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Category: Miscellany

Published February 16, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Tracing History — Alice Rawsthorn on the beauty of printed books for the New York Times:

Some things seem to designed to do their jobs perfectly, and the old-fashioned book is one. What else could be quite as efficient at packaging so many thousands of words in a form, which is sufficiently sturdy to protect them, yet so small and light that it can be carried around to be read whenever its owner wishes? The pages, type, binding and jacket of a traditional printed book do all of the above, as well as giving its designer just enough scope to make the result look beautiful, witty or intriguing.

(pictured above: Blaise Cendrars’s 1919 book ‘‘La fin du monde, filmée par l’ange,’’ designed and illustrated by Fernand Léger.)

Down bpNichol Lane — Founder and publisher of Coach House Books Stan Bevington talks to  The Varsity about the history of the storied indie press:

Coach House purchased a photo-offset lithography machine, which allowed images to be transferred photographically to aluminum printing plates. Oil-based ink adhered to the images on the plates, which were then used to print the pages of a book… In the 1960s, this was cutting-edge technology. According to Stan, offset lithography was a tremendous step forward in the publishing industry because it “drastically liberated” the process of creating printing plates. But the text of a book still had to be typeset by hand, which left publishers relatively restricted in other areas of design. As Stan thumbs through additional books that were printed using offset lithography, he laughs and points out that they are all set in the Helvetica typeface.

Captain Crunch — Alan Moore on DC Comics planned Watchmen prequels at Fast Company:

“There’s been a growing dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional publishing industry, in that you tend to have a lot of formerly reputable imprints now owned by big conglomerates… As a result, there’s a growing number of professional writers now going to small presses, self-publishing, or trying other kinds of [distribution] strategies.

“The same is true of music and cinema… It seems that every movie is a remake of something that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book. Now you’ve got theme park rides as the source material of movies. The only things left are breakfast cereal mascots.”

See also: Tom Spurgeon’s ‘21 Not Exactly Original Notes On More Watchmen, Written At A Slight Remove‘:

Watchmen is something of a perfect Internet-era story, and as such serves as a reminder of how much we’re driven by and limited to the nature and form of the way news stories develop now. You couldn’t build a story like this in a laboratory. The… Watchmen story is about a product; people like products. It’s about the hype for a product, which in many ways and for many fans has become the best part of any arts-product experience. Because the work itself doesn’t exist yet, arguments can be made on its behalf positing an ideal outcome or a disastrous one — your choice.

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Published February 10, 2012

Something for the Weekend

James Victore shares his workspace with From The Desk Of.

Burn Unit — At the New York Times ‘Bits’ blog, David Streitfeld writes on Amazon’s recent image problems:

[Take] the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek two weeks ago. It shows a book in flames with the headline, “Amazon wants to burn the book business.” What was remarkable was not just the overt Nazi iconography but the fact that it did not cause any particular uproar. In the struggle over the future of intellectual commerce in the United States, apparently even evocations of Joseph Goebbels and the Brown Shirts are considered fair game.

Witheringly Obscure — Wired Magazine talks to William Gibson about Distrust That Particular Flavor and collecting antique watches:

[It] was really about pursuing a totally unnecessary and gratuitous body of really, really esoteric knowledge. It wasn’t about accumulating a bunch of objects. It was about getting into something utterly, witheringly obscure, but getting into it at the level of, like, an extreme sport. I met some extraordinarily weird people. I met guys who could say, “Well, I’ve got this really rare watch, and it’s missing this little piece. Where might I find one?” Then the guy would kind of stare into space for a while, and then he’d say this address in Cairo, and he’d say, “It’s in the back room. The guy’s name is Alif, and he won’t sell, but he would trade it to you if you had this or this.” And it wasn’t bullshit. It was kind of like a magical universe. It was very interesting. But once I’d gotten that far … I got to a certain point, and there was just nowhere else to go with it. The journey was complete.

Magic Journalism — Writer Geoff Dyer chooses five unusual histories for The Browser:

[T]ypically, I guess, you read history books for the content – that sounds an unbelievably stupid comment – and you’re drawn to certain works of history rather than others because you’re interested in the period. You read Stalingrad by Antony Beevor because you’re interested in the Second World War, or Russia or whatever. Whereas it seemed to me that the thing about these books was that you might be interested in the subject, but it’s the way that the subject is dealt with that is the distinguishing feature of each one.

And finally…

A long article for Intelligent Life  on ceramicist Edmund de Waal and the double-edged success of his memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes:

In the 18 months since the book came out, de Waal has completed six overseas book tours, given dozens of talks, answered hundreds if not thousands of questions. He has also kept his porcelain-making studio busy and has plans for a subsequent book, about the history of porcelain around the world, which will take him from 18th-century Plymouth to the hillsides outside Jingdezhen where porcelain was first made in China, via Dresden, Marco Polo’s Venice, Istanbul and Yemen. “Porcelain”, he says, “is light when most things are heavy. It rings clear when you tap it. You can see the sunlight shine through. It is in the category of materials that turn objects into something else. It is alchemy. Porcelain starts elsewhere, takes you elsewhere. Who could not be obsessed?”

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Published February 9, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Beautiful children’s book and magazine covers from Korea in the 1950’s and 1960’s at the amazing 50 Watts.

Not a Pretty Scene — Tess Thackara on design and the future of printed books at Guernica magazine:

Amy Martin’s illustrations for Symphony City [published by McSweeney’s McMullens imprint 2011] create a layered multidimensional and richly textural world, which often appears like original paper collages. In some places the visual environment of an urban landscape full of music she creates is so absorbing that I wondered what an e-book or iPad app could offer that print couldn’t… McSweeney’s art director and editor Brian McMullen, who developed and gave his name to the imprint, offered a more practical reason for keeping to printed matter for kids: “Those of us who are parents aren’t convinced that kids need to be encouraged to spend more time than they already do in front of screens… Have you ever tried to tell a three-year-old it’s time to stop looking at one of these devices and hand it back to Daddy? It’s not a pretty scene. These devices are just not compatible with bedtime, in my experience, whereas a printed picture book, for whatever reason, is.”

See also: Designers on Book Covers of the Future at Publishing Perspectives.

Publishing’s Ecosystem on the Brink — An interesting summary by the Author’s Guild of recent articles in Bloomberg Business Week, The New York Times and Harpers about the perilous state of the  book industry.

And finally…

Attention Deficit — Lars Mensel interviews Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, for The European:

There’s no question that the internet offers all sorts of benefits – that is the reason why we use it so much. It is an incredibly powerful and useful technology that makes all sorts of information immediately available to us. Things that used to be impossible, hard or expensive to find are now right there. And we all know how to improve our ability to make decisions with it. But accompanying that, incredibly, is the fact that we become so intent on gathering information that we never slow down and think deeply about the information we find. We gain the ability to harvest huge amounts of data but we lose the ability to engage in contemplation, reflexion and other modes of thinking that require a large amount of attentiveness and the ability to filter out distractions and disruptions.

 

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Published February 1, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

The cover for Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander designed by John Gall.

The Invisible Man — Lee Konstantinou, author of Pop Apocalypse, reviews Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus for the LA Review of Books:

[T]here is something obsessive about MetaMaus, which says as much about the price of success in the contemporary literary marketplace — and its attendant culture of celebrity authorship — as it does about its subject. When a book like Maus makes a big impact, we often condemn its creator never to move on to new projects. MetaMaus give evidence that Spiegelman has endured a fate not unlike that of Ralph Ellison after he published Invisible Man in 1952. Like Ellison, Spiegelman has rightly earned enormous praise, and, also like Ellison, he has become his own best interpreter. But just as Ellison produced no major work after Invisible Man other than the unfinished, posthumously published Juneteenth…, Spiegelman has yet to produce a work of comparable depth and sophistication to Maus.

The Road — Julie Bosman on the future of Barnes & Noble for The New York Times:

If something were to happen to Barnes & Noble, if it were merely to scale back its ambitions, Amazon could become even more powerful and — well, the very thought makes publishers queasy.

“It would be like ‘The Road,’ ” one publishing executive in New York said, half-jokingly, referring to the Cormac McCarthy novel. “The post-apocalyptic world of publishing, with publishers pushing shopping carts down Broadway.”

…Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers’ marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense, suddenly seems a reach. Marketing books via Twitter, and relying on reviews, advertising and perhaps an appearance on the “Today” show doesn’t sound like a winning plan.

See also: B & N won’t sell books from Amazon Publishing and Amazon’s Revenue Slumps.

And finally…

The fascinating first article in a year-long series on the inner-workings of Canadian publisher House of Anansi Press by Mark Medley for the National Post:

A significant amount of time is spent discussing paperback editions of books that recently came out in hardcover. “Right now, we’re seeing the market is really and truly paperback and e-book,” [publisher] MacLachlan says. “So, we have some hardcovers that we thought would [sell] in the fall that haven’t gone as well as they should. And so, rather than wait a whole year to reintroduce the book into the marketplace, let’s do a paperback edition sooner than later.”

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Published January 27, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Typographica’s favourite typefaces of 2011 (pictured above: A2 Beckett designed by Henrik Kubel for A2-TYPE).

The Coroner`s Report — John Banville reviews The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin for The Guardian:

A “Complete Poems” is a death certificate and memorial combined. After the Selected and the Collected, the Complete marks the poet’s official demise and at the same time erects a carven monument designed to outlast the ages. In the case of this mighty volume of the all of Larkin, there is something too of the coroner’s report.

A two–part interview with William Gibson, author of Distrust That Particular Flavor, in the Wall Street Journal.

And finally…

Go Outside — Ian Leslie responds to criticism of his essay on serendipity:

The inherent limits of older formats like newspapers or bookstores are a feature as well as a bug. They make things a bit difficult for us, and because of that they often push us towards unsought-for discoveries.The modern internet makes each of us like a rich man in his mansion who has the finest food flown in from every corner of the world and whose favourite singers and artists come and perform for him in his bedroom at a moment’s notice. He has a nagging feeling that he ought to go outside and experience the city and its manifold surprises first-hand. Nothing is stopping him from doing so. But it feels like such an effort.

 

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Published January 25, 2012

Midweek Miscellany


Everyday Epic — Tom Spurgeon interviews Tom Gauld at The Comics Reporter:

I find that when I’m drawing I’m quite happy to come up with larger than life, epic things but when I write things tend to be more down to earth. The contrast between greatness and everyday reality is something which interests me.

You can find my interview with Tom here. His new book Goliath is out in March.

I Am Lousy Copywriter — A list by legendary adman David Ogilvy, author of Confessions of an Advertising Man, at Letter of Note:

If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.

My Name is Tyranny — Mike Doherty interviews William Gibson about his new book, Distrust That Particular Flavor, for Salon:

I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes – I’m often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand. Have you ever seen Brian Eno’s deck of Oblique Strategies? One of them is “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” That’s my favorite. [At a] hotel in New York a couple of days ago, the young woman who checked me in said what sounded to me like, “Thank you, sir; my name is Tyranny. If there’s anything you need …” For the rest of the day, I was thinking of young, benevolent female characters with the first name “Tyranny.”

And finally…

Tiptoeing Through a Sickroom — Luc Sante on Patti Smith for The New York Review of Books:

Her memoir Just Kids (2010), the account of her friendship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, has been justly celebrated. It is delicate and affectionate as it tells of their adventures in a New York City bohemia that now seems a century removed, of the endurance of their relationship despite his realization that he was gay, of their separate pursuits of fame, of his illness and death. It is almost too literary for its own good, since her choices of word and phrase always come down on the genteel side of the ledger: “perhaps” rather than “maybe,” “rise” rather than “stand,” “yet” rather than “but,” “one” rather than “you.” There’s hardly a contraction, outside the dialogue, in the entire book. But despite the fact that this sort of talk is patently not the way she expressed herself at the time, and that it sounds more effortful than natural on the page, it does cover the book with an appropriate hush—it sounds like someone tiptoeing through a sickroom.

 

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Published January 21, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Adrift in the World — Tim Parks on fiction and place for the NYRB Blog:

If there is a problem with the novel, and I’m agreed with [David] Shields that there is, it is not because it doesn’t participate in modern technology, can’t talk about it or isn’t involved with it; I can download in seconds on my Kindle a novel made up entirely of emails or text messages. Perhaps the problem is rather a slow weakening of our sense of being inside a society with related and competing visions of the world to which we make our own urgent narrative contributions; this being replaced by the author who takes courses to learn how to create a product with universal appeal, something that can float in the world mix, rather than feed into the immediate experience of people in his own culture.

The Degree-Zero of Typeage — The “un-Google-able” Jenny Hendrix on Tintin for LA Review of Books:

Hergé himself described Tintin as the “degree-zero of typeage — a typographic vanishing point.” The formulation suggests Samuel Beckett, and there is indeed something Beckettian about Tintin. In French, appropriately, the phrase “faire tintin” means something approximating “to go without” or “to be frustrated.” Tintin may be a reporter, motivated, like any good journalist, by the hint of a good story, but only in his very first of his 24 adventures does he actually file copy. He was born 15, and supposedly stays that way, though it is hard to imagine he’s any age at all. He has no last name, no parentage and no past, no desires and no sexual identity. Even his appearance has little to say about him: his face is just a circle, with two black dots for eyes and a black, semi-circular wedge of mouth. He could be anyone, and frequently is…

Super-Punch — The New York Times reviews ‘Printing for Kingdom, Empire & Republic: Treasures From the Archives of the Imprimerie Nationale’, an exhibition of historical steel punches, copper matrices, and typefonts at the Grolier Club in New York:

[T]hese exquisite artifacts… offer a reminder, in the ethereal era of bitmapping, that type was once the tangible province of engravers and metal casters who labored in unforgiving but enduring media. To make a C with a cedilla, for example, involved a lot more effort and thought than holding down the Option key on your Mac. A comma-shaped steel appendage had to be lashed with string to the bottom of the C punch to produce a new matrix.

“People are practically printing books with their smartphones,” Mr. Fletcher said, in a tone suggesting that he did not think this was such a good idea. “It’s much more gratifying to be able to touch something and find out it’s real, rather than a matter of bits and bytes.”

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Published January 18, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Psycho-Drama — Pat Kirkham reassesses the collaboration between Saul Bass and Alfred Hitchcock for Design Observer:

The entire Bass/Hitchcock collaboration deserves to be better known, partly because of the sheer quality of the work, partly because it offers an interesting case study of the complex interchange between film and design, and partly because of the controversy surrounding Bass’s contribution to what is arguably the most famous scene in U.S. cinema — the shower scene in Psycho. Serious discussion of Bass’s contribution to the shower scene — a fascinating collaboration, from novel and script to musical score — remains problematic, not least because issues of authorship are far from dead in many academic disciplines, design history and film studies included.

Portmanteau — William Gibson’s new collection of non-fiction, Distrust That Particular Flavor, reviewed in The New York Times:

Everything he notices seems to be a this grafted onto a that. In these essays, we see a man fascinated by objects and places containing their own contradictions. It makes sense, then, that Gibson’s novels have helped promote several portmanteau words and neologisms, like “cyberspace,” into widespread English use. This is the essence of Gibson-think — anything can be a kind of portmanteau, a glued-­together paradox.

See also: Gibson interviewed in The National Post (who get bonus points for their “Neuromantic” headline) and The Globe and Mail.

And finally…

What You Want, But Not What You Need — An interesting article by Ian Leslie, author of Born Liars, on serendipity:

[T]here is a reason why Amazon is successful and bookshops are closing: in a world of infinite choice, efficiency is hard to resist. The pleasures of the bookshop or the library are easily outgunned by the knowledge that we can order or download a book instantly, or find the information we’re looking for within seconds. Serendipity, on the other hand, is, as Zuckerman says,  “necessarily inefficient”. It is a fragile quality, vulnerable to our desire for convenience and speed. It also requires a kind of planned vagueness. Digital systems don’t do vagueness very well, and our patience with it seems to be fading.

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Published January 13, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Fabulous Fury — Evie Nagy reviews Tarpé Mills & Miss Fury: Sensational Sundays 1944–1949 for The LA Review of Books:

Though Mills ostensibly hid her gender and wrote a high-adventure comic rife with guy stuff like smuggling, espionage, mad science, and gruesome murders, Miss Fury has much in it that seems designed to appeal to women as well. For one thing, the outfits are fabulous. As Robbins suggests, Mills clearly took great pleasure in dressing Marla, scheming villainess Erica Von Kampf, and other characters in elaborate gowns, lingerie, and smart but finely detailed sportswear. Modern superhero comics tend to focus on the intricacies of high-tech costumes at the expense of civilian clothes; Miss Fury, by contrast, is midcentury clothes porn.

Fucking Great — British film director Beeban Kidron remembers Magnum photographer Eve Arnold who died recently aged 99:

She was an early adopter of colour – favouring a thick negative with rich hues and simple compositions – and she ruthlessly edited her own work with a wicked sense of humour. “It’s not that we’re so great, it’s that the others are so fucking mediocre.”

See also:

A slide show of Eve Arnold’s work at The Guardian.

Eve Arnold remembered in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Financial Times, The New York Times and The Economist.

The best Typefaces of 2011 from FontShop and the most popular fonts of the year from MyFonts.

Forward! — Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber & Faber, writing for The Guardian on the way ahead in publishing:

[T]he men and women engaged in publishing need to be bold and exuberant. This is an extraordinary age for writing and reading, and it seems to me that this endeavour will go better if it’s done with a sense of purpose and pleasure, rather than defensively. It won’t turn out well for everyone currently in the business, but so what? If publishing is useful and creates value then it will be of value, whoever is doing it.

And finally…

A lovely profile of  Peter Hardwicke, one of the last traditional signwriters in London’s East End, in Spitalfields Life:

I am an old school signwriter that likes to talk directly to the client to select the fonts and the colours. I’ve found it a rewarding way to work, dealing with independent shopkeepers. I like to look at the built environment and choose fonts that are sympathetic to the architecture and the surrounding cityscape. I look at the other shops and I do research…I think people are bored with computer generated artwork…even my younger clients, they’d rather have it  done professionally than use stick on letters – it shows they’ve got taste.

You can find an earlier profile of Peter here and see an archive of his work on Flickr. (Thx Monique)

 

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Published January 11, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

An interview with Jason Cohn, director of the documentary Eames: The Architect and The Painter, at Imprint:

Charles was extremely ambitious and maybe a little bit cut throat in his career. I do think that it was important to him to build a strong brand. The way that he used the image of them as a couple to publicize and self-promote was far thinking. I think that he and Ray intuited that when you are selling a mass-produced item like a chair or an iPod, it’s not quite enough to have something that is beautiful, works well and at the right price point. It helps when you can buy a tiny piece of the designer as well. Just like Steve Jobs did that with Apple, Ray and Charles did that with their furniture. When you were buying a piece of Eames furniture, you were buying a little bit of that joie de vivre, the free and easy California lifestyle, that Charles and Ray represented to a generation of people.

Jason Epstein reviews Richard Seaver’s memoir The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age for The New York Times:

In the spring of 1953 Seaver opened a letter from Barney Rosset, who had just acquired for a few thousand dollars the assets of Grove Press, a stillborn Greenwich Village publishing firm. Rosset said he was coming to France, and could Mr. Sea­ver introduce him to Beckett? Dick replied that Beckett was reclusive, but he should approach Beckett’s publisher, M. Jérôme Lindon at Les Éditions de Minuit. Rosset replied that he was now in touch with Minuit and had made an offer for Beckett in America. Rosset later asked Seaver to join him at Grove, and Dick, now married to the beautiful Jeannette Medina, a concert violinist who had recently won a scholarship to Juilliard, accepted. The ’60s would be a time of triumph and tragedy for Dick and Barney.

And on a not entirely unrelated note…

An obituary for George Whitman, owner of Shakespeare & Company, in The Telegraph:

Whitman displayed a blithe disregard for money, often informing customers that the book they were perusing was not for sale and remaining philosophical when the cash box disappeared — a regular occurrence. Yet while more commercially minded bookshops were being taken over or going to the wall, Whitman weathered the depredations of beat poets and hippies, and survived the 1968 student riots and numerous tax audits by the French authorities. Quite how he did it remained something of a mystery.

See also: The Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist and many more…

And finally…

Outsider Art — Alexander Chee interviews cartoonist Daniel Clowes for the BOMBlog:

I think the so-called acceptance of comics is all in the minds of journalists and desperate booksellers. My comics sold fairly well when it was a completely unknown underground thing and they seem to sell vaguely the same numbers now as they did then, it’s just a different audience. Back then it was only people involved in the underground culture and now it’s a general audience at bookstores… If you looked at the number of people who buy books there it would be a very small percentage of the population, far less than those who’d buy an indie movie. I mean, probably several million people saw the Ghost World movie, for example, but it’s in the hundreds of thousands for the book—a small percentage.

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Published December 21, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Kate Beaton’s Wonder Woman returns.

Five-Pointed Stars of Pain — An excellent post on Dan Clowes and his latest book The Death- Ray at The Brooklyn Rail:

Clowes engaged themes consistent with those of literary fiction in visual terms and in bookstore-friendly formats, and he was not alone. By the turn of the millennium there emerged a critical mass of graphic novels ready to join Maus on the shelves of bookstores and libraries, and some far-sighted publishing insiders took notice. Chief among them was Chip Kidd, the acclaimed book designer for Knopf who also consulted on a handful of comics projects at Pantheon… Kidd perceptively encouraged Pantheon to make a stronger commitment to the comics form, and in late 2000 the publisher debuted two books: Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Clowes’s David Boring.

Ware’s critically lauded book, originally serialized in his Acme Novelty Library series, somewhat overshadowed Clowes’s deadpan investigation into lust and obsession. But the simultaneous publication of these two works by a major publisher made an unmistakable statement: a generation of cartoonists laboring in obscurity had come of age.

A Complicated Life — Los Angeles Times television critic Robert Lloyd on Tintin creator Hergé:

Hergé had left orders that, after his death, Tintin would go no more a-roving. That is not how it is with many fictional characters — or “properties” as they are sometimes called, perpetually prey to the whims of whoever holds the deed. James Bond has long outlived every thing Ian Fleming ever thought to do with him; a single comic-book hero may be the work of any number of cooks, prepared for a range of readers in a variety of flavors, from plain vanilla to something laced with rum, coke or Lithium. But Tintin without Hergé is as unthinkable — or if thinkable, still as wrong — as Charlie Brown without Charles Schulz.

Good Manners — Lorien Kite, the Financial Times’s books editor, has lunch with bookseller (and now managing director of Waterstone’s) James Daunt:

He was recently quoted as having referred to Amazon as “a ruthless money-making devil” that did not operate in the consumer’s interest – comments that generated an angry response in some quarters. Playing devil’s advocate, I ask: isn’t it up to consumers to decide what is more important, the price or a congenial experience? “I wouldn’t disagree with that at all,” he says. “Oddly enough, completely contrary to that headline, I genuinely don’t feel sorry for myself. As long as I deliver something that people enjoy, I’ll be fine.”

And finally…

Alice Rawsthorn on graphic designer Robert Brownjohn for The New York Times:

Talented though he was, Brownjohn’s contemporaries knew him as much for his decadent lifestyle as for his work. Charming and gregarious with a flair for grand gestures, he was haunted by drug addiction. As his friend, the British graphic designer Alan Fletcher, once wrote: “He had real charisma rather than character. You always knew he was about five jumps ahead of whatever you were thinking…”

A few years after his arrival in London, Fletcher arranged for him to talk to a group of designers. Brownjohn spoke lucidly but looked fragile and, at times, struggled to stay awake. An architect in the audience asked: “What is graphic design?” Brownjohn replied: “I am.”

(NB: Posting will probably be a bit sparse here from now until mid-January, so just reminder that there’s also The Accidental Optimist, The Casual Optimist Tumblr and Facebook which will be updated more frequently).

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Published December 9, 2011

Something for the Weekend

An interview with designer Suzanne Dean, creative director at Random House UK,  in The Daily Telegraph:

For this year’s Man Booker winner, Dean tried out, in her own estimation, about 20 different jackets. Working with the book’s themes of time and memory, she ordered vintage watches from eBay, and even smashed them up in her garden. She tried period photographs of schoolboys, and an image of a couple. Each version tilted one’s reading of the novel quite distinctly. Julian Barnes took about seven covers home and thought about them. Just as he was about to settle on one that featured old rulers and a watch, Dean had second thoughts. “I asked him to give me two more weeks.”

See also: ‘A year of beautiful books’ in The Guardian,  and ‘How designers are helping to keep the old format alive’ in The Independent.

Virtual Comics Emporium — Michel Faber reviews 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die by Paul Gravett:

I know what you’re thinking, those of you who’d like to get to grips with this medium but are dutifully consuming Julian Barnes’ Booker-winning chef-d’oeuvre instead. How can you be seen reading a tome with Judge Dredd on the cover and Hellboy punching demons inside? Well, look at it this way: studying 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die is like visiting the world’s most fabulously well-stocked comics shop. This virtual emporium may be far superior to Forbidden Planet, but it can’t afford to ignore its regular customers. If superheroes, homicidal maniacs and feisty animals are not your thing, you’ll just have to tolerate them as you discover a wealth of other delights. Eventually, the realisation may even sneak up on you that a good superhero comic is better than a bad literary novel.

And the on subject of comics…. Neal Adams on Batman cartoonist Jerry Robinson, co-creator of Robin and The Joker, who died aged 89 on Wednesday, in The LA Times:

Neal Adams, the comic book artist who became a fan-favorite in the 1960s and a champion for creator rights, said that young Robinson brought an energy and intuitive understanding of his audience to the Batman comics. Nothing showed that more, Adams said, than the addition of Robin, the plucky daredevil sidekick who provided an entry point for every kid who spent their nickels on Detective Comics, or characters such as Two-Face, which showed Robinson’s affection for Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy… “As I grew up and fell into this stuff, I realized that everything I liked about Batman ending up being the stuff that Jerry Robinson created. ‘Who is this guy? He did all that? Yes he did all that.’”

And finally…

The Individual Soul — Adam Kirsch reviews Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman for The New Republic:

[Grossman] was a former engineer turned writer who became famous as a journalist covering World War II for the Red Star newspaper; his dispatches were immensely popular and made him one of the Soviet Union’s leading writers. That’s why it came as such a shock to the authorities when, in 1960, he submitted the manuscript of Life and Fate for publication. It is, on the one hand, a paean to Soviet heroism in World War II, especially at the crucial battle of Stalingrad, which forms the backdrop to the novel. Yet at the same time, it is a brilliantly honest account of the horrors of Stalinism, and its running theme is that Communism and Nazism were two sides of the same coin.

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