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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 14, 2011

Favourite Covers of 2011

After posting my long overdue picks for 2010 last week, here are my selections for my favourite book covers of 2011.

I’m currently reading Where The Stress Falls a collection of writing by Susan Sontag published in 2001. In an essay about art she quotes Paul Valéry on the painter Corot. “One must always apologize for talking about painting” he says. I know just what he means. I feel the same way about book design. Perhaps even more than a painting, what you see is what you get with a book jacket. If you have to explain why it works, it probably doesn’t. Or you’re talking to the wrong crowd. But there’s something else too. I also feel like I need to apologize for not knowing more; for producing reductive lists like this one; for being, well, so presumptuous…

The 2011 list has changed a few times in the last few days and would likely be different again if you asked me tomorrow — not for lack of quality you understand, but simply because narrowing the list down to a manageable number and deciding which should be in the final ‘top 10’ was just plain hard. This isn’t a definitive survey of book covers in 2011 by any means (sorry!) it’s simply a list of the book jackets that caught my eye this year — designs I thought that were beautiful, a bit different, audacious, a bit out of the ordinary, a bit worthwhile…  I’m grateful to all the designers who created these covers, who gave me suggestions and helped me source the images. Once again, I’ve been struck by their generosity. Nevertheless I have surely I’ve missed some great covers. Tell me what they are in the comments.

Continue readingFavourite Covers of 2011
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Published November 23, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Design Auteur — Steven Heller on Erik Nitsche for Print Magazine:

For some, book publishing was akin to the Internet of the sixties and seventies, a means of communicating information to large numbers in large volumes. In this milieu Nitsche practiced design auteurship before it was given a name, and the body of work he produced is extraordinary even by today’s standards. After moving to Geneva in the early 1960s Nitsche Founded ENI, S.A. (Erik Nitsche International) to produce some of the finest illustrated history books ever designed. The first series, a twelve volume The New Illustrated Library of Science and Invention, with a multilingual print run of over two million copies, covered the histories of communication, transport, photography, architecture, astronomy, and the machine, and flight… The second ENI series on the History of Music was even more ambitious — twenty volumes — that covered an expansive range of musical experience from composition to instrumentation, from classical to jazz.

Our Dreams of Ourselves — An interview with Alan Moore in The Independent:

Moore was always ahead of the times with respect to female fans – unlike much of the comics industry, – and was the creator of the revolutionary The Ballad of Halo Jones, a sci-fi strip to run alongside Judge Dredd in the UK comic 2000AD. First appearing in 1984, Halo was one of the first non-superhero women to headline her own series, at a time when most girls’ comics had folded.

“There wasn’t a single – I mean, I was annoyed – there wasn’t a single girls’ comic in Britain,” Moore remembers. “I thought, well if you do more stories that are aimed at women, you’ll get more women reading the comics. It would seem fairly simple and straightforward, but there was a lot of resistance [to the idea].”

Insane, Not Crazy — Chip Kidd, book designing Bat-thusiast, reviews The Joker: A Visual History of the Clown Prince of Crime by Daniel Wallace:

Created by artist Jerry Robinson and writer Bill Finger in 1940 for “Batman” issue #1—though Batman himself first appeared in “Detective Comics” #27 the previous year—the Joker, with his garish purple suit, ashen skin and emerald hair, was imagined as the maniacally taunting yang to Batman’s unrelentingly stern yin. Thus was born perhaps the single most classic pair of adversaries in comics history. Really, does it get any better than the Dark Knight Detective and the Harlequin of Hate matching wits and ultimately duking it out? I don’t think so.

Step by Step — Umberto Eco talks about his new book The Prague Cemetery at The Paris Review:

For me, the process of writing usually takes six years. In those years I collect material, I write, I rewrite. I am in a sort of a private world of myself with my characters. I don’t know what will happen. I discover it step by step. And I become very sad when the novel is finished because there is no more pleasure, no more surprise.

And finally…

Melvyn Bragg on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for The Guardian:

It was the bestselling book in America in 1939. A film version starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford followed, itself a classic. Arthur Miller wrote of Steinbeck, “I can’t think of another American writer, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who so deeply penetrated the political life of the country.” And yet Steinbeck was also called “a liar”, “a communist” and “a Jew acting for Zionist-Communist interests”. The book was burned in the streets; it was banned in schools and libraries, with its explicit sexuality given as the excuse. It was virulently attacked in Congress, and Steinbeck’s subsequent success in Russia eroded his reputation from the cold war onwards. He bought himself a revolver for self-defence and had good reason to fear for his life. The book has sold about 14m copies and still sells steadily.

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Published November 16, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Book Sniffing — Six writers on their book collecting habits, including Gary Shteyngart:

I’m big on sniffing books. The old Soviet ones really have this strong smell, reminding me, for some reason, of tomato soup in a cheap Soviet cafeteria.

Fear of a Blank Canvas — Book designer Chip Kidd interviewed at Azure Magazine:

If I’m designing a book for myself, that’s a very different thing than if I’m designing a book for Murakami – he’s ultimately the boss. For 1Q84, what I’m really trying to do, as pretentious as it sounds, is to create a work of art that services a greater work of art. It’s him. It’s not about me. But at the same time, I want to make something great for him. If I’m designing something for myself, it can be liberating and potentially stifling at the same time. It’s the literary equivalent of being given a blank canvas. And I’m not a great blank canvas kind of guy. I want the canvas filled in, in terms of content, by Murakami, and then I can make it look like something.

See also: Book designers Lauren Duffy, Kimberly Glyder, Henry Sene Yee and David Drummond on the ins-outs of book design at The Book Deal.

The Incommunicability of Difference — David Bellos discusses translation and his new book Is That A Fish In Your Ear? on Talk of the Nation:

For translation to exist, you have to accept the fact that languages are all different and they don’t describe the world in quite the same way. You also have to accept that languages are all the same in that anything you can say in one language can be said in any other. And it seems to me [that the] tension between the incommunicability of difference and … the sharing of a common set of messages and meanings is … human. I mean, we all live in that state, that I am not like you. My experience is not directly commensurable with yours, and yet, for us to get on and to be human and to be in a society, we have to also make the assumption that in another dimension, we’re all the same. We have the same needs, the same fears, the same desires.”

And finally…

James Parker on George Smiley, John le Carré’s literary spy, and why he is the antithesis of James Bond at The Atlantic:

Bureaucratically dowdy, rarely spotted in the field, a dull fucker by both instinct and training, Smiley drops no one-liners, romances no tarot-card readers, roars no speedboats through the Bayou… When John le Carré dies, there will be no pseudo–le Carrés, rotating the clichés of Smileydom through their potboilers. Not only is le Carré more or less inimitable—less imitable, certainly, than Ian Fleming, whose style was essentially that of a school bully with a typewriter—but Smiley himself is too elusive a creature to be captured by any pen other than that of his creator.

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Published October 20, 2011

Chip Kidd on 1Q84

Associate art director Chip Kidd talks about designing the cover and interior artwork for Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84:

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Published October 5, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Comic Book Commodities — Cartoonist and illustrator Dave Gibbons, best known for his work on Watchmen with Alan Moore, interviewed at The Huffington Post:

[E]conomically comics are in a really difficult place because the monthly American comic books which are maybe 22 pages of story, now can cost $4, which is £3, and that is a lot of money for really such a small amount of entertainment when you think what you can get on the app store or you know the several hours of entertainment you can get at the movies or whatever for not dissimilar sums of money.

So, I think what happens nowadays is actually people ‘as they say,’ wait for the trade collection. But the way I can see it polarising even more is that you’ll then want is something that is more than just the reading experience, you’ll want something that is a beautiful object in it’s own right that has extras, that has maybe artist notes or writers’ notes, backup material, is really nicely bound, is beautifully printed, so you know I can see those two kind of commodities diverging even further in the future.

Gibbons discusses his contribution to Watchmen in the nicely bound, beautifully printed book Watching the Watchmen.

Let the Medium Do the Work — Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) on storytelling:

[I]t’s very important that what you do is specific to the medium in which you’re doing it, and that you utilise what is specific about that medium to do the work. And if you can’t think about why it should be done this way, then it doesn’t need to be done.

CRAZY – A wonderful interview with Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, in The Guardian:

“I’m totally crazy, I know that. I don’t say that to be a smartass, but I know that that’s the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that’s fine. I don’t do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can’t not do it.” You can’t be that crazy, I say: you managed to stay in one relationship for half a century. “Yes! And he was – well. He was a man who loved music and reading. He never smoked and he died of lung cancer, utterly ridiculous. I had that friendship for a long, long time.”

And finally…

One Step Ahead of the Scrap Dealers — The Globe and Mail obituary for typographer and book designer Glenn Goluska who died of lung cancer on Aug. 13 in Montreal at the age of 64:

In the mid-1970s, Glenn Goluska was usually one step ahead of the scrap dealers.

The typographer and his buddies would be on the prowl in Toronto for cast-aside printing equipment. Specifically, they were picking up letterpress, its type made from carved wood or cast metal that left unique marks when smashed on to paper. The technique had stopped being economical for large printing outfits and had been on a 20-year decline, replaced by offset printing, which used a photographic process. This left all kinds of wood and metal cuts, linotype and letterpress machines available for a song.

For Goluska and his friends, here were historic pieces of art-making tools and all they needed to do was gather a few guys and find a truck with reliable suspension.

R. I. P.

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Published September 28, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Peter Mendelsund chats with Chip Kidd about his office for the redesigned From The Desk Of:

I’ve always been a ‘nester’, I think most designers are. The difference now between my office and my bedroom as a child is the dearth of KISS posters (I mean NOW, not then).

(Frankly I’m surprised the universe didn’t collapse from all that awesomeness contained in a single room)

And on a related note, Mendelsund is one of many designers who work is included in AIGA’s recently announced 50 Books / 50 Covers list (although several covers appear to be attributed to their art directors rather than the designers themselves, no?).

Math-Lit — Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai and the forthcoming Lightning Rods, interviewed at BookForum:

Chance often plays a big part in fiction, but it is generally not chance as this is mathematically understood, which tends to be counter-intuitive. A while back I discovered Edward Tufte’s brilliant books on information design, The Visual Presentation of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and so on. I read Gerd Gigerenzer’s Reckoning with Risk, about why we have trouble calculating probabilities using percentages, even when it’s a matter of life and death (a doctor working out the likelihood that someone is genuinely HIV-positive, based on a positive test result); I read Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods on the history of risk; I read Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, on the way sabermetrics had transformed professional baseball. It seemed to me that one could use Tufte’s methods to incorporate this tremendously interesting subject into fiction.

The cover design for Lightning Rods is by Steven Attardo for Rodrigo Corral Design.

And finally…

The legendary George Lois talks about his covers for Esquire  with Gym Class Magazine. There’s no shortage ego, but I love this anecdote about playing a soft ball game against The New Yorker:

So I go over there with my glove and my sneakers, and I could not believe it. I looked at the team. The third baseman was Gay Talese. The second baseman was Gore Vidal. It was not a team of athletes. I said: ‘Oh my god, they’re all literary geeks.’ He said: ‘No, no, we’re going to have fun.’

Now I’m serious about playing softball or basketball. I don’t screw around, I play with great ballplayers, I’m a good athlete. I said: ‘Harold, this side is terrible.’ He said: ‘No no!’

We went over and played THE NEW YORKER, and I think we lost 18–3, and the only reason we got three runs is because I hit three homers. I don’t remember being there for any other reason.

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Published August 23, 2011

Just My Type Trailer

Here’s a simple but effective video for Just My Type by Simon Garfield:

The book is finally getting released — with a foreword by Chip Kidd no less — by Penguin US  next month.

(via Quipsologies)

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Published May 10, 2011

Chip Kidd at The Comic Archive

Last week I linked to a short video of Chip Kidd talking about growing up with comics. Now, The Comic Archive have posted a few more segments from that interview in which Chip discusses his book design and work in comics.

In this first clip, Chip talks about his decision to pursue graphic design in college and the influence of comic books on his work:

In this longer segment, he discusses coming to New York, being hired by Knopf as a cover designer, and returning to comics through DC Comics and Pantheon:

And this may just be for the fan-boys, but in this final clip Chip shows off his specially commissioned one-of-a-kind collections of original artwork:

#Envy

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Published May 5, 2011

Chip Kidd, Growing Up With Comics

Chip Kidd, designer, writer, and art director at Knopf, talks about his childhood love of comic books with The Comics Archive:

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Published April 28, 2011

Koji Suzuki | Vertical

After watching Lauren Panepinto’s how-to video yesterday and talking with designer Jacob Covey about op-art book covers, I was reminded of Chip Kidd’s amazing designs for the Vertical editions of Koji Suzuki’s Ring books:

Vertical are apparently releasing Edge by Koji Suzuki this fall with a cover by Peter Mendelsund that sticks with the visual theme of the series:

The design is from a few years ago according to Peter (it still looks fresh to me), but clearly I should have nagged him for a better quality image rather than relying on the internet!

Update: Thanks to Peter for sending me a higher-res cover image for Edge. Beauty.

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Published March 26, 2011

Something for the Weekend

“It Looks Pretty Cool” — Chip Kidd on his design for Haruki Murakami’s new novel 1Q84:

logistically the title is a book designer’s dream, because its unique four characters so easily adapt it to a very strong, iconic treatment.

F**ked — Author Dale Peck on founding  Mischief + Mayhem, a new publishing collective, in The Financial Times:

“The whole point of writing literature was that in exchange for not getting paid a lot of money, you could say whatever you wanted; now, you don’t get a lot of money and you don’t get to say what you want. All of which segues to why writing is f***ed.”

The Last of the Old-Style Hollywood Actresses — A Ballardian Primer to Elizabeth Taylor:

What did Taylor represent to Ballard? Less a sex symbol and more an emblem of the parallel landscape that celebrity culture in the 1960s and 70s inhabited, a virtual reality colonising the private lives of ‘ordinary’ people exposed, through mass communications and on a hitherto unprecedented scale, to a world as strange as an alien planet yet paradoxically erotic and near – a synthetic substitute for reality itself.

(images: cropped photograph of Elizabeth Taylor by Bert Stern via Dan Shepelavy (top). Cover of Crash by J.G. Ballard designed by David Wardle).

Too Much Information —The New York Times of the meaning and the use of the word “information”:

The use of the word “information” itself… seems to have exploded since its earliest recorded appearance in 1387. (“Fyve bookes com doun from heven for informacioun of mankynde.”) As Michael Proffitt, the managing editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, notes in an essay written for the recent relaunch of the O.E.D.’s digital edition, “information” is the 486th most frequently occurring word in Project Gutenberg’s searchable corpus of mostly pre-1900 literature. A 1967 survey of contemporary American English ranked it 346th. And the rise of digital technology seems only to have speeded its ascent. One recent survey of online usage lists “information” as the 22nd most common word.

And finally… It seems unlikely that you haven’t seen these already, but still…

New Vintage paperback designs for James M. Cain “conceived by Megan Wilson, executed by Evan Gaffney.” Stunning stuff.

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