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Published March 11, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, March 11th, 2009

Rare (and not so rare) — Joel Kral‘s fabulous collection of book covers on  Flickr (via Monoscope):

These are some of the rare (and not so rare) books that I have collected over the past 13 years. They range from graphic design, architecture, art, typography, illustration, skateboarding, graffiti, etc.

Literary Fibs — “Miserable writerist” Charlie Brooker responds  to the claim that 65% of us lie about the novels we’ve read in a bid to impress people:

The… irony is that while people lie about having read highbrow novels in order to impress each other, a massive percentage of highbrow novels aren’t worth reading anyway because the authors are too busy trying to impress the reader (who, we now know, probably hasn’t bothered turning up)

Shelved Books — “A blog dedicated to the cover that never happened” by designer Kimberly Glyder.

Day to Day Batman — Chip Kidd, the self-described “Indiana Jones of Forgotten Japanese Batman Comics”,  talks about Bat-Manga! on NPR (pictured above).

Isn’t that enough? — Jeff Gordiner, Editor-at-Large at Details magazine and author of X Saves the World, interviewed at The Raleigh Quarterly (via@RonHogan):

Other than Philip Roth, though, almost everybody’s writing too much. Blogs, chat rooms, Twitter, Facebook status updates —there’s a wordy data glut going on, and it’s made me more reverent than ever of strategic silence. I’m fond of the J.D. Salinger approach — just evaporating from public view. Is it wrong that Salinger hasn’t left us with 30 or 40 books?

Snooty British traditions and  New York brashness — the National Post talks to Nicole Winstanley about Penguin Canada’s new imprint Hamish Hamilton Canada. This is the 4th installment of the Post‘s  ‘The Ecology of Books’ series. Part one is about literary agents, part two looks at literary journals, part three is a fascinating profile of McClelland & Stewart’s Ellen Seligman.

The Periodic Table of Typefaces —  (pictured above)

And finally, Alan Taylor has launched  ‘meta-blog’ Big Picture Notes to accompany the Boston Globe‘s brilliant photo blog The Big Picture.  Great stuff.

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Published February 27, 2009

Something for the Weekend, Feb 27th, 2009

The 5 Rules of Book Cover Design Book — John Gall, VP and art Director at Vintage, talks about designing books at Barnes & Noble (video). There is also a nice print interview with John Gall from 2007 at STEP Inside Design magazine and another interview with the designer from the same year  at fwis Covers website (which is worth it just for the immortal line: “I want a telepathic dog.”) (John Gall at the Book Cover Archive— Pragmatism: A Reader designed by John Gall,  pictured above)

Fear, panic, and a little bit of hope — Sarah Weinman discusses the perilous state of  the publishing industry on NHPR’s Word of Mouth.

Chapters-Indigo‘s move into e-books, Shortcovers, goes live to much curiousity and twittering. The Globe and Mail has the basics, The National Post’s The Ampersand rounds up some of the reactions, but O’Reilly’s TOC seems to sum up the general mood: “A Good Start, But Room for Reader Improvement”. Michael Serbinis, the executive VP, writes about the first day on the Shortcovers blog.

(NB – I’ve sort of been ignoring the Kindle2 stuff as it’s not available in Canada, but — just to have some balance — E-Reads has a nice round up of the coverage).

Influence the future — Anthro Goggles lists the first 4 SF books you should read if you work in social media.

Jacket Copy — An interesting interview with David L. Ulin, book editor of the Los Angeles Times (who folded their standalone book section 6-months ago), in PW:

Ulin takes a realistic, broad-ranging view of how book coverage will be presented in the future. “I’m committed to both print and Web. There are two readerships, and I’m not sure they’re the same. My main interest is, how do we get the most book coverage to the most people?” Ideally, Ulin would welcome a return to the stand-alone book review. “But we don’t have one now, and we’re not going to have one,” he says.

modernism 101 : from aalto to zwart — “We specialize in rare and out-of-print design books and periodicals. Our carefully-selected online inventory spotlights both famous and forgotten modernist architects, photographers, typographers, and industrial designers in all their published glory.” How could I not link to this? Even if you can’t afford the books (which I can’t) you can at least look at the covers! (The Twentieth Century Book by John Lewis pictured above). (via ISO150)

And on a related bookporn note, Grain Edit has some rather nice pictures of Typographica, the design journal edited by Herman Spencer…

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Published February 9, 2009

Monday Miscellany, February 9th, 2009

“Books exist because we want and need them” — A slide show of pages from Robert Bringhurst’s new book The Surface of Meaning: Books And Book Design In Canada (pictured) published by CCSP Press in The Globe and Mail. (Disclosure: The Surface of Meaning is distributed by Raincoast in Canada).

A bookshop is a dynamite-shed — Bookride have posted a splendid John Cowper Powys rant about second-hand bookshops:

[A] bookshop — especially a second-hand bookshop — is an arsenal of explosives, an armoury of revolutions, an opium den of reactions. And just because books are the repository of all the redemptions and damnations, all the sanities and insanities, of the divine anarchy of the soul, they are still, as they have always been, an object of suspicion to every kind of ruling authority.

Pessimism Porn — Hugo Lindgren explains his addiction to nightmarish economic news  in New York Magazine:

“[E]cono-porn… feeds a powerful sense of intellectual vanity. You walk the streets feeling superior to all these heedless knaves who have no clue what’s coming down the pike. By making yourself miserable about the frightful hell that awaits us, you feel better. Pessimism can be bliss too.”

Publishing certainly has its fair share of addicts…

Visionary locations — Toby Litt on J.G. Ballard in the Guardian:

“Plenty of other writers now fictionally venture into multistorey carparks, airport hospital wards, decaying hotels, but they do so in the knowledge that they’re trespassing on Ballard’s territory. He was here first; he was the pioneer – back when these places were seen as totally unliterary. What could possibly happen on a motorway embankment that was of interest?”

Finding alternative best sellers — Toronto bookshop This Is Ain’t The Rosedale Library profiled by Brian Joseph Davis in the Globe and Mail.

Is CondéNet Dead? — Slate’s The Big Money examine how “a publishing giant failed to get the Web”. Lessons (if more were needed) for book publishers (via @jafurtado):

“To say that we’re just a magazine company in this day and age is like saying that we’re a buggy company.”

PUFF — lovely pictures of PUFF by William Wondriska (published in 1960 by Pantheon Books Inc.) at the wonderful Grain Edit (pictured above).

Image Spark— A neat image bookmarking tool. V. excited about this as you can probably imagine… (via @michaelSurtees/DesignNotes) .

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Published January 14, 2009

The New Globe & Mail Books

As announced in December last year, The Globe and Mail replaced its standalone Books tabloid with a combined ‘Focus and Books’ section this weekend, simultaneously launching a new Books website that will feature, amongst other things, daily book reviews, news on books and the publishing industry, and blogs by Globe Book’s online communities editor Peter Scowen and Books editor Martin Levin.

In context of the numerous issues facing newspapers internationally, and the rapid decline of book review coverage in the US (and elsewhere) in recent years, the Globe’s long-foreshadowed shake-up has garnered barely a murmur outside of Canada. Nevertheless there has been some lively discussion on several Canadian book blogs.

Describing it as a “an inauspicious start” and “a work in progress”, That Shakespeherian Rag gives the new books coverage a thorough critical mauling, drawing particular attention a egregious error regarding the 2008 Giller Prize-winning novel Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden, and several other missteps. The Literary Lad’s final verdict: “[A] mixed, but generally underwhelming bag, with the online component scoring better than the new print format… Let’s hope that the early hiccoughs are just that, and not an indication of how things are to be run in the long term.”

Mark at INDEX // mb , who has clearly given this a lot of thought (he’s written about the launch too), isn’t keen on the presentation, but does give credit where he thinks it’s due: “The Globe team have given us a great online destination for Canadian readers. Congratulations to them for planning, creating, and delivering the new site.”

And despite some initial disappointments, Hugh at Book Oven is also optimistic, noting that the “decision to not just quietly kill their book section, as so many other papers have, but to relocate it is encouraging.”

Like Hugh, I’m grateful the Globe has decided to maintain some kind of book coverage in what is a horribly toxic environment for newspapers and book reviews. And I know book review editors (particularly, perhaps, Canadian ones) have a truly thankless task —  trying to please everyone means, inevitably, you please nobody (least of all bloggers!).

I am personally sad, however, to see two distinct sections that I liked unceremoniously (and somewhat incoherently) brought together in a expedient shotgun wedding. No doubt Focus and Books will grow into its new identity and improve with time, but the result this weekend lacked clarity and a sense of purpose. The new features appeared, well, rather desperate.

The online component — technical issues aside — feels a little belated to me and the Globe is lagging behind the extensive book coverage to be found elsewhere on the web, notably at the New York Times and the Guardian who committed earlier to being online. Better late than never though, and with an authoritative and informed focus on the Canadian literary scene, the Globe might be able to carve out a niche for itself given time.

Peter Scowen — who has been honourably responding  to the critical reactions on the Globe’s In Other Words blog — notes that the online launch did not go “without a hiccup” and I don’t suppose that producing the new print section was straightforward. Perhaps it is really too early to tell how this will all play out? Still, I must confess to being strangely ambivalent about the new section and website. With layoff expected at the Globe any day now, I can’t shake the feeling that they’re re-arranging the deckchairs…

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Published December 10, 2008

Cautious Optimism

Books a better buy in Canada? After all the problems caused by the high Canadian dollar in 2007, Canadian publishers and booksellers are “cautiously optimistic” at the start of this year’s holidays according to Vit Wagner in the Toronto Star:

“The climate is much better this year,” says [Nancy] Frater, proprietor of the Orangeville store BookLore. “My reason for optimism is that in challenging economic times, people do turn to books. As gifts, books have long-lasting value and they’re reasonably priced.”

It’s all relative though:

“I can’t look into the future and say everything’s going to be sanguine,” says Random House of Canada’s [Brad] Martin. “We’re doing a lot of cost cutting, but it’s more discretionary, like cutting the number of sales conferences from two to one. But we believe that the organization that we have now is what we need to successfully publish books in this country at the level that we have been publishing them.

“What I can’t tell you is what is going to happen to the market over the first six months of next year. It’s concerning for all of us. But certainly right now we seem to be performing better in a difficult market than the two other major English-language markets.”

And I’m not sure how this all sits with the recently reported “belt-tightening” in Canadian publishing — including staff changes at KidsCan Press and Thomas Allen postponing most of  their spring 2009 list — and all the grim news coming out of the US.

Is there worse to come? Any Thoughts?

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