Skip to content

Category: Miscellany

Published January 7, 2011

Something for the Weekend

A Sense of What’s Possible — Ramona Koval talks to Edith Grossman about her book Why Translation Matters and her translation of Don Quixote for The Book Show on ABC Radio National. From the transcript:

What I mean by ‘deep reading’…and it comes after a couple or three readings…what I mean is capturing the subtleties of what the original author is doing. Because artful language has both the stated and the unstated in it, and the stated is fairly obvious, the unstated is really what differentiates one writer’s style from another. And those unstated, unspoken elements are what I try to bring over in analogous fashion into English. That kind of reading, analysing the way parts of the sentence relate to one another and how the sentences in a paragraph relate to one another and so forth, how the paragraphs connect within the chapter, this is more intensive than an ordinary reading of a book. But to my mind it’s what I have to do in order to create something in English that feels to the English-speaking reader the way the original feels, in my case, to the Spanish speaker.

MyFonts’ Top Fonts of 2010, which includes the charming Lady René by Argentinian foundry Sudtipos:

See Also: DesignWorkLife’s favourite typefaces of 2010.

Legendary design consultancy Pentagram have launched a new website to showcase their work, including  some great book design (via FormFiftyFive).

And finally…

The New York Times looks at the work of Thatcher Wine and other designers who assemble and create custom book collections for clients (one can only hope the above was for The White Stripes).

Comments closed
Published January 5, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Nothing is Forgotten — A dark and beautiful wordless webcomic by Ryan Andrews (via Drawn).

And on the subject of comics, Kelly Thompson of the brilliantly named 1979 Semi-Finalist blog picks her top 20 favourite female comics creators of 2010, including Kate Beaton and Emily Carroll, for Comics Should Be Good: Part One and Part Two.

Most Anticipated… — The Millions list of interesting new books coming out in 2011 (not that I’ve caught up with 2010 yet).

The Best Fonts of 2010 as chosen by FontShop.

Wordmark — A handy online tool that allows you to preview and compare all the fonts installed on your computer (via Fontblog).

And lastly…

Critical Life — Ramona Koval interviews Gabriel Josipovici, author of What Ever Happened to Modernism?, for The Book Show on ABC Radio National. From the transcript:

[F]or all my writing life I felt one shouldn’t comment critically about one’s contemporaries, because in a way that is self-defeating. What one should do is praise the works one likes and gradually people will see their value. I suppose I was being unduly idealistic and I felt that I was only talking to the converted, as it were, and I wanted just for once to actually make people sit up a little more and to let out in print what I have said and talked about with friends, this feeling that English culture had become this thing that was rather mean and dispiriting, aided and abetted not just by…it wasn’t just something in the writers but it was something in the whole culture…

(via ReadySteadyBlog)

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Comments closed
Published December 22, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

Just to continue the Gatsby theme this week, Penguin UK have been adding more recent and vintage book designs to their Flickr, including this Fitzgerald cover from 1998 (Thanks Alan! Can we get design credits please?).

Running Out of Room — Will Schofield, the chap behind the awesome A Journey Round My Skull, at From The Desk Of…

I love records and books equally, and have collected both with abandon since my teenage years. Luckily I never had a strong vinyl fetish so last year sold a bunch of records and now mainly listen to mp3s. I say luckily because I ran out of room for my books and records around 2003.

“The boxes have now changed, but they are still boxes” — Marshall Poe, author of A History of Communications, on how the internet changes nothing (via Rough Type):

We knew the revolution wouldn’t be televised, but many of us really hoped it might be on the Internet.  Now we know these hopes were false.  There was no Internet Revolution and there will be no Internet Revolution.  We will stumble on in more or less exactly the way we did before massive computer networks infiltrated our daily lives.  Just look around and you will see that the Singularity is not near.  For some reason we don’t want to admit this fact.  Media experts still talk as if the Internet is new, as if it is still evolving, as if it will shortly “change everything.”

And finally…

Fonts in Use — A catalogue of type in use. Like the Book Cover Archive for fonts. Brilliant.

5 Comments
Published December 17, 2010

Something for the Weekend

I’ve not been entirely convinced by all of the artists’ books covers I’ve seen coming out the Never Judge…? show at StolenSpace in London (to be fair, I’ve not been to the exhibition in person), but Gary Taxali’s design for The Confederacy of Dunces is just great. I believe this edition will be available from Penguin UK in April 2011. There’s more on the exhibition at Creative Review.

What Font Should I Use? — Smashing Magazine’s 5 principles for choosing and using typefaces.

The Collectors — NPR on e-readers, data collection and personal privacy (via MobyLives):

Most e-readers, like Amazon’s Kindle, have an antenna that lets users instantly download new books. But the technology also makes it possible for the device to transmit information back to the manufacturer.

“They know how fast you read because you have to click to turn the page,” says Cindy Cohn, legal director at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It knows if you skip to the end to read how it turns out…”And it’s not just what pages you read; it may also monitor where you read them. Kindles, iPads and other e-readers have geo-location abilities; using GPS or data from Wi-Fi and cell phone towers, it wouldn’t be difficult for the devices to track their own locations in the physical world.

(It’s also worth noting, as Steven W. Beattie does, that this all applies equally (if not more so) to  Kobo’s new Reading Life app.)

Not Just a Stereotype — Michael Bhaskar, Digital Publishing Manager at Profile Books, offers some final thoughts on 2010 at Book Brunch, dispelling a few myths along the way:

Like many groups, publishers are easily stereotyped, and like such groups too, they find that the media usually plays along with the stereotype rather than discovering the nuances behind it. So we hear about a slightly staid world of boring pedants, blinking helplessly at the on-rushing lights of the digital juggernaut and eagerly burrowing their way back to the 1950s… But this isn’t the industry I know. Far from being terrified of digital, publishing has actually already become well adapted to the digital world.

In his recent study of publishing, Cambridge academic John Thompson makes the point that, from the industry’s point of view, much of the digital transition has already taken place. In the workflows of most publishers the only time we see printed material is at the very end of the process… The day to day reality of a publishing house is one of dealing with digital products…

Wave of Information — Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story, in conversation with Robert Birnbaum for The Morning News:

Sure the novel has survived. Television, radio, telegraph, film—just about anything that has been thrown at it. It’s a very durable form. And the novels are getting better and better. I am shocked at the quality of literature. What I worry about more than anything is—maybe this anecdotal “living in New York”—is the exhaustion of people… The difficulty people have of opening up a book after a day of being bombarded with bits of information, most of it useless. And much, if redundant, certainly information that is ceaseless. Ceaseless waves of it. You come home, the quest for narrative is still there—you want narrative. What’s the water-cooler discussion going to be about? It’ll be about Mad Men, which you can sit there and passively take in—it’s a wonderful show—as opposed to something that requires a mass of concentration and effort. That’s my fear. Who knows, maybe it’s completely unfounded.

And finally…

Carolyn Kellogg chooses her 13 favourite bookplates from Etsy for the LA Times ‘Jacket Copy’ blog (pictured above: Skull and Crossbones bookplates by rxletterpress).

1 Comment
Published December 15, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

Beautiful typographic notecards by Chicago-based designer Tom Davie.

The King of Comps — The prolific Ian Shimkoviak, one half of The Book Designers, interviewed at Caustic Cover Critic:

Every designer has their way of doing things… For me, I start with 3 sketches and as I work on those it will lead to other potential solutions and then I see something online or on a walk or in a magazine and it seems like it could work well for that project too and it just goes on and on. Things also happen unexpectedly. Something happens almost by accident and it looks interesting and somehow works.

No Layout — described as “a digital library for independent publishers, focusing on art books and fashion magazines.” (via Michael Surtees)

Warmblooded — NPR talks to independent booksellers, including Rebecca Fitting and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo of Greenlight Books in Brooklyn, about the future of bookstores:

“I kind of feel like we’re coming to end of the age of dinosaurs and there’s all these warmblooded animals running around instead,” [Fitting] says…

For her part, Bagnulo sees the chains’ woes — and the recent news that Google is entering the e-book market — as something of an opportunity.

“The potential is for there to be two trends,” she explains. “Digital content — which is ubiquitous and everywhere — and the local, boutique, curated side. And the chain stores unfortunately don’t have the advantage in either of those areas. I mean, they can’t carry every book in the world in their store, and they don’t have the same emotional connection to their neighborhood that a local store does.”

And finally…

Author Umberto Eco on WikiLeaks and how technology advances crabwise (and sounding weirdly like William Gibson) for Presse Europ:

So how can privy matters be conducted in future? Now I know that for the time being, my forecast is still science fiction and therefore fantastic, but I can’t help imagining state agents riding discreetly in stagecoaches along untrackable routes, bearing only memorised messages or, at most, the occasional document concealed in the heel of a shoe. Only a single copy thereof will be kept – in locked drawers. Ultimately, the attempted Watergate break-in was less successful than WikiLeaks.

I once had occasion to observe that technology now advances crabwise, i.e. backwards. A century after the wireless telegraph revolutionised communications, the Internet has re-established a telegraph that runs on (telephone) wires. (Analog) video cassettes enabled film buffs to peruse a movie frame by frame, by fast-forwarding and rewinding to lay bare all the secrets of the editing process, but (digital) CDs now only allow us quantum leaps from one chapter to another. High-speed trains take us from Rome to Milan in three hours, but flying there, if you include transfers to and from the airports, takes three and a half hours. So it wouldn’t be extraordinary if politics and communications technologies were to revert to the horse-drawn carriage.

1 Comment
Published December 10, 2010

Something for the Weekend

Past and Present — An excerpt from Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig by Steve Heller and Elaine Lustig Cohen at Design Observer*:

Lustig’s designs fluidly shift from past to present. For his early “experimental” work he built upon an armature of old technologies… and techniques…, which evolved through new technologies… into unprecedented styles… Toward the end of his life, his typography turned into a playful amalgam of vintage letters composed in contemporary layouts with vibrant colors. In “Personal Notes,” he wrote, “As we become more mature we will learn to master the interplay between past and present and not be so self-conscious of our rejection or acceptance of tradition. We will not make the mistake that both rigid modernists and conservatives make, of confusing the quality of form with the specific forms themselves.”

The Authentic — Chuck Klosterman, author most recently of Eating the Dinosaur, profiles Jonathan F., author of Freedom, for GQ Magazine:

It’s a present-day problem: There’s just no escaping the larger, omnipresent puzzle of “reality.” Even when people read fiction, they want to know what’s real. But this, it seems, is not Franzen’s concern. He disintegrates the issue with one sentence.

“Here’s the thing about inauthentic people,” he says on the train, speaking in the abstract. “Inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity.”

Telling Stories — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on interactive storytelling:

The ability to write communally and interactively with computers is nothing new… Digital tools for collaborative writing date back twenty or thirty years. And yet interactive storytelling has never taken off. The hypertext novel in particular turned out to be a total flop. When we read stories, we still read ones written by authors. The reason for the failure of interactive storytelling has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with stories.

Footnotes — Part one of a long interview with journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco, author most recently of the remarkable Footnotes in Gaza, at Art Threat (via Drawn):

[T]he biggest influence on me journalistically speaking has been George Orwell. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book Road to Wigan Pier, but Orwell spent time in the industrial areas of Britain during the depression and took a room with a miner, lived with miners. He went down into the mine shaft with the miners. His ability to go to these places and really look at things from a ground level, that was impressive to me. And for other reasons too: because he was so dedicated to his work, and he felt that his work was sort of bigger than himself as a human being. I appreciated that dedication.

Part two will run on Monday apparently…

And finally… Superhero WikiLeaks:

(Thanks Shawn)

*Born Modern is published by Chronicle Books and is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books.

Comments closed
Published December 8, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

Little Nemo meets David Lynch — Mark Medley interviews Charles Burns, author of Black Hole and X’ed Out , for The National Post:

Whereas Black Hole, which takes place in the early 1970s, examines the dread and confusion of adolescence using the tropes of a horror film, X’ed Out, which is set in the late 1970s at the height of punk music, is an exploration of young adulthood and the anger, uncertainty and experimentation that comes with aging.

“I definitely started out wanting to do my punk story,” says Burns, 55. “As typically happens, you start with one idea and it spreads.”

A House Full of Books — The LA Times book critic David L. Ulin on the gift of books:

We have a rule in our house: My wife and I will always pony up for books. It’s not even a subject of discussion — if either of our kids wants a book, we will buy it, no questions asked. This is equally true of the books we have at home, which are equally available to everyone, regardless of subject matter or degree of difficulty. Whatever else they are, after all, books are gifts (for the mind, the eye, the hand), which makes it downright uncharitable to deny them to anyone.

This, I should say, is how I was raised too, in a house full of books, by parents who put a premium on the written word. I was allowed to pick up everything — and often did. When I was in third grade, I checked out “War and Peace” from the school library (I was looking for the longest book in the world), and although I never actually opened it, I remain thrilled by the idea that no one told me not to try.

Don’t Know What They’re Missing — The Economist profiles type designer Matthew Carter:

Mr Carter doesn’t own an iPad, Kindle, or other reading device, as he is waiting for them to mature. (He does own an iPhone.) He frets that, as things stand, reading devices and programs homogenise all the tangible aspects of a book, like size or shape, as well as font. They are also poor at hyphenation and justification: breaking words at lexically appropriate locations, and varying the spacing between letters and between words. This may sound recondite but it is a visual imprint of principles established over the entire written history of a language. “Maybe people who grow up reading online, where every book is identical, don’t know what they’re missing.”

On a sort of related note… Mashable talks to designer Susan Kare about her icon designs for the original Apple Macs.

And finally (as we’re talking about typography)…

Jean-Luc — A free display typeface in two styles designed by Atelier Carvalho Bernau to celebrate Jean-Luc Godard’s 80th birthday.

Comments closed
Published December 3, 2010

Something for the Weekend

Limits and Boundaries — Peter Mendelsund, associate art director at Knopf, discusses his cover design for Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman with The New Yorker’s ‘The Book Bench’:

[O]ften my favorite jackets are the ones done after repeated rounds of failure and rejection. There’s something to be said for the desperation that rejection engenders in me. Sometimes, when the process feels most intractable and hopeless, a kind of last-ditch clarity appears. That being said, it’s also nice when you get it on the first stab.

And on the subject of super-talented book designers… A short Q &A with Coralie Bickford-Smith, Penguin senior cover designer, at 10 Answers.

I, Reader — Alexander Chee on e-books and life spent reading for The Morning News:

Many ponderables remain regarding the e-book. At a personal level, I am someone who has read books in poor light for decades without hurting my vision (despite what my mother claimed), and I’m keeping, well, an eye on that—the iPad gives me headaches in ways reading on paper never did. As a writer and former bookseller, I understand the e-book’s imperfections and limits, and monitor the arguments that it will end publishing or save it, and potentially kill bookstores, which would kill something in me, if it were to happen. But I also believe that the book as we know it was only a delivery system, and that much of what I love about books, and about the novel in particular, exists no matter the format. I’ve lately been against what I see as the useless, overly expensive hardcover, and I admit I enjoy the e-book pricing over hardcover pricing. Still, I’ll never replace the books on those shelves, and there’ll always be books I want only as books, not as e-books, like the new Chris Ware, for example, which would be pointless on an e-reader. This really is just a way for me to have more.

Rage Against the Machine — Onnesha Roychoudhuri’s long and much talked about article on Amazon for the Boston Review:

What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors?…

The conceit is that that $9.99 price tag is what the market demands. But in this case Amazon is the market, having—with no input from its suppliers—already dictated the price and preempted the standard fluctuations that competition and improved efficiency impose on prices…

Cheap books are easy on our wallets, but behind the scenes publishers large and small have been deeply undercut by the rise of large retailers and predatory pricing schemes. Unless publishers push back, Amazon will take the logic of the chains to its conclusion. Then publishers and readers will finally know what happens when you sell a book like it’s a can of soup.

Talking About My Generation — The LA Times’ David L. Ulin on Gary Trudeau’s 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective:

[T]he trick, the secret of “Doonesbury,” that, in its topicality, its ongoing dailiness, it is really about something more profound. Trudeau highlights that in his introduction: “It’s not about Watergate,” he writes of the collection, “gas lines, cardigans, Reaganomics, a thousand points of light, Monica, New Orleans, or even Dubya.” No, indeed, although such elements do show up here, more important are the people, the dance of generations, their humanity. This is where “Doonesbury” is at its most compelling…

And finally…

Andrew Kuo, who creates off-beat music infographics for The New York Times,  talks about his new book of personal work,  What Me Worry (published by The Standard), at Interview Magazine (thx PMac!).

2 Comments
Published December 1, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

I’m something of skeptic when it comes to Nick Hornby (to put it politely) but the “Ministry of Stories” is, despite its Orwellian moniker, clearly a well intentioned venture, and the design of its Hoxton Street Monster Supplies storefront by We Made This is pretty stellar.

There is more on the Ministry of Stories, which is based on David Eggers 826 project, at The Guardian.

Elsewhere…

Largehearted Boy is doing everyone a favour by aggregating every online “Best of 2010” book list he can find.

AND Design Observer’s contributing writers recommend books for the holidays. While The Bygone Bureau asks some stellar bloggers for their Best BLOGS of 2010.

The Daily Cross Hatch has a four-part interview with Love & Rockets cartoonist Jaime Hernandez:

There are teachers and there are doers—I’m a doer. I don’t know how this stuff happens, it just spills out of me, it’s that kind of thing.

After a while, I’ll think about it and say, “oh, that’s how I do it.” But I couldn’t stand in front of a class and tell them how to do it.

[part one] [part two] [part three] and [part four]

And finally…

A fantastic animated Batman short by Spanish illustrator Javier Olivares:

(via The Ephemerist)

Comments closed
Published November 24, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

Some lovely vintage French book covers on Flickr, courtesy of Alexis Orloff (via Words & Eggs).

Cultural Change — A really interesting analysis of the current state of publishing by John B. Thompson, author of Merchants of Culture, at The Brooklyn Rail:

Readers and consumers have many different values, and beliefs, and preferences and you will see some be very happy to read on electronic devices of one kind or another. Others will remain wedded to print on paper and will want books in that form. There are deeply embedded cultural practices around writing and reading and these are not going to change quickly and easily. There are people who believe that technology sweeps all before it, and that technology is really the driving force of social change. I don’t take that view. I regard that as a technological fallacy—the view that technology is a driving force of social change. I think technologies are always embedded in social, cultural context and what technologies get taken up depends on a variety of factors that shape people’s practices and beliefs. There are many examples of technologies that went nowhere…

Getting Paid — Cartoonist and illustrator Colleen Doran on the pirating of her comics (via Richard Curtis):

Creators and publishers can’t compete with free and the frightening reality is that even free isn’t good enough.   Pirates aggregate content in ways creators and legit publishers can’t. Why go to dozens of web pages for entertainment when you can go to a pirate and get everything you want? There’s no connection to creators as human beings who work hard and make money from that work, and who need income from past work to finance future work.

Distribution is the only concern. Readers care about the gadget that gives them the goods, and have no connection to the goods at all, or who made them.  But without desirable content, there’s nothing to distribute.

Everyone gets paid — manufacturers of computers, iPads, electricity, bandwidth — everyone except the creators of content.

And finally…

A Children’s Treasury of Mark E. Smith Verse (via the awesome A Journey Round My Skull):

Comments closed
Published November 19, 2010

Something for the Weekend

New Directions celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2011 and to mark the occasion, creative director at large Rodrigo Corral commissioned illustrator Felix Sockwell to redesign their iconic colophon by Heinz Henghes.  Sockwell writes about the redesign process (and vomiting!) here (via MobyLives).

Drowned in Sound — You have a few days left to listen to the BBC Radio adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World.

Rewiring — Peter Cocking, art director at Douglas & McIntyre, on designing a new cover for Johanna Skibsrud’s debut novel The Sentimentalists, winner of the Giller Prize and first published by artisan publisher Gaspereau Press:

I felt that the existing cover was to some extent a brand for the book — it appeared in the media quite a bit. It’s different from what we would do in that it’s — and I mean no disrespect to Andrew [Steeves, co-publisher of Gaspereau Press] — but it’s a more literary small-press treatment. It’s very appropriate to the way they publish the book, but it was clear, of course, that we were going to try and push this out into the marketplace in a much wider way. So it seemed to me that the idea was to take what they had, because people might remember this as the cream-yellow book with the solider, and make it a little more contemporary, trade-friendly, a little more aggressive as it were. It wasn’t so much a design from scratch, the way I would normally approach a novel. The way I would describe it is I didn’t build the house, I repainted it, did some new wiring.

And finally…

Jonathan Safran Foer’s “unmakeable” book Tree of Codes published by Visual Editions and printed by Belgian publisher and printer Die Keure, seen at Fast Company.
Comments closed
Published November 17, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

An excerpt from Jay McInerney’s introduction to Joy Division (published by Rizzoli), accompanied by a slideshow of Kevin Cummins’ photographs of the band, in Vanity Fair.

Sandwiches with Ginsberg — Patti Smith reads from Just Kids, the story of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, at National Book Awards in New York.

“It’s not all pristine snow and leather goggles” — The Guardian reviews I.N.J. Culbard’s adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. Culbard talks about illustrating and adapting Lovecraft at the SelfMadeHero blog.

Also at The Guardian: A 26 letter slideshow from David Sacks’ new book, Alphabets: A Miscellany of Letters (pictured below: illustration by Jonathan Lander, 2009):

Slow Down — An interview with Pushcart Prize editor Bill Henderson at Kirkus Reviews:

My friends in commercial publishing tell me that indeed times are terrifying. Nobody knows where the commercial world is headed as it tries to make a profit. The villains are those who attempt to corner the e-book market and announce that they have hundreds of thousands of titles available instantly… Why is this speed of any interest to anybody? Serious readers take their time in savoring a book. But suddenly we’ve all turned into speed freaks. Those who will suffer most from this, interestingly, are the big-box superstores that can only stock a mere 100,000 titles in their walls… The independent bookstores may, on the other hand, do very well because they can treat customers as human beings.

And finally…

Interviews with typographer Erik Spiekermann and book maven Sarah Weinman at From the Desks Of…

Comments closed