’s why it would have been a shame to blend it all down into one big thing.”
Paula Scher, a partner at Pentagram Design, agrees that book design — in whatever form — is important because people still relate to visual imagery. “It’s the emotional connection,” she says. “People still remember record covers although nobody has records anymore.” Book jackets matter, whether they are on a piece of paper or in an electronic version, she continues “because when none of it matters because it’s digital or nobody does it or it doesn’t save the planet, then we murder our own craft and give excuses to be mediocre and lower standards bit by bit.”
Indelible Replicas — Author Philip Ball (Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People) reviews The Information by James Gleick for The Observer:
Robert Burton, the Oxford anatomist of melancholy, confessed in 1621 that he was drowning in books, pamphlets, news and opinions. All the twittering and tweeting today, the blogs and wikis and apparent determination to archive even the most ephemeral and trivial thought has, as James Gleick observes in this magisterial survey, something of the Borgesian about it. Nothing is forgotten; the world imprints itself on the informatosphere at a scale approaching 1:1, each moment of reality creating an indelible replica.
Also in The Observer…
P. J. Harvey on writing and her new album Let England Shake (via A Piece of Monologue):
“I certainly feel like I’m getting somewhere that I wanted to get to as a writer of words. I wanted to get better, I wanted to be more coherent, I wanted there to be a greater strength and depth emotionally, and all these things require work – to hone something, to get rid of any superfluous language. I’m inspired by the other great writers I go back to and read again and again, and think how did they do that?”
Such as? She indicates a volume of Harold Pinter’s poetry that she has brought with her. “Pinter leaves me speechless. Just unbelievable. A poem like ‘American Football’ or ‘The Disappeared’. TS Eliot of course. Ted Hughes. WB Yeats. James Joyce.” She leans forward, freshly excited. “Just that feeling of reading something profound and having your breath quite literally taken away by the end of a piece. I’m reading John Burnside’s poems at the moment. Do you know his work? I’m getting that feeling – just reaching the end of every poem, going ‘Oh my God!'” She clutches her chest and laughs. “And all of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people. It made me want to try and get close to this strange, mysterious thing that people can do with words.”
And finally…
The Local Grammar Nazi — Robert Lane Greene, author of You Are What You Speak, on the fluidity of language:
Comments closedIt’s certainly easier to know one set of rigid rules than to develop a fingertip-feel for the nuances of syntax, word choice and mechanics. This is why the book “Elements of Style” is such a hit. William Strunk and E.B. White’s canonised system for language use is short and sharply worded. Read, memorise and you need never think again… Readers are taught any number of things, such as when to use “that” instead of “which” and how one should never begin a sentence with “However, …”. But such guidelines should be understood as the authors’ preferences, not grammatical commandments.
Writing in English offers far more room for manoeuvre than some may realise… A lot of people don’t like this fluidity. Life is tricky in a world without rules. Fortunately, language does have rules, but they are more like bedrock principles than a detailed set of by-laws covering every do and don’t. A good usage dictionary should explain the principles, not simply command.
British designer Stuart Bache was art director on this lovely cover for the forthcoming novel Bricks by Leon Jenner. The epic cover illustration is by Jorn Kaspuhl, who also illustrated the book.
There is a really nice sense of something both classic and yet contemporary about this design, which seems appropriate for the book from what I can gather. Stuart’s work has, of course, appeared on previously on The Casual Optimist, and you can read my short interview with him here.
Bricks itself is actually about a bricklayer who remembers a past life as a Druid at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain. It was — if I remember correctly — originally released by the author a few years ago as an online audio book. No doubt someone will correct if I am wrong.
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Visual Vocabulary — An interesting interview with book designer Peter Mendelsund at Czech Position:
I definitely take into account the author’s native culture, though whether I choose to adopt something stylistic from this culture depends on the vagaries of the particular project. There are times when one wants to accentuate the universal aspects of a writer’s work; and there are times when one wants to situate an author in a specific time and place… With Kafka, I would argue that his greatness lies in the universality of his ideas, that his writing transcends time and place… Conversely, with many other writers, nationality is at the core of their work — their great subject is place and contextual identity. They may write about Czech-ness, or English-ness, etc. These are the books where it makes the most sense to bring the local artistic tropes and visual cues to bear. For what it’s worth, I love delving into the visual vocabulary of different cultures.
The Casual Optimist interview with Peter is here, and you can read my 2-cents on his Kafka redesigns here.
The Polish Club — 50 Watts asks you to design the Polish edition of your favourite book. $400 is up for grabs.
Living by Dying — Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Suitors and Ether (forthcoming), on the death of the book in the new Los Angeles Review of Books:
For the record, my own loyalties are uncomplicated. I adore few humans more than I love books. I make no promises, but I do not expect to purchase a Kindle or a Nook or any of their offspring. I hope to keep bringing home bound paper books until my shelves snap from their weight, until there is no room in my apartment for a bed or a couch or another human being, until the floorboards collapse and my eyes blur to dim. But the book, bless it, is not a simple thing… [W]hat could it mean for the book to die? Which sort of book? And what variety of death? What if the book had only ever lived by dying?
A World Made of Stories — James Gleick, author of The Information, on memes:
In the competition for space in our brains and in the culture, the effective combatants are the messages. The new, oblique, looping views of genes and memes have enriched us. They give us paradoxes to write on Möbius strips. “The human world is made of stories, not people,” writes the novelist David Mitchell. “The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed.” Margaret Atwood writes: “As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.” Nearing death, John Updike reflected on
A life poured into words—apparent waste intended to preserve the thing consumed.
Fred Dretske, a philosopher of mind and knowledge, wrote in 1981: “In the beginning there was information. The word came later.” He added this explanation: “The transition was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind.” Now we might add, thanks to Dawkins, that the transition was achieved by the information itself, surviving and perpetuating its kind and selectively exploiting organisms.
Cull or be Culled — NPR’s Linda Holmes on how we are missing everything:
You used to have a limited number of reasonably practical choices presented to you, based on what bookstores carried, what your local newspaper reviewed, or what you heard on the radio, or what was taught in college by a particular English department. There was a huge amount of selection that took place above the consumer level. (And here, I don’t mean “consumer” in the crass sense of consumerism, but in the sense of one who devours, as you do a book or a film you love.)
Now, everything gets dropped into our laps, and there are really only two responses if you want to feel like you’re well-read, or well-versed in music, or whatever the case may be: culling and surrender.
And on a related note…
Lester Bangs’ Basement — Bill Wyman on collecting and scarcity at Slate:
Lester Bangs, the late, great early-rock critic, once said he dreamed of having a basement with every album ever released in it… [T]he Internet today is very much like [that]. In its vastness, cacophony, and inaccuracy, it’s also very reminiscent of Borges’ Library of Babel. Just as that library contained books made up of every possible combination of letters, in the corners of the Internet I’m concerned with here you can find similar chaos: The song “Let It Be” by the Beatles, sure, but also mislabeled as by the Stones, by the Kinks, by the Hollies, by the “Battles” … and also with, of course, those same labels attached to entirely different songs (like “Let It Bleed”).
Anyway, is it enough?
For some, the enjoyment of art or culture has fetishistic aspects. To them, being a fan is about something more than just experiencing the art. There will always be collectors, fixating on the physical objects, like the great LP jackets from the 1960s and 1970s… And there will always be people who can’t be happy unless they have something regular fans don’t. Indeed, a friend of Bangs’, long after he died, said to me that the unspoken corollary in Bangs’ mind to his fantasy was that no one else would have access to it.
Happy Easter.
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How Much Is It Worth? — Ivan Brunetti on teaching, and his book Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, at The Comics Journal:
To me, art is not about talent, it’s about hard work. It’s about developing one’s intelligence, thoughtfulness, and sensitivity. To some degree, the potential for these things seems to vary, implying they are perhaps innate, but I think anything can be nurtured (or neglected). Something might not come easy, but it can be learned. It’s matter of will, desire, determination, and hard work. How much is it worth to you? The definition of what is considered “talent” or “skill” keeps changing. I say if one develops him or herself as a human being, then art can follow. If no adequate form exists, the artist will create a new one.
The Attention Age — More from Peter Osnos at The Atlantic, this time on book reviews:
The challenge for authors and publishers — as with so much else in our information and entertainment environment — is to catch the attention of the people at all these enterprises who choose among the cascade of books that arrive every day. I am reminded of hearing Esther Dyson observe over a decade ago that we no longer live in the information age, we live in the attention age. The notion that merit alone assures acclaim was never really valid, especially in non-fiction, but it is certainly not true today.
Getting Pregnant — Film critic Roger Ebert on being “well-read”:
At the end of the day, some authors will endure and most, including some very good ones, will not. Why do I think reading is important? It is such an effective medium between mind and mind. We think largely in words. A medium made only of words doesn’t impose the barrier of any other medium. It is naked and unprotected communication. That’s how you get pregnant. May you always be so.
Contempt — David Simon, creator of The Wire, interviewed by Bill Moyers for Guernica:
[T]he guys who are running newspapers over the last twenty or thirty years have to be singular in the manner in which they destroyed their own industry. It’s even more profound than Detroit in 1973 making Chevy Vegas and Pacers and Gremlins and believing that no self-respecting American would buy a Japanese car. Except it’s not analogous, in that a Nissan is a pretty good car and a Toyota is a pretty good car. The Internet, while it’s great for commentary and froth, doesn’t do very much first-generation reporting at all. The economic model can’t sustain that kind of reporting. They had contempt for their own product, these people… [F]or twenty years, they looked upon the copy as being the stuff that went around the ads. The ads were God. And then all of a sudden the ads were not there, and the copy they had contempt for. They had actually marginalized themselves.
And I love this response to being called “the angriest man in television”:
Comments closedIt doesn’t really mean much. The second-angriest guy is, you know, by a kidney-shaped pool in L.A. screaming into his cell phone because his DVD points aren’t enough. But I don’t mind being called that. I just don’t think it means anything. How can you have lived through the last ten years in American culture and not be? How can you not look at what happened on Wall Street, at this gamesmanship that was the mortgage bubble, that was just selling crap and calling it gold? Or watch a city school system suffer for twenty, twenty-five years? Isn’t anger the appropriate response? What is the appropriate response? Ennui? Alienation? Buying into the great-man theory of history—that if we only elect the right guy? This stuff is systemic. This is how an empire is eaten from within.
Holly MacDonald is Assistant Art Director at Bloomsbury in London. She has some of her own lovely cover designs on her blog.
Losing the Knack — Stephen King talks about his creative process and the current state of short fiction at The Atlantic:
I’ve got a perspective of being a short-story reader going back to when I was 8 or 9 years old. At that time there were magazines all over the place. There were so many magazines publishing short fiction that nobody could keep up with it. They were just this open mouth going “Feed me! Feed me!” The pulps alone, the 15- and 20-cent pulps, published like 400 stories a month, and that’s not even counting the so-called “slicks” — Cosmopolitan, American Mercury. All those magazine published short fiction. And it started to dry up. And now you can number literally on two hands the number of magazines that are not little presses that publish short fiction… You don’t see people on airplanes with their magazines folded open to Part 7 of the new Norman Mailer. He’s dead of course, but you know what I mean. And all of these e-books and this computer stuff, it kind of muddies the water and obscures the fact that people just don’t read short fiction. And when you fall out of the habit of doing it, you lose the knack, you lose the ability to sit down for 45 minutes like you can with this story and get a little bit of entertainment.
Also at The Atlantic: Peter Osnos, founder of Public Affairs Books, on how publishing has changed since 1984.
No Comment — Khoi Vinh, former-Design Director for NYTimes.com, writing on his own blog Subtraction about how comments and blogging are changing:
Comments closed[B]logging in the style that I cherish — the Blogger/MovableType/WordPress.org style, you might say, where each blog is a kind of an independent publication — now feels somewhat like a niche activity practiced by relatively few, where it once seemed like a revolutionary democratization of publishing. What seems more lively, more immediate and more relevant right now is what I might call ‘network blogging’ — content publishing that’s truly integrated into a host network like Tumblr or Twitter, that’s not just on the network, it’s of the network too. It’s simpler, faster, more democratic than what came before. It’s not my preferred style of blogging, but it’s hard to acknowledge that it’s not incredibly exciting in very different ways.
Part of this change, I think, is a decline in commenting… [T]here are much more absorbing content experiences than independent blogs out there right now: not just Tumblr, but Twitter and Facebook and all sorts of social media, too, obviously, and they’re drawing the attention that the ‘old’ blogs once commanded. Moreover, these social networks allow people to talk directly to one another rather than in the more random method that commenting on a blog post allows; why wouldn’t you prefer to carry on a one-on-one conversation with a friend rather than hoping someone reads a comment you’ve added to a blog post…?
Here’s a short video showing the complex production of Jonathan Safran Foer’s innovative die-cut novel Tree of Codes, published by Visual Editions and printed by Die Keure in Belgium:
(via Creative Review)
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Tick, Tick, Tick… — A lovely essay by Zadie Smith about Christian Marclay’s art film The Clock — a 24-hour montage of film and television clips about time — for the NYRB:
Marclay manages to deliver connections at once so lovely and so unlikely that you can’t really see how they were managed: you have to chalk it up to blessed serendipity. Guns in one film meet guns in another, and kisses, kisses; drivers in color wave through drivers in black-and-white so they might overtake them.
And still The Clock keeps perfect time. And speaks of time. By mixing the sound so artfully across visual boundaries (Marclay’s previous work is primarily in sound), The Clock endows each clip with something like perdurance, extending it in time, like a four-dimensional object. As far as the philosophy of time goes, Marclay’s with Heraclitus rather than Parmenides: the present reaches into the future, the past decays in the present. It’s all about the sound. The more frequently you visit The Clock the more tempted you are to watch it with your eyes closed… Nostalgia is continually aroused and teased; you miss clips the moment they’re gone, and cling to the aural afterglow of what has passed even as you focus on what is coming, what keeps coming.
The Real Story — An interesting and passionate post by the publishers of Two Ravens Press about the whys and wherefores of being a small press and the economic realities they face:
Why do small publishers bother? There are undoubtedly as many reasons as there are small publishers, but for people like us it’s because we’re tired of seeing the same old stuff on the bookshelves year after year after year. Safe books, based on the books that sold millions the previous year. Books that take few chances, books that fail to do anything to change the way we look at the world or ourselves. I wanted to go into a bookstore and be surprised. I wanted writing that was different, language that sang. And that’s why we started Two Ravens Press: to publish those books that big publishers were hardly bothering with any more. That’s also why the glib so-called ‘solutions’ to all the problems of an independent publisher like us that consist of helpful statements like ‘you need to have the commercial successes to fund the losses you’ll make on the literary, innovative stuff’ make absolutely no sense at all. Everyone else is publishing the commercial stuff. I don’t want to. Not doing that is my whole raison d’être. That’s the whole point! I don’t LIKE commercial stuff. I don’t think it ought to be banned, I don’t look down my nose at it, sometimes (but not often) I’ll even read it. But I don’t want to be yet another publisher churning out more of the same old writing. I want to do something different. I want literature.
See also: Lynn Michell, director of Linen Press on The Guardian Book Blog.
The Sound of Science — The New York Times on the unlikely success of WNYC’s innovative science show Radiolab:
This approach — a smaller number of shows, painstakingly assembled and treated more like small movies than like regularly scheduled programs — addresses a different tension, around new habits of media consumption. That is the tension between relevance and disposability. Discussions of technology and media tend to focus on speed — what’s the fastest way to break the story, consume the story, influence the story? After all, media consumers today seem like info-rats chewing through heaps of micro-facts and instant-expiration data points.
But the other interesting thing about media these days is that it can stand perfectly still. In fact it loiters: shows don’t simply spill over the airwaves and evaporate; they linger on DVRs, DVDs, various online services. Newspaper articles pile up in Web “archives.” And clearly we still accept, still crave, some deeper media experience too. In experimenting with a show that produces (at most) 10 episodes a year, WNYC was specifically thinking of HBO’s success in building powerful cultural franchises that ignore the mores of traditional broadcasting.
And finally…
Wall of Sound — Nikil Saval on how the iPod has changed the way we listen and respond to music:
Comments closedThe great 1990s magazine the Baffler spent its first half-decade analyzing how the culture industry managed, with increasing success, to recognize new musical trends and package them and sell them back at a markup to the people who’d pioneered them. The Baffler looked back to the punk scene of the early ’80s for inspiration; it spoke up for small labels that sold music to local constituencies. If you couldn’t get what you wanted on the radio, you would have to find it left of the dial—and keep looking over your shoulder for the man.
The danger now is different. The man no longer needs a monopoly on musical taste. He just wants a few cents on the dollar of every song you download, he doesn’t care what that song says. Other times he doesn’t even care if you pay that dollar, as long as you listen to your stolen music on his portable MP3 player, store it on his Apple computer, send it to your friends through his Verizon network. To paraphrase Yeltsin’s famous offer to the Chechens, take as much free music as you can stomach. We’ll see where it gets you.