Books, Design and Culture
The Collection is a short documentary about two friends and their discovery of a unique collection of movie memorabilia, comprised of over 40,000 printer blocks and 20,000 printer plates used to create the original newspaper advertisements for movies released in the US from the silent era through to the 1980s:
(via Coudal)
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Remember Those Great Volkswagen Ads? is a short documentary about the classic, highly influential ad campaigns created by Manhattan advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) for Volkwagen in the 1950s and 60s:
(via Kottke)
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Another overdue link from my ‘longreads’ bookmarks, The Hollywood Reporter talks to the cast and crew of Mad Men about the early days of the show now that it is about to come an end:
Christina Wayne (former senior vp scripted programming, AMC) Years earlier, I’d wanted to option Revolutionary Road [Richard Yates’ novel about suburbia in the 1960s]. But I was a nobody screenwriter, and [Yates’ estate] held out for bigger fish, which they got with Sam Mendes. So when I read [the Mad Men script], it resonated with me. This was a way to do Revolutionary Road, week in, week out. When we had lunch with Matt for the first time, I gave him the book. He called me after and said, “Thank God I’d never read this because I never would have written Mad Men.”
Perhaps more interesting, however, is James Meek’s lengthy article for the London Review of Books on the show’s superficiality, and its curious relationship with advertising:
Comments closedSterling Cooper, the fictional advertising agency around which Mad Men is built, is a caricature of the commercial TV system that produced the series: a pool of creative people in bitter thrall to the accountants and deal-makers they rely on for money. Although we learn in parenthesis that the agency gets most of its income from commission on the ads it places, for dramatic purposes the agency is divided into two departments: Creative, which comes up with campaign slogans, artwork and copy for ads, and Accounts, which persuades, charms, fawns, bribes and pimps its way to getting and keeping corporate clients. Mad Men is a show about writers dependent on advertising, written by writers dependent on advertising, the difference being that the fictional writers of Creative write the ads on which they depend.
Commercial Indifference — Geoff Dyer’s Zona reviewed at the LA Review of Books:
[Dyer] followed a book of eccentric travel writing with a book on photography, and then in 2009 served up a couple of loosely-linked novellas under the, let’s face it, terrible title of Jeff In Venice, Death in Varanasi. Add in Dyer’s pre-2000 offerings on jazz, D.H. Lawrence, and World War I, along with several novels, and you have an oeuvre that resembles a messy and ever-expanding Venn diagram of the author’s obsessions. Even so, a 200-page book about a Russian film from 1979 takes commercial indifference to heroic lengths.
(And much as I love you and your recent redesign LARB, could we get simple RSS feed please?)
The Great Unwashed — Julia Kingsford, writing at The Bookseller, on the cultural snobbery and clichés surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey (h/t Don Linn):
Surely they can’t be ‘real’ readers whose papery passions have traditionally been our bread and butter and who shop in ‘real’ bookshops? No, these must be a different sort of reader, new and not as good, ‘silly’ and to be only temporarily humoured and nervously served before we gladly see them off as they return to whatever form of entertainment they normally enjoy. Far from intellectual snobbery about readers being the preserve of the book trade, it runs rife through everyday media and culture, constantly perpetuating the view that books are for the few.
Medium-Rare — Author Lev Grossman (The Magician King) on almost being a rare book collector, at Time:
My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don’t buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed. (In the rare book trade the little details that definitively identify a first edition are called “points.” My books are not strong on points.) It’s not glamorous, but it’s still satisfying, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.
And finally…
“New” — An archive interview with art director and pioneer of modern advertising Helmut Krone. There is so much good stuff in this… (via Coudal, naturally):
“New” is when you’ve never seen before what you’ve just put on a piece of paper. You haven’t seen it before and nobody else in the world has ever seen that thing that you’ve just put down on a piece of paper. And when a thing is new all you know about it is that it is brand new. It’s not related to anything that you’ve seen before in your life. And it’s very hard to judge the value of it. You distrust it, and everybody distrusts it. And very often it’s somebody else who has to tell you that that thing has merit, because you have no frame of reference, and you can’t relate it to anything that you or anybody else has ever done before.
(The going rate for Helmut Krone: The Book appears to be upwards of $80 on Abebooks. Time for a reprint?)
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Terry O’Reilly’s radio show Age of Persuasion is always a fascinating half-hour of social history regardless of whether you are interested in advertising or not.
In this recent episode, O’Reilly looks at the great women of the advertising world, including the first advertising woman ever, the woman who created the first images of wives as “Happy Homemakers”, the woman who revolutionized the retail business, and the female creative director who inspired the “I Love New York” campaign.
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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).
1 CommentIn Influencers, a short documentary Paul Rojanathara and Davis Johnson, New York creatives discuss pop culture trends and what makes a person creatively influential:
(via Kitsune Noir and others)
Comments closedToday is Penguin’s 75th Birthday! Happy Birthday Penguin.
Tony Lacey, Publishing Director of Penguin, discusses the Penguin Decades series:
And The Guardian interviews Penguin Chief Executive John Makinson, who sounds pretty pleased with himself (Penguin just announced record-breaking half year results):
“[E-books] redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us,” he says. “Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there are worries around pricing and around piracy, royalty rates and so on, but there is also this huge opportunity to do more as publishers.” Publishing, he says, must embrace innovation: “I am keen on the idea that every book that we put on to an iPad has an author interview, a video interview, at the beginning. I have no idea whether this is a good idea or not. There has to be a culture of experimentation, which doesn’t come naturally to book publishers.
In other news…
Copy Writer from the Dark Side — Author Will Self (Liver) discusses advertising with Gordon Comstock for an interview the Creative Review:
I straighten my dog collar and point out some of the things we might have in common, the novelist and the adman. The love of epigrams, the twisting of cliché, the use of animals behaving uncannily – all Self tropes, all things that a copywriter might well have in his book.
It’s a notion I can imagine certain writers would bridle at, but Self only nods philosophically, “Well, maybe I am a copywriter that’s gone to the dark side, I don’t know.”
Wonder Woman Returns — Kate Beaton goes all superhero and shit at Hark! A Vagrant. Kate is now also selling prints directly from her site and from TopatoCo.
And finally, on a related note and because it’s Friday,…
Lady Gaga Kidnaps Commissioner Gordon:
Comments closedSupervillain Lady Gaga brazenly abducted Commissioner James Gordon from a charity fundraiser Tuesday, leaving police baffled and the citizens of Gotham fearing for their safety. Known for her outlandish costumes and geometric polygon hair, the criminal madwoman made a daring escape from Arkham Asylum last week and has been taunting authorities by interrupting television broadcasts ever since… While the kidnapping occurred at stately Wayne Manor, home of playboy jet-setter Bruce Wayne, the eccentric billionaire was not available for comment.
A couple of quick links…
‘Travel with words, meet the world’ — A nice typographic ad campaign from Penguin Books seen at Ads of the World (via This Isn’t Happiness).
No-Fi — Cartoonist James Sturm, founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies, is giving up the internet and documenting for Slate:
Over the last several years, the Internet has evolved from being a distraction to something that feels more sinister. Even when I am away from the computer I am aware that I AM AWAY FROM MY COMPUTER and am scheming about how to GET BACK ON THE COMPUTER. I’ve tried various strategies to limit my time online: leaving my laptop at my studio when I go home, leaving it at home when I go to my studio, a Saturday moratorium on usage. But nothing has worked for long. More and more hours of my life evaporate in front of YouTube. Supposedly addiction isn’t a moral failing, but it feels as if it is.
(For the sake of full disclosure, James Sturm’s new book Market Day is published by D+Q who are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast)
Jonathan Turner (AKA Insect54) has posted a few photos of Herbert Spencer’s book Pioneers of Modern Typography on his (amazing) Flickr photostream (via Inspire Me).
2 CommentsLike Dieter Rams, George Lois seems to be a recurrent theme here and I was wondering why that was. Sure, he has a new book out (published by Assouline), but why is he still relevant? Thinking about this, I kept coming back to his April 1968 Muhammad Ali cover for Esquire.
In 1964 Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion of the world, had controversially joined The Nation of Islam and changed his name from Cassius Clay. Three years later he refused to be drafted into the U.S. army because of his religious beliefs and opposition to the Vietnam War. He was stripped of his world title and had his professional boxing license suspended.
At a time of racial tension in the US (there were race riots and civil rights protests across the country in 1967 as well as protests against the Vietnam war) Ali was a successful, outspoken, controversial and self-confident black man refusing to fight for his country. He was reviled and, one suspects, feared by white conservative America.
By 1968, Ali was on bail awaiting his appeal to the Supreme Court. He was still unable to fight and the magazine was planning a story on his exile from the ring.
Putting the boxer on the cover was certainly controversial. But Lois did not make the fighter ‘respectable’ (one doubts the thought even entered his head). Instead, in a photograph taken by Carl Fischer, he presented Ali bare-chested and pierced with arrows.
It is a striking, bloody, and shocking image — especially given the context.
Yet it is also witty, irreverent and surprising: a complex “big idea” rendered with beautiful simplicity.
Lois posed Ali as Saint Sebastian, a 3rd Century Christian soldier and martyr who was bound to a post and shot full of arrows for his beliefs (the arrows, incidentally, didn’t kill him — a subsequent beating took care of that).
The reference was a postcard of a 15th Century painting by attributed to Castagno in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (the Met have since re-attributed the painting to Francesco Botticini).
Like so many of Lois’ other covers for Esquire — this is unquestionably an attack on the establishment. But ‘Ali as St. Sebastian’ is also just about the most elegant and incisive “fuck you” imaginable. It is not the shocking irreverence that makes it resonate — it’s the lacerating wit.
From race to sex to Vietnam — this stuff mattered to Lois. And that never, ever gets old.
Links:
George Lois
George Lois AIGA Medalist
The Passion of George Lois, Design Observer
George Lois 12 Favourite Classic Esquire Covers, New York Magazine
George Lois, Wikipedia
Trailer for the documentary Art & Copy featuring a movie-stealing George Lois (just guess which one he is):
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