Books, Design and Culture
The Man — An interview with the talented Seb Lester, typographer and artist, at The Raw Book:
People may associate me with flourished calligraphy and intricate formal script styles, but I don’t want to be known as a stylist because I feel I can do a wide variety of things. I want to try to constantly evolve and progress, with quality being the only theme running through my work. No one would guess most of the projects I’ve worked on have been done by me.
There is something quite wonderful about watching Lester at work:
The Beauty of Letterpress — An online resource and showcase created by Neenah Paper, featuring “the best and most innovative letterpress work in the industry today.”
And finally…
Heart-Shaped Box — Phil Bicker, a senior photo editor at TIME, interviews photographer Bert Stern at Time Lightbox:
1962… also saw the release of Lolita, directed by his old friend Stanley Kubrick. He asked Stern to take some publicity shots for the film. Stern took then 13-year-old actress Sue Lyon and her mother to a five-and- dime store in Sag Harbor, on eastern Long Island, to make the pictures. “I walked into the store and saw all these sun heart-shaped sunglasses and candy canes and other fun stuff that became the props for the shoot. I had not seen the movie but I underlined passages in Nabakov’s book that would make picture ideas. I always work with words that become pictures.”
See also: Stern discusses his work and Shannah Laumeister’s new documentary Bert Stern: Original Mad Man at the New York Times’ T Magazine.
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In part one of our conversation, Misha Beletsky, art director at Abbeville Press, discussed his interest in the work of German-born designer and calligrapher Ismar David, the subject his recent book The Book Jackets of Ismar David, published by RIT Press. In this second and final part of our interview, Misha and talks about his own work as a designer and an art director:
How did you become interested in design?
The father of a boyhood friend in Russia was a book designer. He had a photo lab set up in his closet, took pictures of letters, and pasted them up with rubber cement. Having access to creation of the book, that holy of the holies of the bookish world I grew up in seemed like magic. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. One day I tagged along with this friend to take night classes at the Moscow Printing Institute. Suddenly, I felt it was no longer a world I could enjoy as a guest, but a world I could be a part of. I felt it was not only something I liked doing, but an area where I could make a real difference. When I arrived in the US, one particular image from a RISD catalog influenced my decision to choose this school over others: a photograph of a calligraphy class. The unassuming black-and-white image spoke to me more than all lavish and clever full-color catalogs of other schools not because I wanted to become a calligrapher, but because I knew this was a place that based its design education on a solid ground. The essential training in typography I received at RISD laid the ground for my summer internship with David R. Godine, Publisher in Boston. This small press started out as a letterpress printing shop in a barn and over the years has been responsible for more important books on book design and typography than any single publisher in this country. There I caught the bug of fine printing. I began appreciating printer’s ink, impression, and paper, and there I was indoctrinated about the proper use of old style figures and small caps. I learned to consider all elements of the book as a part of one system where the whole is more than a sum of its parts and each part is integrally related to each other. Empowered by my discovery of the letterpress, I went back to school to spend my Senior year hand-setting metal type, carving woodcuts, and printing my own limited-edition books. My first job after school designing book interiors for Alfred A. Knopf was the best way to apply the ideals of fine printing to real-life trade publishing. Knopf house style had changed little since the heady days of W.A. Dwiggins, George Salter, and Warren Chappell. I explored every nook in the corporate library, taking in every book designed by the best designers of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Their lessons are still with me today.
Could you describe your book cover design process?
Most of the books I design are art books, which usually implies I am responsible for both the cover and the interior design. This means I have a rare privilege of making sure the cover and the interior design agree. I usually start from the inside out: I decide on the interior typography first, and then move on to the jacket. Unlike most trade books, where cover designers are only limited by their imagination and their budget in the choice of the artwork, the cover image for illustrated books usually comes from within the book. I select an image, crop it, and design the typography. This limitation made me keenly aware of how much you can do with type alone and sympathetic to the designers of the past who were able to achieve great results with limited tools.
What do you look for in a designer’s portfolio?
I look for understanding of and an eye for traditional book typography. Only a handful of portfolios out of hundreds I reviewed had it.
Do you see any prevalent trends in contemporary book design?
There is a relatively new trend of purely decorative covers and bindings by Coralie Bickford-Smith and others that seems to be a reaction to the overwhelming number of clever designs. As far as interiors go, by and large, I see a lot of unexciting work of decent quality and very little great work. I keep waiting for a resurgence of good typography, but it has not arrived yet.
What advice would you give a designer starting their career?
Read Ben Shahn’s The Shape of Content. Learn calligraphy, drawing, and printmaking. Learn letterpress printing from metal type. Manual skills cannot be emphasized enough.
Who are some of your design heroes?
Bruce Rogers, the subject of my new book. He had an almost unfathomable sensitivity to typography. In his lifetime he was famous to a point of embarrassment. Today he is hardly ever talked about. Yet, to me he remains the most versatile and the most accomplished practitioner of our craft.
Another name is Vladimir Favorsky, a towering genius of Russian graphic arts, completely forgotten outside of Russia. For many years he taught at VKhuTeMas, the Russian sister-school of the Bauhaus (which evolved into the design department of Moscow Printing Institute where I briefly studied), yet he was in opposition to the Constructivist ideas espoused by most professors there. He developed an original design philosophy of his own that integrated Avant-garde ideas with the traditional craft of wood engraving. Ironically, his fusion of the old and the new may prove more relevant today than the radical rejection of the old by his famous modernist colleagues.
What does the future hold for book cover design?
Who knows? What does the future hold for visual art or for our culture at large? It seems we’ve been living in a cultural twilight zone. We’ve tried Modernism and we came to a logical dead end, we’ve tried revolting against Modernism, and we’ve become tired of that, too. What’s next? I hope we can learn to build on top of what the previous generations learned instead of rejecting whatever the last fashion was and trying to outdo it. In the words of Goethe that Ismar David loved to quote, “What you inherited from your fathers, acquire it to make it your own.”
Thanks Misha! (And I couldn’t resist including this…)
Misha Beletsky is the art director of New York’s Abbeville Press, an independent publisher of fine art and illustrated books.
Towards the end of last year, Misha was kind enough to send me a copy of his recent book, The Book Jackets of Ismar David, published by RIT Press.
A German-born graphic artist, David worked in Germany and then Jerusalem before moving permanently to the United States to become part of a group of accomplished calligraphers who also worked as book jacket designers in New York in the 1950s. David’s bold and expressive style was informed by a mastery of the typographic tradition (he designed a calligraphic Hebrew typeface called David Hebrew), and he worked for many of leading publishers of the day including Alfred A. Knopf, Harper and Row, Houghton Mifflin, Random House and others.
In this post, the first of a two-part interview, Misha discusses the book and his interest in the work of Ismar David.
When did you first come across the work of Ismar David?
Anyone who reads Hebrew is familiar with David’s work, whether they are aware of it or not: David Hebrew, a font he designed happens to be one of the most ubiquitous Hebrew typefaces for text setting. I was first exposed to his work outside of type design as I researched my article on the history of Hebrew typography around twelve years ago.
What interested you about him?
David’s work is powerful and beautiful, yet little known. He had a rare ability of using traditional skills and historical knowledge to arrive at strikingly contemporary results.
Did David’s work change when he moved to the US?
His work matured and became more diverse, as he grew in his craftsmanship and absorbed many exciting influences of 1950s’ New York design scene. He was working alongside other accomplished calligrapher jacket designers like George Salter, Warren Chappell, Arnold Bank, Phil Grushkin, Charles Skaggs, Oscar Ogg, Jeanyee Wong, and Lili Wronker, among others. They all knew each other and learned from each other’s work.
Do you consider David to be primarily a book designer or a calligrapher?
He was a graphic artist who used calligraphy as a primary means of expression. He was equally comfortable designing book jackets, architectural interiors, logos, advertisements, and monumental inscriptions, depending on the project at hand.
What was special about his Hebrew typeface ‘David’?
It was the first 20th c. Hebrew text type, whose letterforms were not based on an existing typographic model, but found inspiration in historic calligraphic hands. David distilled the idea of the Hebrew letter to its purest form.
How did David’s work differ from his contemporaries Paul Rand and Alvin Lustig?
His work could not be called clever or conceptual. He relied on the sheer power of the letter, shape, and color to create stunning jackets that told the book’s story through a primary visual vocabulary.
Is David’s work still relevant today?
I believe it is. Twenty years into the “conceptual revolution” in our book cover design, the Modernist idiom is getting a bit tired. We are ready for something different. There is a renewed interest in traditional typography and design craftsmanship, and it is here that we could learn a thing or two from David.
Do you think we’re seeing a revival of calligraphy, lettering and hand-drawn type?
Somewhat: if Pinterest stats are any indication, lettering compositions are trending along with pictures of fashionable outfits, cute puppies, and expensive home interiors. It’s not a complete comeback, though. On one hand, a few talented designers like Marian Bantjes and Jessica Hische are enjoying a tremendous degree of success with their decorative lettering work. On the other hand, the work of traditionally trained calligraphers is still in relatively low demand. What seems encouraging, though, is a renewed interest in, and appreciation of, calligraphy as a craft. I would attribute the interest in this and other handicrafts to the backlash against the proliferation of the computer that has left the hand out of the creative process. At the same token, the plethora of visual resources now available on the Internet provides unprecedented access to the rare historical calligraphic books and manuscripts. In this case the same computer is actually helping to make the handicraft popular again.
Thanks Misha.
You can find more images from The Book Jackets of Ismar David on Facebook. Part two of my converation with Misha will be available tomorrow.
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Patchwork — Artist Lilli Carré talks about her story collection Heads or Tails with Robot 6:
I wanted to include the majority of the short stories I’ve produced over the past five years, and so I went through all my stuff and arranged them not chronologically, but by how they each fed into each other. The book contains stories collected from anthologies, some new work, and a few pieces that I reformatted from small run mini-comics, artists books, and drawings that I’ve made over the years. My style changes quite a bit from project to project, so the book has a kind of patchwork quilt feel to it, but I wanted to make sure there was a solid thread between how one story feeds into the next.
The Activists — An interview with Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians, founders of Melville House, at The Rumpus:
A lot of our early work was activist books… We were always kind of motivated in that way. When you have your own publishing house, you have to follow your own tastes, so we were publishing whatever we liked. We were also publishing a lot of translated fiction, because we felt that something that was important in the United States that was important then and still now, to combat that sort of insular feeling that we are all there is. To bring other writers and voices into the language, and get them exposed to new readers.
Nice — A lovely profile of Ben McFall who manages The Strand’s fiction section, in the New York Times:
Mr. McFall grew up in Detroit, the only child of two schoolteachers, and he studied literature and music in college. He worked at a bookstore in Connecticut after graduation and then moved to New York in the mid-1970s to flourish as an actor, singer, poet and openly gay man. He took a job at the Strand in 1978.
“Back then, it was a cruel place; I was the first nice person to work here,” Mr. McFall said.
And finally…
Learn New Old Skills — An interview with type designer and calligrapher Seb Lester at Salon:
I’ve gone back to basics in recent years and placed a lot of emphasis on traditional tools… I have realized that calligraphy makes me a better type designer with digital tools and vice versa. There is a beautiful synergy between the two. There is also something very satisfying about making expressive marks and calligraphy has a humanity and expressive quality hard to capture with a computer. A personal motto at the moment is learn new old skills.
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A lovely new video featuring the work of British type designer, illustrator and artist Seb Lester:
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New Ways to Kill Your Mother: not only a great title, the UK edition of Colm Tóibín’s most recent book sports a wonderful jacket design by talented Scottish designer, illustrator and letterer Steven Bonner. The typography and decorative lettering is beautiful, but the noose is just such an elegant black twist.
Steven’s lettering was included in Letter Cult’s massive list of the best custom lettering of 2011 (linked to previously here), and you can see more of his design work on his website.
New Ways to Kill Your Mother has just been released in the US. You can read the New York Times review here.
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A profile of calligrapher DeAnn Singh at The LA Times:
When the producers of “Mad Men” needed a note in cursive and a signature from Don Draper, they turned to Singh. “Something masculine and from the 1950s” was the request, though they eventually decided that the missive be typed…
Ask her about computers, and she’ll tell the story of Steve Jobs.
Before the founding of Apple and the development of the Macintosh, Jobs dropped out of Reed College and studied calligraphy with artist Lloyd Reynolds. If he hadn’t taken that class, he has said, personal computers might not have come with a variety of fonts.
Fantasy Modernism — Lev Grossman talks to the A.V. Club about The Magician King, the sequel to his 2009 novel The Magicians:
I have this theory about modernism and fantasy, which I’ll do in 30 seconds.
They came into being at the same time, which is very interesting. They were both reactions to the disasters of World War I and the electrification of cities, and urbanization, and the rise of the automobile, the end of that twilight world of the Victorians. They both are reactions to that in different ways. Modernism went very inside and delved into the interior lives of people. Fantasy externalized all that in these fantastical, magical, metaphorical landscapes. I thought, “Well, what if you did both the inside and the outside at once?” I tried to combine those foci of fantasy and modernism into one kind of writing. It sounds like I’m writing a dissertation on my own work, but, you know, you end up thinking about what you’re doing. That’s the kind of thing I thought.
See also: Alexander Chee reviews the book for NPR.
Prussian Pedantry — Susie Harries’ new biography of scholar Nikolaus Pevsner, best known for his 46-volume series The Buildings of England, reviewed by George Walden for The Observer:
For us at least the conflict of national intellectual styles he represented was hugely beneficial. The irony of a “Prussian pedant” lecturing the English on Englishness, for which he was mocked, resolves itself in the fact that, together with Gombrich in art history and Weidenfeld in publishing, Pevsner was one of a golden generation of German/Austrian Jewish refugees who did much to give their adopted country the bottom it prided itself on already possessing.
And for those of you not interested in a county-by-county guide to the wonders of English architecture (what’s wrong with you?), Pevsner also wrote the seminal Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. First published in 1936, a revised and expanded edition will be available (in the UK at least) in September.
And finally…
Everyone is an Auteur — Guardian correspondent Fiachra Gibbons meets Jean-Luc Godard:
“I am not an auteur, well, not now anyway,” he says as casually, as if it was like giving up smoking. “We once believed we were auteurs but we weren’t. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It’s sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.”
Oh Jean-Luc…
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