A charming interview with Patrick Kelly, the owner of a second-hand bookshop in Brixton called Book Mongers. The shop celebrated its 20 year anniversary in May:
(via Simon Armstrong)
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Published September 19, 2012
Tag: bookstores
Published June 7, 2012
Epilogue: The Future of Print
Epilogue: The Future of Print is a wonderful student documentary project by Hanah Ryu Chung about book and print culture in Toronto. In the film, eight local book and print professionals talk about their work and what the future holds for the printed word:
(via Letterology)
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Published January 9, 2012
The Joy of Books
After organizing their bookcase at home, Sean Ohlenkamp and his wife Lisa Blonder Ohlenkamp have now done a beautiful job of ‘organizing’ the shelves of Toronto independent bookstore Type Books on Queen Street West:
Lovely.
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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 8, 2011
Midweek Miscellany
Curate, Curate, Curate — An interview with James Daunt, the new managing director of Waterstone’s, in The Independent:
“You have to let the booksellers decide how to curate their own stock,” he says. “The skill of a good bookseller is how you juxtapose your titles, and create interesting displays, and reflect what your community wants… The computer screen is a terrible environment in which to select books. All that ‘If you read this, you’ll like that’ – it’s a dismal way to recommend books. A physical bookshop in which you browse, see, hold, touch and feel books is the environment you want.”
An epic three–part interview with the ever-quotable Alan Moore at Honest Publishing:
[T]he people actually producing technology, such as Kindle and iPad, these are always the people who are telling us that we have to have these things. And being the type of creatures that we are, a fair number of us will naturally fall into that, will perhaps assume that as a status symbol it’s much better to be seen reading a Kindle than a dog-eared paperback. Although I will note that the last two or three times I’ve taken train journeys, everybody around me was sitting round reading a dog-eared paperback. I tend to think that for most people the idea of the book, with its easy portability, where you can turn the corner of a page down, where you are basically working with ordinary, reflected light rather than screen radiance, I think that the book will end up as the reading method of choice.
See also: A full, unabridged version of Laura Sneddon’s interview with Moore for The Independent.
And on the subject of authors with beards…
Neal Stephenson, author most recently of REAMDE, talks to The New York Times about the future:
What I’m kind of hoping is that this is just kind of a pause, while we assimilate this gigantic new thing, ubiquitous computing and the Internet. And that at some point we’ll turn around and say, ‘Well, that was interesting — we have a whole set of new tools and capabilities that we didn’t have before the whole computer/Internet thing came along…Now let’s get back to work doing interesting and useful things.’
And finally…
Terry Gilliam talks movies with the LA Times:
Comments closed“The thing is, some really good scripts come my way, but there’s nothing in them for me to come to grips with, they are complete in themselves,” Gilliam said. “There’s no uncertainty. I don’t look for answers; I look for questions. I like when people leave the cinema and feel like the world has been altered for them somewhat. On ‘Brazil,’ I know a woman who said she saw the film, went home and later that night she just started weeping. I also heard about an attorney who saw the film and then locked himself in his office for three days. Fantastic.”
Published November 11, 2011
Something for the Weekend
Read This — Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise and Listen To This, on books about music at FiveBooks:
There’s a long list of bad examples of vague and gushy writing about music in literature, but there’s also a string of distinguished examples. I wrote a piece for The New Yorker a couple of years ago where I talked about my favourite composers in literature. It makes me very happy when I see a novelist going to the trouble of getting the musical details right, because this is part of the conversation on classical music that we very much need. To have plausible and vivid representations of composers and classical musicians in literature and in film is very important.
(Disclosure: the paperback editions of The Rest is Noise and Listen To This are published by Picador in the US and are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books)
Building from the Bones of a Superstore — Businessweek on the decline of Borders and the opportunities for independent bookstores in the US:
Despite rising online book sales and digital downloads and the Great Recession, bookstores in the area were profitable—right up until they closed. Even Davis-Kidd, locally owned until the Joseph-Beth Booksellers chain purchased it in 1997, had been solvent, undone not by the collapse of the local market but by the bankruptcy of the parent company… Nashville lost its bookstores not because people there had abandoned physical books and retailers. For the most part, it lost them remotely, at the corporate level.
It’s Just a Device — Errol Morris talks to Stephen King about the Kennedy assassination and his new novel 11/22/63:
When you write about the past, the more you write, the clearer the past becomes. It’s like being regressed under hypnosis. My view of the past is that attitudes change, but they change very slowly. Underneath, they stay pretty much the same. “The fundamental things apply as time goes by.”
The Artist and The Scientist — Paola Antonelli, critic and curator at MoMA, on type design for Domus magazine:
Font designers who are able to marry critical and commercial success are a unique mixture of two basic clichés: the artist and the scientist. They are eclectic, curious, obsessive and absorbed, as well as rigorous, punctilious, enamoured of rules and limitations, and loyal to a higher code of design behaviour. They are an even more different breed among the many different breeds of designers working today. Contending now with the dynamic methods of communication provided by tablet computers, smartphones and other supports for text and brand, they deal with each family of fonts as if it were truly made of individuals, live characters that need to be able to fend for themselves once released into the wider world. In this vein, font design might just be the most advanced form of design existing today.
And finally…
Failure and Disappointment — Comedian Ricky Gervais on the difference between American and British humour:
Americans say, “have a nice day” whether they mean it or not. Brits are terrified to say this. We tell ourselves it’s because we don’t want to sound insincere but I think it might be for the opposite reason. We don’t want to celebrate anything too soon. Failure and disappointment lurk around every corner. This is due to our upbringing. Americans are brought up to believe they can be the next president of the United States. Brits are told, “it won’t happen for you.”
Have. A. Nice. Day.
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Published August 31, 2011
Live and Breath Imagination
In this lovely video for Crane.tv, Sylvia Whitman, manager of Shakespeare & Co. and daughter of founder George Whitman, talks about the storied Parisian store and the wonder of good independent bookshops:
(via Port Magazine)
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Published August 10, 2011
Laurence King on the Future of Design Publishing
In a great interview for Design Observer, UK publisher Laurence King discusses the future of design publishing with Mark Lamster:
Illustrated book publishers, and in particular art publishers, need bookshops to survive, especially the increasingly rare specialist ones where there are discerning buyers who understand art, architecture and design. I think that these need to be treated with a great deal of care by publishers because all too often they serve as shop windows for Amazon. They are more important to us than sales through them indicate. It would be great if they could use their reputations and expert knowledge to become competitive with Amazon on-line. But I dread the day when art publishers have to set up loss-making showrooms to exhibit our books, just because we went on being tough with the specialist booksellers. At the same time, booksellers need to reinvent themselves quite fast, which is obviously difficult.
Laurence King published Bibliographic: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books — one of my favourite visual books from the last couple of years — in 2009, and later this fall, they’re publishing a huge, long-awaited, monograph on designer Saul Bass. Can’t wait.
Full disclosure: Laurence King is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books.
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Published July 15, 2011
Something From the Weekend
Paint It Black — Alan Moore talks to Pádraig Ó Méalóid about the latest instalment of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Century: 1969 (available next month) for the Forbidden Planet blog:
What we’ve got in 1969, in keeping with the League’s usual practice, is that we’ve got a world entirely composed of references to the culture of that period, or around that period. So we’re taking bits from various films, television series, books, comics, any culture of that time we’re working into the fabric of our story… I hope that people will have as much fun digging out the various references as we had putting them in there…
See also: Pádraig Ó Méalóid’s recent interview with Alan Moore for 3AM Magazine.
Gonzo Graphic Novels — Six leading cartoonists discuss their own favourite cartoonists for The Guardian. Here’s political cartoonist Martin Rowson on Joe Sacco:
Although Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a work of incredible importance, I think it gave the entire genre a bum steer. It then got into this terrible kind of introspective, personal, adolescent angstiness. All this “you have to be serious about this because it’s a serious art form”: well, it is and it isn’t. Therefore, discovering Joe Sacco was a liberation. Here is somebody who is using the medium as journalism and reportage. It’s taking the best bits of the underground comics of the 60s – the radicalism – with the personal immersion you got with Spiegelman. It’s an extraordinarily powerful way of telling a story – a true one in this case. The fact that he places himself in the heart of it makes it gonzo journalism turned into a graphic novel, although it’s not really a graphic novel, it’s a sort of visual journalism.
Also in The Guardian… Lee Rourke, author of The Canal, on The Book Barge, a bookstore in a travelling canal barge:
It is the brainchild of Sarah Henshaw. “By setting up on a canal boat,” she explained, “we hope to promote a less hurried and harried lifestyle of idle pleasures, cups of tea, conversation, culture and, of course, curling up with an incomparably good Book Barge purchase.” I was immediately sold. But why a canal boat? “I hoped that by creating a unique retail space, customers would realise how independent bookshops can offer a far more pleasurable shopping experience than they’re likely to find online or on the discount shelves at supermarkets.”
Wonderful.
And finally…
Recording the Disjunction — Errol Morris talks to the A.V. Club about truth, self-deception, and his new documentary Tabloid:
Comments closedPeople sort of imagine that they go to a documentary—and this is also true [when] you read an article, a work of journalism—that they’re [experiencing] a work of non-fiction. We know that what we’re reading is not the absolute truth. If we’re reading a first-person account, we know that each and every one of us, myself included, have a great desire to be seen in a certain way, or to be perceived in a certain way. It’s unavoidable. What a movie can do—and this is what really does interest me, it’s at the heart of documentary—is not so much delivering the so-called truth. Yes, pursuing the truth, trying to investigate what really happened, trying to uncover some underlying reality, but recording that disjunction, that distance between how people see the world and the way the world might really be—that’s at the heart of the enterprise.
Published July 13, 2011
There’s No Place Like Here
Published July 6, 2011
Midweek Miscellany
60 Years of Innovation — The estimable John Self on publisher Peter Owen for The Guardian:
It cannot simply be good luck that leads one man to publish such an embarrassingly long list of riches. Owen is clear that both “literary acumen and a business mind” are essential. He has survived where other publishing houses forging a similar path, such as those of Marion Boyars and John Calder, have been closed or sold, and had their lists filleted by larger houses; if you are just “an editor buying books you like, with no idea how to run a business,” Owen says, “you don’t stand a chance.” For him, a distinctive look helped: bold (and presumably inexpensive) two-colour covers by Keith Cunningham may have lacked the cool of Jan Tschichold’s Penguin templates, but gave the list a uniform feel. The odd commercial success helped more, with titles which caught the public mood such as Siddhartha and The Man Who Planted Trees. Owen may not always have liked his authors (Salvador Dali was “a creep [but] not as mad as you’d think. When you mentioned money, he suddenly became very sane”), but it’s hard to question his commitment to new and avant-garde writing.
Goodbye To All That — The Economist glumly ponders the fate of Borders and independent bookstores:
The problem, however, is that no one seems willing to buy full-price books anymore. Campaigns to get people to buy books from their local bookstores—such as “Save Bookstores Day” on June 25th—miss the point. While there is demand for real bricks-and-mortar places to gather, drink coffee and read new books, such places can’t exist if the market can’t accommodate them… [T]he market is squeezing out a meaningful public space. It will be interesting to see what fills the void these bookstores leave behind.
“Interesting” is probably not the adjective I would have used personally…
Dead Cool — Comics critic Paul Gravett talks about his new book 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die with Bleeding Cool:
Initially, the American publishers tried to insist that every one of 1001 Comics must be available in English. But I had to insist that this would exclude loads of absolute masterpieces, and it wouldn’t make the book work in the other languages it is going to appear in, such as French or German. So somewhere around 12 per cent or so of the 1001 are not available in English, at least not yet. I seriously hope that exposure in 1001 will alert publishers and motivate them to translate them.
And finally…
Naomi Yang, designer, visual artist, publisher and founding member of the band Galaxie 500, talks with Print Magazine:
A book has always been an object! That is what can be so wonderful about them and so different than a digital book—or even a print-on-demand book. A book is an entire world: you see the cover, you pick it up, you feel the material of the cover, you turn it over, you read the back—and then you open it! You get the progression of the half-title, the title page, the table of contents and then that first page of text, that first line. And there are so many small things, the page numbers, the running heads, the proportions of the margins—the same elements in each book—but how will you do it this time?
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Published February 25, 2011
Something for the Weekend
Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, has posted an amazing selection of vintage French photographic noir book covers at John Gall’s blog Spine Out.
On the Defensive — Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask, on teaching creative writing in The Financial Times:
When you teach creative writing, you are already on the defensive. People love to poke you in the chest and cry, “But you can’t teach writing!” This is precisely what I think about automobile driving but I let them rant while I rub the sore part where they poked me. I don’t know why people get so worked up about this subject. Nobody has asked them to teach creative writing or even to learn it. Apprenticeship, the sharing of history and technique, has always been a central feature of art-making. Yet people cling to a romantic idea of the self-made genius toiling away in a garret or napping undisturbed in a sleep module.
Books on Wheels — A really lovely article about bookmobiles from the Smithsonian Magazine:
Bookmobiles, the man said, had been a fundamental inspiration while growing up in rural Mississippi in the mid-1960s. The public library had been closed to blacks—but the bookmobile stopped right on his street, a portal into the world of literature.
The gentleman was W. Ralph Eubanks: today an acclaimed author, and Director of Publishing for the Library of Congress… “The librarians did not care that I was barefoot, and wearing a pair of raggedy shorts. All they cared about was that I wanted to read—and to help me find something I would enjoy reading.”
Eubanks’ story is just one example of the pivotal role bookmobiles have played in literary culture, and individual lives, for more than 150 years.
Strides at The Strand — Nancy Bass Wyden, co-owner of The Strand bookstore in New York, interviewed in The Daily Beast:
We have taken strides to grow with our customers and listen to their needs. When customers started requesting New York Times bestsellers, we started carrying new books and featuring them on tables in the front of the store; when customers started talking about the Internet, we got online; when Amazon and B&N.com became “competitors,” we partnered with them.
And finally…
The Trial — Judith Butler in the LRB on the implications of the ongoing and complex legal battle in Tel Aviv over several boxes of Kafka’s original writings:
Comments closedHad the works been destroyed, perhaps the ghosts would not be fed – though Kafka could not have anticipated how limitlessly parasitic the forces of nationalism and profit would be, even as he knew those spectral forces were waiting.