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Published August 18, 2012

Something for the Weekend

The brilliant Jon Gray and Jamie Keenan reveal the 20 irrefutable theories of book cover design. All of them are great.

Also at The Guardian: Ahdaf Soueif, author most recently of Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, on fiction and the revolution in Egypt:

Attempts at fiction right now would be too simple. The immediate truth is too glaring to allow a more subtle truth to take form. For reality has to take time to be processed, to transform into fiction. So it’s no use a story presenting itself, tempting, asking to be written, because another story will – in the next minute – come roaring over it, making the same demand. And you, the novelist, can’t grab one of them and run away and lock yourself up with it and surrender to it and wait and work for the transformation to happen – because you, the citizen, need to be present, there, on the ground, marching, supporting, talking, instigating, articulating.

The Last Book Sale — A charming piece for the NYRB by Larry McMurty, book dealer and author of The Last Picture Show, on an auction of his books in Archer City:

Everything sold but the fiction. Everyone who deals in fiction has plenty, and more is spilling onto the market from the sale of the Serendipity Bookshop stock now being dispersed on the West Coast. Many people asked me if I was sad to see so many books go. I wasn’t—mainly I was irritated to discover that I still had 30,000 novels to sell.

And finally…

 Put A Bird On It — The New York Times on the city’s boutique art bookstores:

perhaps because the physical book is coming to seem more like an object than ever before, the current landscape of shops blurs the line between bookstore and gallery in rollicking, unpredictable fashion. And because the shops are not nearly as tethered to high-end economics as art galleries, the mélange of stuff that results, some for sale and some not, can be strange and wonderful, like highly personalized cross sections cut from the culture at large.

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Published July 4, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

City Air Sets You Free — Mark Lamster interviews P.D. Smith about his new book City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, for Design Observer:

It was never my intention to write an architectural history. Cities are much more than the sum of their architecture or infrastructure. A city is made great by its people. Nevertheless, you cannot ignore the structures and spaces of a city. Winston Churchill once famously said: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Our urban environments undoubtedly shape us as people. That’s why between each of the eight sections in the book there are essays on more concrete features of the urban landscape, such as the Central Station, the City Wall, the Skyscraper or even the Ruins. But I hope that even here I don’t lose sight of the people who use these architectural spaces. After all, they are the life-blood of the city.

Pop Detritus — Peter Paphides reviews When Ziggy Played Guitar by Dylan Jones, for The Observer:

For many critics, Ziggy was the last desperate act of a craven opportunist. A New Yorker writer flown to see the Ziggy shows fretted that “Bowie doesn’t seem quite real”. But, as long as music journalism has existed, performers – be it Bowie in 1972 or Lana Del Rey in 2012 – have been docked points for their apparent lack of authenticity.

And, besides, it was those very notions of authenticity with which Bowie was playing when he created Ziggy. After several hapless reinventions, the only hit he had to show for his efforts was Space Oddity, but, as Jones points out, Ziggy Stardust was the result of a decade spent sifting through pop cultural detritus and working out which bits he could use to turn him into a pop star.

Don’t Believe the Type — Estimable Jon Gray on the recently revealed cover design for J.K. Rowling’s new novel:

JD Salinger famously had a clause written into his contract stating that no imagery could appear on his covers. Günter Grass will only allow his own drawings. The classic orange Penguins, the poetry covers of Faber: they tell us nothing other than this is a book of note, a book of importance. JK Rowling’s name is the important piece of information, the quality assurance mark, and it is stated very simply and boldly in the brightest and clearest way possible.

(Needless to say, Jon’s thoughts are more interesting that the cover itself).

Material World — An interview with mighty Coralie Bickford-Smith:

I always start by asking myself ‘what is the most effective set of book covers I can produce using just standard materials which are simple but incredibly effective to be within the usual budget constraints?’ To marry design with materials in the most considered and best way possible. So in a way it always starts with the materials so I can make my design suit that method of printing. With the cloth classics its was all about creating a book that would be loved and cherished and not throw away. The materials were the starting point. The foiling was a real struggle at first, the detail of the design cant be too intricate. So the patterns were all designed with this in mind so that the printers could reproduce the design easily. Every material has its limits and its all about getting to grips with those limits to produce an end product that looks effortless and deceptively simple.

My interview with Coralie is here.

And finally…

The Long History of the Espresso Machine…

In the 19th century, coffee was a huge business in Europe with cafes flourishing across the continent. But coffee brewing was a slow process and, as is still the case today, customers often had to wait for their brew. Seeing an opportunity, inventors across Europe began to explore ways of using steam machines to reduce brewing time – this was, after all, the age of steam. Though there were surely innumerable patents and prototypes, the invention of the machine and the method that would lead to espresso is usually attributed to Angelo Moriondo of Turin, Italy, who was granted a patent in 1884 for “new steam machinery for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverage.”

Great stuff… (see also: The Once and Future Coffeehouses of Vienna)

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Published December 8, 2011

My Favourite Covers of 2010

At the end of last year, Joseph Sullivan, curator of the late lamented The Book Design Review, asked me to write about my favourite covers of 2010. I’d always stayed away from such posts in the past because it was Joseph’s thing (his 2009 list is here). But since it was Joe who was doing the asking and The BDR was on “indefinite hiatus,” how could I not?

For various reasons, the list I compiled didn’t get used in the end, and it has sat in my drafts folder for about year now. I now have a list of my favourite covers of 2011, but before I post it I thought I would share that original list from 2010, if only for a bit of context.

I’ve made a few minor alterations to the list I sent to Joe — mostly to better accommodate the series designs and to fully utilise 12 months of regret and hindsight — but it is more or less intact, in spirit at least.

I’ve included the short introduction I wrote for the original piece to explain my process (or lack thereof…).

(Hindsight = 20/20: Apparently I like negative space. A LOT).

The Top 10 Book Covers of 2010

Selecting an annual top 10 of anything — film, music, books — is fraught with difficulty. Not only do you have to sift through all things you have seen, heard, and read over the course of a year (assuming you can remember them all), you must somehow take into account all the things you meant to get to and didn’t (where does one even start?). Worse, you are haunted by the awful, inevitable realization that there were any number of incredible things so outside your usual cultural range that they didn’t even register on your consciousness — the “unknown unknowns,” to borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s immortal phrase. Fate usually decides that you will discover at least one previously unknown work of brilliance exactly 24-hours after you publicly declare your favourites…

Then, having grappled with (ignored) all those thorny issues (and plunged on regardless), there is further problem of what actually constitutes good (let alone “great”) book cover design. Part science, part art (part pleasing interested parties), good book cover design is slippery and alchemical. How does one judge? Using what criteria? Ask 10 designers and you will surely get 10 differently nuanced answers.

I have not read all the books on this list, so I cannot claim authority on appropriateness of every cover to its subject (surely an significant consideration, and yet who would want to limit their list only to the books they had read?), so my criteria, such as they were, included the quality of the overall design — the composition, image selection and typography — as well as originality, swagger and the indefinable  je ne sais quoi essential in my opinion to really great covers.

And with that complete abdication from any claim to comprehensiveness or authority, I introduce my picks for the top 10 book covers of the last year with apologies to all the designers — particularly outside of North America and the UK — whose amazing work I have missed, forgotten, or otherwise neglected.

The covers are presented in alphabetically by title.

Continue readingMy Favourite Covers of 2010
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Published September 14, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Creative Review takes  a look at the cover designs for the books shortlisted for the Booker Prize, including this beauty by the mighty Jon Gray for Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch.

Let’s Get Critical — Long-form cultural criticism, essays and reviews, curated by architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange.

Never Fashionable, Always in Style — Costume designer Jacqueline Durran on tailored suits worn by the spies in the film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, for The Guardian:

“I thought that lots of these middle-aged men had bought suits 10 or 15 years ago and stuck with them,” she says. “I would look at a character and try to work out where they had bought their suit.”

She decided that everything in the film could have been bought from shops within half a mile of Piccadilly in London: “Things from Savile Row, Jermyn Street, Fortnum & Mason, Burlington Arcade – one of those upper-middle-class shops that are never fashionable but always do a certain kind of clothing.”

(Related: The real-life spies of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)

Also in The Guardian… Michael Prodger reviews Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life by Susie Harries:

Whereas art history in Germany was a creditable discipline of long standing, in England it was a new subject – class-ridden, based on connoisseurship and, he thought, “at its worst, an activity a bit like stamp collecting”. It was this fustian world that Pevsner and other émigrés such as Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Wittkower and Edgar Wind were to transform.

Pevsner had a hard time fitting in, not least because he was a modernist, something the British found temperamentally uncongenial. For Pevsner, though, it represented an antidote to art for art’s sake and he saw it as an appropriate expression of the spirit of the age. Art, he believed, should be functional and of service, and architecture was the most important of the arts because it was the most closely connected with human life.

And finally…

Pathos and Pantomime — Peter Ackroyd choose five books about London:

London has always had the reputation of being a city of contrast, where pathos and pantomime meet. That is true in the work of Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, for example. And it is certainly true in the work of [William] Blake. So you can see patterns of the London imagination at work. It is a world of theatre. The grand theatre of the human spirit which London most readily represents, and there is scenic detail and movement and passion and the action of crowds. It is quite different from other cities.

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Published September 10, 2010

Something for the Weekend

A series of book cover design concepts for The Infamous Press by Norwegian graphic designer Morten Iveland (via IS050).

Paid by the Joke — The enduring appeal of Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar in The Guardian:

Billy Liar’s longevity is not an example of a tale that is told and told again with a dulling faithfulness; rather, the long life of Billy Liar is a story of reincarnation, of each new generation seizing upon the tale afresh and making the story its own. Its influence may be felt in half a century of creative endeavour, in drama and literature and film, and, perhaps most keenly, in popular music: referenced, for instance, in the video for the Oasis single The Importance of Being Idle, and in a song by the Decemberists, and popping up, too, in many of Morrissey’s lyrics, including the Smiths’ 1984 hit William, It Was Really Nothing.

And if anyone at Penguin is reading, please, please reissue Billy Liar with the Tony Meeuwissen Woodbine cover from the 1970’s (come on, you know you want to):

(image via David The Designer)

If Covers Could Talk — A nice satirical book cover blog, kind of like Unhappy Hipsters for books.

And finally…

W. W. Norton, who have done great job with their Flickr — particularly their book design archive where the above stunner by Gray318 comes from — now have a Tumblr as well. The latest post, at the time of writing, is an animated scene from Stitches, the graphic memoir by David Small. Nice work.

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