Earlier this week I posted the 1947 documentary Making Books. As follow up, here’s the 1961 documentary Bookbinders from the AFL-CIO series “Americans at Work”:
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Published March 10, 2011
Category: Books
Published March 9, 2011
Midweek Miscellany
Two stunningly minimal designs by Rodrigo Corral for New Directions.
Faceout Books is back after a hiatus. First up, an interview with Jennifer Heuer about her design for Down and Delirious in Mexico City by Daniel Hernandez.
Haystacks of Needles — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on situational overload versus ambient overload:
Situational overload is not the problem. When we complain about information overload, what we’re usually complaining about is ambient overload. This is an altogether different beast. Ambient overload doesn’t involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles. We experience ambient overload when we’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all. We keep clicking links, keep hitting the refresh key, keep opening new tabs, keep checking email in-boxes and RSS feeds, keep scanning Amazon and Netflix recommendations – and yet the pile of interesting information never shrinks.
The cause of situational overload is too much noise. The cause of ambient overload is too much signal.
The Case for the Novella — The New York Times Magazine has an excerpt from “The Three-Day Weekend Plan,” an essay by John Brandon from the new book The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books (Soft Skull):
Bluntly, the novella is in its Golden Age as a form right now because no one is beating it with a stick until nickels fall out. So my plan for the novella is — drum roll: Do nothing. Or do whatever little is required to steward the status quo. Let’s agree, shall we, to keep throwing around the inane term Great American Novel, and to never, ever utter the phrase Great American Novella.
And on the subject of The New York Times Magazine…
The Speed of Change — Former Design Director for NYTimes.com Khoi Vinh on the new design of the New York Times Magazine:
Comments closedDigital publishing is supposed to be much quicker than print publishing, but this… suggests that more important than the speed of medium is the nimbleness of the business behind it. The print side of The New York Times takes a lot of good natured ribbing for being slow to publish news, but it’s still very, very good at what it does. Which is to say that few organizations can publish on a weekly basis and still effect the kind of major change that this redesign represents.
In some ways, the digital side of the business is not as nimble as that. To be sure, few companies can execute digital publishing as well as The New York Times… But partly because the medium is much younger and constantly changing, partly because best practices are less well-defined, and partly because the mission is more diffuse, execution is a more intricate, protracted and, often, inefficient affair on the digital side.
Published March 8, 2011
Making Books, 1947
Here’s a fascinating 1947 documentary produced by Encyclopedia Britannica Films about the mass production of books:
(via Brain Pickings)
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Published March 7, 2011
50/50 Reinstated
Richard Grefé, executive director of AIGA, has announced that the 50 Books/50 Covers competition will continue:
In seeking to balance AIGA’s celebration of design in all its dimensions, we recently merged the historic AIGA competition for books and covers… into the broader competition, “365: Design Effectiveness,” which includes interactive, cross-media and print design. Book designers, publishers and admirers reacted strongly to this news with a public petition to “Save 50/50,” gaining more than a thousand signatures in mere days.
We have listened to these passionate voices in the design community, and we have reinstated “50 Books/50 Covers” as a distinct competition. Our intention was not to reduce our support for book designers, but to present AIGA as representative of—and respectful toward—all design disciplines equally. We apologize to those who construed the original decision as a reduction in AIGA’s commitment to the importance of book and cover design; that was not the intention, although it was clearly the impression. We also apologize for tinkering with something that is held so dear by so many; and we were remiss in how we vetted and communicated this change.
Thank you Christopher Sergio and Catherine Casalino for organizing the petition to save 50/50, and thank you AIGA for listening. YAY.
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Published March 7, 2011
The Breaking of Eggs: One Book, Three Covers
Books published in both the US and UK will often have different covers in each country. The UK and the US are, after all, two nations divided by a common language. Even so, I was still quite surprised by just how different the cover of UK paperback edition The Breaking of Eggs by Jim Powell (forthcoming from Orion, above right) was from the cover US edition of the same book (published by Penguin, above left).
It was Dan Mogford the designer of the UK paperback who pointed me in the direction of the original US cover, designed by Gregg Kulick. I had, it turned out, seen Gregg’s cover before — it had caught my eye in Paul Buckley’s book Penguin 75 — I just hadn’t realized it was the same book that Dan had just designed the cover for!
As Dan and Gregg’s treatments were so different, I thought it might be informative to ask them both about their designs. In the process, I came across Nathan Burton’s design for the UK hardcover edition of The Breaking of Eggs (published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, above middle) — another, altogether different, interpretation of the same story. I thought it would be interesting to ask Nathan what he remembered from his design brief as well.
I’m grateful to all three designers for sharing their thoughts on their very different directions…
The Breaking of Eggs is the story of an old curmudgeon who learns to take down all of the walls he built around himself and really enjoy life. As a child, he flees Poland to escape the war and settles in France. As an adult he becomes a travel writer who focuses on the old communist block and is very much a communist himself. The rest of the world and its excesses annoy him and he shuts himself out. Slowly he breaks down the walls and visits his lost brother in America.
The title refers to a Joseph Stalin quote “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” and could be used as a metaphor for his own life. Or he as a child, he could also have been one of the broken eggs. Regardless, it was his mind that needed to be broken in order to live a truly full life. Which, is why I chose that imagery. The giant exclamation point was a homage to Rodchenko, who was a huge influence on my design as a student and who often used them in his design.
The map in the background just represents some of the places he wrote about as a travel writer. This was more of a request from editorial to show “place” on the cover and I think it was a very nice suggestion.
The publisher had tried a photographic route previously to commissioning me which hadn’t worked so they wanted an alternative approach. Buzz words they came up with were: cafe, espresso, napkin, beer, handwritten notes, cigarette smoke, a guide book on a table, a train. It was a case of combining this with a nod toward an Eastern European aesthetic to come up with the final design.
1 CommentThe previous incarnations of the jacket – on both sides of the Atlantic – had all been fairly quirky and lighthearted and the publishers were keen to open this book up to a different audience. Orion were quite specific about the direction they wanted to go with this – the phrase ‘traditional, sophisticated literary fiction’ was mentioned a few times!
The focus for this version of the jacket was to be the protagonist’s early year’s in Lodz, Poland around 1939 when he was abandoned by his mother. The brief asked for ‘a lonely looking boy in an urban Polish setting ideally with a woman walking away from him’ – this highly specific request meant I was looking at a composite image from the start, it was really a case of finding the right elements within a variety of period photographs then assembling them to tell the story you see in the final composition.
Published March 4, 2011
Something for the Weekend
Beep Beep — Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) reviews The Information by James Gleick:
As a celebration of human ingenuity, The Information is a deeply hopeful book. But it ends on an ambivalent note. The mathematical analysis of information, Gleick points out, entails the “ruthless sacrifice” of meaning, the very thing that “gives information its value and its purpose.” To the number-crunchers and code-wranglers who design our world-engirdling information networks, a message’s meaning is beside the point. A bit is a bit is a bit. As Shannon himself dryly noted, meaning is “irrelevant to the engineering problem.”
And yes, that cover was designed by Peter Mendelsund.
Beginners Edited — The original draft of Beginners by Raymond Carver compared with the final version of the story, retitled and published as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, edited by Gordon Lish. It’s from a couple of years ago, but still fascinating if you’ve never seen it (via Biblioklept).
Collector’s Items — The Guardian on the renaissance of chapbooks:
The 16th century merriments that became the chapman’s stock in trade were historically cheap, crudely made and illustrated using recycled woodcuts.
Today’s chapbooks, which are enjoying a revival along with independent regional publishing, bear little resemblance to the roughly produced books of the past. They are objects of beauty in their own right, with emphasis on original design as well as being a showcase for original writing. Pamphlet-sized but glossy, and more book than leaflet, they are highly covetable, which partly explains their appeal.
And finally…
A Curious Journey— The story of Margret and H.A. Rey, the creators of Curious George, at More Intelligent Life:
On June 12th 1940, the couple left Paris. The Nazis arrived less than two days later.
The Reys made their way to the south of France, and spent several weeks in a makeshift refugee camp in a high-school gymnasium before proceeding to Lisbon. From there they arranged passage to Brazil, and months later to New York. They carried with them the first drawings for the Curious George books, and showed them to police as proof of their occupation. The first book, “Curious George”, was published in 1941. The little monkey arrives in New York and strolls off of the ship with a smile, holding his papers in one hand and a little red valise in the other. A policeman salutes in welcome.
An exhibition of art by the Reys is on display at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco until March 13th.
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Published March 3, 2011
Save 50/50 Petition
Book designers Christopher Sergio and Catherine Casalino have created an website and online petition asking AIGA to reconsider its recent decision to end its annual design competition 50 Books / 50 Covers:
This year—after nine-decades—AIGA has decided to quietly discontinue the 50/50 competition.
Their decision was made without public announcement or explanation, and implemented without fanfare. The usual 50/50 deadline came and went, but the “Call For Entries” never went out. The presumption seemed to be that no one would notice its loss.
But people have noticed. And as it turns out, many of us care. In the few short days since the design community first realized what was going on, people have expressed the desire to preserve a competition dedicated solely to excellence in book design. There has been a common consensus that even in the digital age celebrating the physical book is important.
That is why we have created this website and online petition—to help spread the word even further, to give voice to a larger audience, and to perhaps see if enough momentum might be built to save the 50 Books / 50 Covers competition.
If you are a fan of design in any medium, or of reading in any format, we ask you to help us take a stand for the combination of both forms of expression.
50 Books/50 Covers is one of only a few design competitions dedicated to excellence in book design. It is important that it continues.
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Published March 2, 2011
Midweek Miscellany
The new cover for Daniel Clowes’ The Death Ray available this fall from Drawn + Quarterly. (The usual disclosure: D+Q is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books).
The Enemy of Creativity — Jim Holt reviews Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows for London Review of Books:
It’s not that the web is making us less intelligent; if anything, the evidence suggests it sharpens more cognitive skills than it dulls. It’s not that the web is making us less happy, although there are certainly those who, like Carr, feel enslaved by its rhythms and cheated by the quality of its pleasures. It’s that the web may be an enemy of creativity. Which is why Woody Allen might be wise in avoiding it altogether.
A Machine To Think With — Paul Duguid reviews Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson, Publishing as a Vocation by Irving Louis Horowitz and The Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet for the TLS:
I. A. Richards called the book “a machine to think with”, yet it is curiously resistant to technological standardization. That point escapes many digitizing technologists, who are not perhaps the anti-book boors as sometimes portrayed… Rather they may be the last romantics, idealizing the book as a simple carrier of information and so one that submits unproblematically to their computer algorithms.
Unsolving the City — BLDGBLOG talks to author China Miéville about architecture and his recent novels The City and The City and Kraken. Fantastic stuff:
My intent with The City and The City was… to derive something hyperbolic and fictional through an exaggeration of the logic of borders, rather than to invent my own magical logic of how borders could be. It was an extrapolation of really quite everyday, quite quotidian, juridical and social aspects of nation-state borders… But I’m always slightly nervous when people make analogies to things like Palestine because I think there can be a danger of a kind of sympathetic magic: you see two things that are about divided cities and so you think that they must therefore be similar in some way.
The new covers for Miéville’s forthcoming book Embassytown, and his entire back catalogue with Pan Macmillan UK, were designed by Crush Creative.
And finally…
Handsome Boy Modeling School — A profile Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, in The New York Times’ Fashion and Style section:
Mr. Stein, an unabashed bon vivant who favors bespoke shirts and tailor-made suits by Kirk Miller, appears indifferent to accusations of pretension or dandyism… He has already cemented his status as a somewhat unlikely sex symbol (though among New York’s literary crowd, being pale, thin and occasionally bespectacled doesn’t count against you) with a practiced charm and habit of leaning in close and locking eyes intensely in conversation.
There is hope for us all yet… I just wish I could afford the bespoke shirts and tailor-made suits…
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Published February 25, 2011
Something for the Weekend
Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, has posted an amazing selection of vintage French photographic noir book covers at John Gall’s blog Spine Out.
On the Defensive — Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask, on teaching creative writing in The Financial Times:
When you teach creative writing, you are already on the defensive. People love to poke you in the chest and cry, “But you can’t teach writing!” This is precisely what I think about automobile driving but I let them rant while I rub the sore part where they poked me. I don’t know why people get so worked up about this subject. Nobody has asked them to teach creative writing or even to learn it. Apprenticeship, the sharing of history and technique, has always been a central feature of art-making. Yet people cling to a romantic idea of the self-made genius toiling away in a garret or napping undisturbed in a sleep module.
Books on Wheels — A really lovely article about bookmobiles from the Smithsonian Magazine:
Bookmobiles, the man said, had been a fundamental inspiration while growing up in rural Mississippi in the mid-1960s. The public library had been closed to blacks—but the bookmobile stopped right on his street, a portal into the world of literature.
The gentleman was W. Ralph Eubanks: today an acclaimed author, and Director of Publishing for the Library of Congress… “The librarians did not care that I was barefoot, and wearing a pair of raggedy shorts. All they cared about was that I wanted to read—and to help me find something I would enjoy reading.”
Eubanks’ story is just one example of the pivotal role bookmobiles have played in literary culture, and individual lives, for more than 150 years.
Strides at The Strand — Nancy Bass Wyden, co-owner of The Strand bookstore in New York, interviewed in The Daily Beast:
We have taken strides to grow with our customers and listen to their needs. When customers started requesting New York Times bestsellers, we started carrying new books and featuring them on tables in the front of the store; when customers started talking about the Internet, we got online; when Amazon and B&N.com became “competitors,” we partnered with them.
And finally…
The Trial — Judith Butler in the LRB on the implications of the ongoing and complex legal battle in Tel Aviv over several boxes of Kafka’s original writings:
Comments closedHad the works been destroyed, perhaps the ghosts would not be fed – though Kafka could not have anticipated how limitlessly parasitic the forces of nationalism and profit would be, even as he knew those spectral forces were waiting.
Published February 23, 2011
Edward Gorey
Alexander Theroux, author of The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (recently revised and republished by Fantagraphics), talks to NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday about the writer and illustrator Edward Gorey, who would have been 86 years old today:
Violence is the essential Gorey ingredient. It is used in his books with such off-hand wit and inevitability that, having become his signature, if it were suddenly missing, you would begin to worry or at least feel you are being fobbed off by work not of the master’s hand.
NPR THE WEEKEND EDITION: THE LIFE OF EDWARD GOREY
Theroux also talks about his peculiar friend with Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter:
Comments closedI was telling someone the other day, there a division in the 20s and post WWI era, especially growing up in England. I think Gorey inherited this. There were the athletes, the muscular types — on one side of the tennis court, as it were. Then there were these kind of fey, bright young things on the other side of the tennis court. There has always been a kind of mocking, derisive look that they took regarding each other. I think Gorey grew out of that kind of gay interest, that fascination with ’20s movies, ’20s styles; there’s a tradition, I think. He was unhappy in the military and when he was at Harvard he was always in an artsy world. He went to the ballet every night in New York. He was almost a caricature of that Ronald Firbank type of character. He was very fey. He didn’t hide any of that.
Published February 18, 2011
Something for the Weekend
Punching Through the Din — designer Jim Northover on the exhibition of Saul Bass movie posters at Kemistry in London.
This is the End — Sarah Weinman on chronicling the end of the chain bookstore era:
But maybe what really happened was as simple as this: chain bookstores were never supposed to last as long as they did, and have reached their natural end point after twenty years. Publishing in general has enough struggle with scale, either being too small and prone to great risk and failure, or too big and beholden to larger entities who want greater and greater annual profits. Whatever possessed us to think bookstores could operate this way? Why is the art of bookselling supposed to be conflagrated with abundance, with excess and with millions of square feet?
And on a somewhat related note…
The Cost of Keeping Authors Alive –Boyd Tonkin for The Independent (via MobyLives):
Dirt-cheap e-books benefit the very rich – and the very dead. They might also help new authors to find a foothold and win an audience – although, on that logic, newcomers should think about showcasing their work for nothing. Many do. But the almost-free digital novel hammers another nail into the coffin of a long-term literary career. Who cares? Readers should, if they cherish full-time authors who craft not safe genre pieces but distinctive book after distinctive book that build into a unique body of work.
(see also: Margaret Atwood at TOC)
Kick Ass Annie — An interview with Anne Koyama, the founder and operator of Toronto-based Koyama Press, at Design Feaster:
I look at all kinds of artwork, films, architecture, photography and typography. I subscribe to a lot of art/artist’s blogs. I like to walk around cities and try to really see the details of things around me (which is more difficult than you may think for someone possessed of a short attention span). I carry a little point-and-shoot camera often. Of course, all of the artists I work with inspire me and I seem to find a few artists each week that I’d like to work with if I had the funds.
And lastly…
Meet the Classics — A Brazilian ad campaign to promote Penguin Classic Books (via This Isn’t Happiness).
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