Skip to content

Category: Miscellany

Published August 5, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, August 5th, 2009

Foucault — A nice new cover design from David Drummond (approval pending).

(And apparently I like photos of the backs of people’s heads)

Kill Your Darlings — Print asks book designers Carol Devine Carson, John Gall, Paul Buckley, Rodrigo Corral, John Gray, Gabriele Wilson, Paul Sahre, and Peter Mendelsund about the covers that didn’t quite make it:

every book jacket designer has at least one that got away—a fresh, inventive cover that was shot down en route to the bookstore shelf. These “lost” covers form a parallel universe in which the books we read and love exist in entirely different skins.

Re-typing History — The Financial Times reports on typographer Mike Parker’s challenge to the accepted history of the ubiquitous Times New Roman:

The… evidence for his version of history is a brass pattern plate bearing a large capital letter B. He holds the plate up to show the familiar form of the letter, its characteristic curves and serifs. The point, he says, is that such pattern plates represent a technology that was not used after 1915. The creation of Times New Roman was announced in 1932.

Bite-Size Edits — Baking books with the Book Oven chefs.

Forgotten Bookmarks — the “personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things” found in books at a rare and used bookstore.

The Book Depository launches in the US. There are details at The Book Depository blog.

And finally…

Trial and Error — Author Matthew Pearl discusses the evolution of the cover for his novel The Dante Club. It’s nice to read about an author not having a hideous experience with a publisher for a change, and I actually think that the cover design for The Dante Club, while not flashy, gives a lot of great visual cues to readers about the nature of the book (which is really what it is about isn’t it?).

1 Comment
Published July 29, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, July 29th, 2009

Geometric books covers at Design Daily.

The Debate That Will Not Die — Mike Shatkin weighs in on DRM and tries to find that elusive middle-ground. The discussion continues into the comments (of course)…

Unputdownable — A nice ad campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi for Penguin Books in Malaysia (via The 26th Story).

Great Ideas — The Caustic Cover Critic looks at the covers for all 20 of the new additions to Penguin’s Great Ideas series. Some fantastic typographic stuff here as you might imagine, although — to be honest — I think there are one or two weaker entries in this round and the purple motif works better for some books than others…

A New Page — (Much linked to elsewhere, but in case you missed it) Nicholson Baker’s meticulous vivisection (or “epic takedown” if you prefer) of the Kindle in The New Yorker:

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

This was what they were calling e-paper?

And if you can’t get enough of that Kindlenfreude feeling…

David L. Ulin, book editor  The LA Times, weighs in on Amazon’s troubling reach.

Niches — Richard Nash, formerly of Soft Skull Press, talks about his new community-based venture, tentatively called ‘Cursor’, in Publishers Weekly.

And finally…

A Journey Round My Skull has a nice post of vintage Swedish books covers from collected from the excellent  Martin Klasch. I particularly like this vampiric cover for Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep by Martin Gavler from 1963 (above).

Comments closed
Published July 24, 2009

Something for the Weekend, July 24th, 2009

Group Thinkery — Book-designing, tuba-playing Christopher Tobias has launched a new blog to discuss books, design, and publishing. Group Thinkery is also on Twitter.

I came across the stellar portfolio of High Design’s David High — which includes this rather brilliant cover for The Management Myth for W.W. Norton — earlier this week thanks to a tweet from the chaps at FaceOut Books. Go take a look.

Luck — In another one of those long, fascinating Agents and Editors Q&As from Poets and Writers that are always well worth your time, Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, looks back at his career and comments on the current state of the industry:

One of the really hard lessons was realizing how much of a crapshoot publishing is—how you can love something and do everything you can for it, and yet fail at connecting it to an audience. Maybe you misjudged it. Maybe it didn’t get the right breaks. One of the hardest things to come to grips with is how important the breaks are. There’s luck in publishing, just like in any human activity… That was one of the hardest lessons: how difficult it is to actually be effective… Writing is its own reward. It has to be. I really believe that. This is a part of publishing that’s really hard to come to grips with. But publishers can’t make culture happen the way they want it to happen… We can huff and puff and pay money and advertise and everything else, but in the end, if the readers don’t come, we can’t do anything about it.

The lovely-looking limited edition, hand-made Done Walking With My Regular Shoes by recent graduate Stina Johansson. The cover design is screen-printed onto canvas (via DesignWorkLife).

Andy designing — The New Directions blog looks at the book designs of Andy Warhol:

Andy Warhol worked for New Directions as a book designer off and on for almost 10 years. Our editor-in-chief recalls James Laughlin telling her an Andy Warhol anecdote:

“He was a very strange looking man. But all the secretaries loved him because he would sneak little origami creatures on their desks when they weren’t looking. One time as he was walking out of the office he looked bashfully over at a secretary goggling at him and said ‘I like you. You’re so hirsute.’ Her reply? A very soft and giggly ‘thank you.’”

Personalization — Steven Heller talks to Rick Smolan about The Obama Time Capsule, a book that can be customized by the reader before it is printed:

I wondered if there was a way to create a book that wove together all these amazing images with each individual book buyer’s own story, photos and even their children’s artwork, so that every single copy was unique. I intentionally didn’t want to do a trade book edition because part of the goal was to have no books in warehouses, no print run, no books printed that might have to be later pulped and destroyed, no books shipped over by container ship from China or Korea (where all the big coffee table books are printed). The idea was to do the book of the future 10 years ahead of its time.

In this particular instance the customization of the book sounds a little gimicky to me, but possibilities it opens up seem pretty endless…

And lastly… Not being very quick on the uptake (what, you noticed?) I just came across the winners of The Strand bookstore’s Eye on The Strand photography contest. The Grand Prize was awarded to Josh Robinson for ‘Strand Shadows’ (above) and the contest exhibition, which opened on July 15th, will run through August 26, 2009 at the Pratt Institute CCPS Gallery, located at 144 West 14th Street, New York. I’m also rather fond of Cary Conover’s ‘Upside Down’ which took second place:

1 Comment
Published July 20, 2009

Monday Miscellany, July 20th, 2009

Shelf Life — EMPRNT‘s Bookshelves Flickr Pool. I could look at other people’s bookshelves all day…

You Don’t Belong — Lee Bermejo and John Arcudi’s Superman story for DC’s Wednesday Comics is also running in US Today. Two episodes in and it looks great (even if the Flash interface is not not ideal) — there are some nice moments, especially in episode 2 (Batman as psychiatrist anyone?) and Bermejo’s art kills it (via The Ephemerist).

PW Comics Week also ran an interesting interview with DC Comics editor Mark Chiarello about Wednesday Comics a couple of weeks of back.

And thinking of comics, LA Times’ Geoff Boucher reports on the forthcoming Darwyn Cooke adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter.

Fancy — BibliOydssey has posted some lovely samples of ornamental type.

Comments closed
Published July 17, 2009

Something for the Weekend, July 17th, 2009

BookCamp Vancouver — Registration is now open and places are going fast so sign up while you still can.

Holding Forth — New York Magazine has an 8-page preview  Asterios Polyp the  new graphic novel by David Mazzucchelli, who also illustrated the graphic novel adaptation of  Paul Auster’s City of Glass, and Pantheon editorial director Dan Frank and Knopf/Pantheon designer/senior editor Chip Kidd talk about the book at Publishers Weekly.

Paul Eats Chocolate — Drawn +Quarterly’s 211 bookstore in Montreal is selling chocolate bars designed Michel Rabagliati, creator of the semi-autobiographical ‘Paul’ comics (full disclosure: D+Q’s books are distributed by Raincoast in Canada).

Comments closed
Published July 15, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, July 15th, 2009

Vintage Camus — Seen at Bente Miltenburg‘s Flickr photostream (via A Journey Around My Skull).

An Intricate Dance — Author Sonya Chung describes her experience of the cover design process (and the weird — slightly tortured — anxieties that accompany it) for her debut novel Long For This World at The Millions blog (via Duke University Press on Twitter):

I am still a little nervous – having no control over the final printing process, color-correcting, etc. – about what this cover will look like. But I also realized that as each response piled on one after the other in my inbox, I was beginning to delight in the wackiness of the whole thing.

And on a related note, writer Neelanjana Banerjee looks at stereotypical images of Asian Americans on book covers in Hyphen Magazine (issuu document). Henry Sene Yee, creative director of Picador, makes an interesting general point — which I think is often forgotten — about ‘recognizable codes’:

“Russian constructivist font for Russian books; torn paper and beige for Westerns; italics, diamond rings and legs for women’s fiction… The writer is tapping into this culture; so is the designer, and so is the reader.”

GroupThink — After a bit of a hiatus, designer Christopher Tobias is back blogging with a series of discussions on book design:

Beginning today, I plan to post an ongoing series of questions aimed at book designers as a way of opening discussion about various topics related to our industry… Others outside of book design are certainly free to field the questions or give input. I hope that together we can compile a nice collection of discussions for the benefit of those in the profession now and in the future.

Swiss — A bilingual, expandable book designed for the UK art and design gallery Blanka by Dylan Mulvaney: “It honors Josef Müller-Brockmann as well as conveys the principles of Swiss Graphic Design as exemplified by the leader of the revolutionary Swiss Style.” (via SwissMiss and Swiss Legacy).

Good — Christopher Simmons has a quick chat about The Good Design Book project with Grain Edit:

I frequently come back to the definition of design proffered by Charles Eames: “Design is a plan for arranging elements to achieve a particular purpose.” If you break that down, it contains 5 equal parts: the plan (strategy), the arrangement (layout or formalism), the elements (content), the achievement (result) and the purpose (the goal). Good design can therefore be thought of as design based on a good strategy and which features a good arrangement of good content for a good purpose. And of course it needs to yield good results.

And lastly… Following the survey of Mick Wiggins work (mentioned previously here),  Caustic Cover Critic discusses those rather lovely Steinbeck covers with the illustrator:

The Steinbeck gig was about as dreamy a gig as an illustrator can hope to land: 24 covers to date, I think. It was not difficult in the sense of inspiration—he’s so good at evoking mood, and his settings are described so beautifully—but the flop-sweat for me was intense. Steinbeck’s such a classic figure in the literary landscape and bookshelves, delivering art that disappointed was not an option.

4 Comments
Published July 10, 2009

Something for the Weekend, July 10th, 2009

Shute — JRSM, the Caustic Cover Critic, has a great post on the work of book designer and illustrator Mick Wiggins, whose evocative illustrations (which look a bit like dark interpretations of vintage Tube posters) adorn the Penguin Classics US editions of John Steinbeck and the new Vintage Classics editions of Nevil Shute.  JRSM will have an interview with Mick Wiggins soon. Can’t wait…

The Revenge of Print — Eric Obenauf, publisher at Two-Dollar Radio on the state of print and publishing for The Brooklyn Rail:

The goal for book publishers, most simply put, should not be to undertake a virtual arms race of developing technology with both the Internet and media, or to try to compete on a bloated scale with music and film, or even to translate a work to conform to an undetermined potential future model. The mission for book publishers and print media at large should be to create a product that is irreplaceable and indispensable.

And I will just add for the umpteenth time that it’s not about e-books, DRM, pricing, or devices — it’s about making better books.

Big Blue — Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan or, The Whale winner of this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize (and one the books I’m currently reading), chooses his Top 10 Whale Tales in The Guardian. You can also hear Claire Armitstead’s interview with Philip for The Guardian here and read PD Smith‘s TLS review here. And, for the record, Philip is a Southampton boy like myself…

Top 10 Comic Book Cities as chosen by Architects Journal. Gotham is only number 6 (via Book Oven on Twitter).

And lastly…

Up We Go! Up We Go! — The wonderful BibliOdyssey has posted a number of E. H. Shepard’s lovely illustrations for The Wind in the Willows.

Have a great weekend.

1 Comment
Published July 8, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, July 8th, 2009

A-Type — The Independent has a nice look at book design and Faber & Faber’s Eighty Years of Book Cover Design by Joseph Connolly:

You could argue that the current renaissance in book design came about thanks to Penguin, always the most design-savvy of publishers. In 2004 they produced their first series of Great Ideas – small paperback editions of classic, mostly philosophical texts. They had highly tactile covers and used bold period typography to give a sense of when and where each book was coming from. The following year we got Penguin by Design, an illustrated history of 70 years of Penguin covers, and then, in 2007, Seven Hundred Penguins, a two-inch-thick collection of the best covers, shown life-size, one to a page. For seasoned haunters of second-hand bookshops, this particular item was as thrilling as a similar-sized brick of Class A drugs.

JRSM has more on the Faber book at Caustic Cover Critic.

5 Easy Pieces — Dave Daley discusses his site  Five Chapters,  which publishes a short story in 5 parts over the course of a week, with Ron Charles at the Washington Post‘s Short Stack blog:

“I write passionate notes to writers I admire. And I tell them about the site and why I think it’s a good place for them to be. Here’s an audience of story-lovers and book buyers… The short story is just ideal for our attention spans these days.”

Rogue Agent — Scott Esposito talks to Denise Oswald, the new Editorial Director Soft Skull, for The Quarterly Conversation:

Soft Skull is like a rogue agent—who wouldn’t want to work there? It’s exciting. I’ve always loved their shoot from the hip / take no prisoners attitude and the house’s commitment to embracing the outspoken and the contrarian, the marginal and the disenfranchised. Their books are thoughtful and deeply engaged on a ground level with the world we live in. Yet there’s always room for something elegant and literary or naughty and fun, which is a very satisfying balance at the end of the day because it helps one from becoming too self-serious.

Coffee and Memory — On topic close to my heart, research from the University of Florida has shown that caffeine both prevents and reverses symptoms of Alzheimers in mice, which, according to Donald Clark, just goes to show coffee is cognitively good for you:

Coffee has… long fuelled learning, whether it be through the direct stimulation of the brain, increasing attention, improving memory, preventing dementia or providing a social context for debate and work. It’s something we coffee drinkers have always instinctively known!

Comments closed
Published July 3, 2009

Something for the Weekend, July 3rd, 2009

Who Was Abner Graboff? —  Frustrated with the lack information available online about artist, designer and illustrator Abner Graboff, Ward “Ward-O-Matic” Jenkins decided to do some digging himself. His research — now available in a three part series —  includes a host of great images of Graboff’s children’s books and book cover designs, as well as a nice interview with Graboff’s son Jon:

Throughout my father’s career, he did hundreds of book jacket designs and I once asked him, in a slightly condescending way, if he enjoyed that kind of work? He said he loved it because he had to nail the vibe of the book in a single illustration and when he got it right, that it was very satisfying. There was a long period of time when I could walk into a bookstore, look around, pick up a book and look at the jacket design credit… and more often than not, find his name. Later on, I started to get fooled. Other designers were either copying or being heavily influenced by his style.

Calling Bullshit on Social Media — Scott Berkun, O’Reilly author of The Myths of Innovation and Making Things Happen (via — irony alert — Mark Bertils on Twitter):

TV forced radio to change and in some ways improve. The web forced TV, newspapers and magazines to change, and they will likely survive forever in some form, focusing on things the web can not do well.  Its unusual for new thing to completely replace the old ones and when they do it takes years. Anyone who claims social media will eliminate standard PR or mass media is engaging in hype, as odds are better those things will change and learn, but never die. It’s wise to ask what each kind of media / marketing is good and bad for and work from there.

Berkun’s definitely onto something here and it probably deserves a whole post (maybe later!)… Certainly, he’s right to point out (earlier in the essay) that there have always been social networks. But he doesn’t note that for many city dwellers traditional social and familial networks have been breaking down in the post-war period, which I suspect is part of the seductive appeal of connecting online for us slightly older urban types whose use Twitter and Facebook a lot… Anyway, it’s interesting that some of Berkun’s points about technology probably also apply to e-books.

Berkun’s essay also reminded me of an article I read in Fast Company earlier in the week, Our Kids Aren’t Web-Addicted… Are We?:

It’s only we adults that are at PC workstations all day, looking for ways to avoid doing work or trolling the boundaries of our IT-installed browser filters. And we’re the only ones who have social networks big enough to require a tool like Twitter. Imagine how absurd Twitter seems when you only have 10 or 12 friends, not a network of 300+ coworkers, college buddies and colleagues?

And finally…

Krazy — Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes, on George Herriman’s seminal comic strip Krazy Kat, reproduced at This Recording (via Bookslut):

Krazy Kat gains its momentum less from the personalities of its characters than from their obsessions. Ignatz Mouse demonstrates his contempt for Krazy by throwing bricks at her; Krazy reinterprets the bricks as signs of love; and Offissa Pupp is obliged by duty (and regard for Krazy) to thwart and punish Ignatz’s “sin,” thereby interefering with a process that’s satisfying to everyone for all the wrong reasons. Some 30 years of strips were wrung out of that amalgam of cross-purposes. The action can be read as a metaphor for love or politics, or just enjoyed for its lunatic inner logic and physical comedy.

Comments closed
Published June 29, 2009

Monday Miscellany, June 29th, 2009

Gestalten’s Naïve: Modernism and Folklore in Contemporary Graphic Design, edited by Robert Klanten and Hendrik Hellige,  reviewed at The Designer’s Review of Books.

Served — Jeremy Ettinghausen, Penguin UK’s Digital Publisher, explains the rationale for their new (v. cool sounding) project for kids We Make Stories:

[A]s the debate about the value and price of digital content rages on, I’m testing out a new mantra on my suspicious colleagues; services not content. The idea, ill-formed as it is in my head, is that while we might continue find it a challenge to get consumers to pay for digital content, we might be able to use our skills, expertise and experience to create services that people will pay for. Services are what we do for writers, so perhaps there might be services we can create for readers.

Proof I think — were it still needed — that not all the most interesting book stuff is being generated in Seattle.

Friction — Laura J. Murray’s excellent critique of Brett Gaylor’s documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto for Culture Machine (PDF). Murray’s comments about a copyright  ‘war’ and choosing ‘sides’ certainly resonated with me:

I’m not on any side, because I’m not in a war. Such language is a) a kneejerk echo of the Hollywood/recording industry message, b) offensive to anyone who has ever experienced a blood and guts war, and c) a joke to those who are not already convinced of the importance of remix. But most importantly, it is, d), an unproductive way of framing our current copyright challenges, because it suggests that the debate won’t end until one side has achieved total victory.

Amen.

The State of the Union — A big sprawling spaghetti post from the the chaps at Three Guys and One Book (loosely) about the state of publishing from the perspective of readers (mostly). I don’t agree with all of it by any means, but some of it sticks…

Less, But Better — A profile and brief interview of design hero Dieter Rams at BBH Labs. Just FYI — If I ever write a publishing manifesto (ha!), it will be called Less, But Better: A Publishing Manifesto. And just for the hell of it, here are Dieter Rams 10 principles of good design:

  1. Good design is innovative
  2. Good design makes a product useful
  3. Good design is aesthetic
  4. Good design helps us to understand a product
  5. Good design is unobtrusive
  6. Good design is honest
  7. Good design is durable
  8. Good design is thorough to the last detail
  9. Good design is concerned with the environment
  10. Good design is as little design as possible

Most, if not all, of these principles could be applied to publishing. Who (or where?) is publishing’s Dietar Rams?

And finally…

Big Gold Dream — Michael Fusco’s great redesigns for the Pegasus Classic Crime reissues of Chester Himes seen (of course) at FaceOut Books. Michael Fusco has some more great cover designs on his website.

(And a quick side note to publishers and designers — it was impossible to find decent hi-res image of these covers. If you want people share your brilliant work, you need to work on this. Ideally I want images that are at least 400px x 600px)

1 Comment
Published June 26, 2009

Something for the Weekend, June 26th, 2009

2009 Penguin Design Award — Peter Adlington’s abstract design for The Secret History by Donna Tart (pictured above) took 1st place. More on the Penguin Blog.

The Good Design Book — Christopher Simmons, graphic designer and principle at the San Francisco-based design firm MINE, records the progress and process of writing and designing his new book on design (via Unbeige). The whole concept reminded me that I should also mention the crowdsourced Smashing Magazine Book.

OK, Go — Kassia Krozser, Kirk Biglione, and Kat Meyer (and an unnamed “veteran of the book industry”), put their money where their collective mouth is, and launch digital publisher Quartet Press (and they’re accepting submissions).

The Debrief — Organizer Hugh McGuire pens his personal thoughts on BookCamp Toronto for Book Oven.

One of the most powerful things about BookCamp, compared with other events I’ve been to, is that this was not just a grassroots group. There was high-level engagement from the publishing industry, with publishers, editors, senior VPs, production managers, marketers, and interns, and everything in between. It was great to see the honest debate and conversation being lead by these insiders, who are truly grappling with the future of their business and their passion.

And VANTAP‘s Sean “Crazy Horse” Cranbury  adds his 2 cents on #bcto09 at the Books on The Radio blog, and teases BookCamp Vancouver.

Vile Bodies — The 1930 first edition cover of Evelyn Waugh’s second novel seen at BibliOdyssey.

And last, but not least…

Apples and Oranges — The article about the evolution of Amazon by Adam L. Penenberg, author of the forthcoming Viral Loop: How Social Networks Unleash Revolutionary Business Growth, that launched a great Twitter chat with @FastCompany and yesterday’s ’26 Things…’ list (which could have easily been twice as long). 

Comments closed
Published June 24, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, June 24th, 2009

New York Places and Pleasures — Cover design by Elaine Lustig and Jay Maisel from Kyle Katz’s amazing Flickr photostream (via Design Observer).

A Very Bad Man — Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, reviews the forthcoming Darwyn Cooke comic book adaptation of The Hunter by Richard Stark (AKA Donald Westlake) — which I can’t wait to get my hands on — for the Washington Post:

Cooke has a particular gift for the space-age designs and stripped-down chiaroscuro that were in vogue a half-century ago — he previously explored them in his “DC: The New Frontier” comics — and his loose, ragged slashes of black and cobalt blue evoke the ascendancy of Hugh Hefner so powerfully you can almost hear a walking jazz bass. At times, he seems to be demonstrating how few brushstrokes it can take to communicate a precise degree of amoral machismo. Parker’s a very bad man, but it’s hard to take your eyes off him.

More stuff about  Darwyn Cooke and his Parker adaptation can be found at Almost Darwyn Cooke’s Blog (but not quite).

Buy Your Own Chains — The New Yorker’s Willing Davidson painfully accurate observation that low industry pay and unpaid internships skew what is published (via GalleyCat):

Tiny salaries in the low ranks of publishing are miserable for the young workers, but they’re probably worse for literature… It’s a truism of the industry that most of these jobs are held by people who can afford them—people with some parental support and no student loans. Often they’ve had unpaid internships, that most pernicious example of class privilege. Their superiors are the same people, ten years later. They—we!—are smart, cultured people with good intentions, but it’s easy to see how this narrow range could lead to a blinkered view of literature.

Which leads rather nicely to…

The Intern —  Dark (and darkly funny) secrets from the lowest rung of this business we call publishing. See also Editorial Ass.

Gotham — I started with New York (and linked to The New Yorker somewhere in the middle), so I thought I’d wrap up with New York too. I came across The Mythic City: Photographs of New York by Samuel H. Gottscho, 1925-1940 a couple of weeks ago while looking for something completely different. It’s not new (it was published in 2005 to coincide with an exhibition at Museum of the City of New York), but the cover has stuck with me (something to do with the chunky cinematic type I think) and, by a happy coincidence, a copy of the book landed on my desk this week. It is beautiful. (Full disclosure: The Mythic City is published by Princeton Architectural Press who are distributed in Canada by the people who pay me).

Comments closed