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Tag: guy delisle

Published December 5, 2011

Raincoast Spring Books

I was out west for the Raincoast Books spring 2012 sales conference last week. Sadly I didn’t get to see much of Vancouver or catch up with half the people I meant to, but I did get to hear about a lot of great new books including one about building (and losing) an android Philip K. Dick. It’s non-fiction. Thanks Henry Holt!

Henry Holt also have a new novel by Herta Mueller, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2009, called The Hunger Angel, and the latest from John Banville’s alter-ego Benjamin Black, Vengeance.

Picador are publishing a collected edition of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose trilogy in January — the first time they’ve all been properly available in the US I believe — to coincide with the US edition of his new book At Last (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). They also have a collection of essays by Siri Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking.

While there was nothing on the list quite of the magnitude of this season’s long-awaited Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design, there are a few art and design titles that caught my eye. Princeton Architectural Press are publishing Woodcut, a book of beautiful prints by artist Bryan Nash Gill (you have surely have seen his work even if you don’t recognise the name immediately) and Up on the Roof, a collection of photographs by Alex MacLean of New York’s hidden rooftop spaces. They are also publishing a long overdue paperback edition of Michael Bierut’s Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design, and a paperback edition of the beautiful, if overlooked, Typography Sketchbooks by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico. Lawrence King are publishing a new book on the history of picture books, Children’s Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling by Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles,  and a new edition of The End of Print by David Carson.

On the comics side, Drawn & Quarterly are publishing Jerusalem: Chronicle from the Holy City, the latest travelogue from Guy Delisle who previous books include The Burma Chronicles, Pyongyang and Shenzhen. D+Q are also publishing a new edition of Chester Brown’s controversial, scatological and long out-of-print comic Ed The Happy Clown.

I’m also looking forward to finally seeing more of Baby’s in Black: Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart Sutcliffe, and The Beatles in Hamburg by Arne Bellstorf which is being published by First Second in April (I just wish they’d gone in a different direction with the typography on the cover — the German and UK edition’s  have lovely swooping hand-drawn lettering).

And lastly — because I am big nerd and recently finished his earlier book Batman Unmasked — I’m excited about Will Brooker’s Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman, which is being published by I. B. Tauris in July.

Now, back to the Toronto grindstone…

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Published March 23, 2009

Monday Miscellany, March 23rd, 2009

The Story Artist — Stand back and admire Cristiana Couceira’s cover for the New York Times Book Review (pictured above) illustrating Colm Toibin’s review of Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy Daugherty (St. Martin’s Press).  You can see more of Cristiana’s fabulous work at her blog Sete Dias.

ma collection de boîtes de conserves — Cartoonist Guy Delisle, author of Shenzhen, Pyongyang, and Burma Chronicles, displays his charming recycled pen-holders. Guy also has some great sketches of Jerusalem on his blog (an experience that is probably even better if your French is not rubbish like mine). (Via the D+Q blog and full disclosure etc: Raincoast Books distribute D+Q in Canada).

And speaking of D+Q,  John Wray’s much-praised novel Lowboy features a cover  by the very talented Adrian Tomine (pictured above). And über-critic James Wood reviews Lowboy in the latest New Yorker.

Paper Egg — Tobias Carroll has posted an interesting interview with Jonathan Messinger, co-publisher at  Featherproof Books:

[T]he line we’ve been delivering for a while now is that printed books will, eventually, go the way of vinyl. At some point, digital distribution will be the predominant method, but there will still be those who value and collect print, as people do records now (a fact that, it seems, has created a strong niche market for cool vinyl releases). But I’m not so sure that I completely buy that analogy, as fun as it is to repeat. Really, the debate seems pointless to me. What it always devolves to is one person clinging to what they’ve grown up with and accustomed to—the printed book, this classic, vaunted, untouchable commodity—and self-appointed visionaries who see digital distro as the obvious wave of the future, plowing down the fogies and fuddy-duddies.

If we de-politicize it, it becomes a much more open, interesting discussion. My feeling is that both media offer something that the other doesn’t. So why should one replace the other? … I’d rather just think about how best to use print creatively—what can it do that nothing else can, what are its limits and how do we test them?

Information revolution, c. 1455 — Murray Whyte looks at the “Gutenberg moment” in the Toronto Star:

as we appear finally to face the end, or partial end, of the Gutenberg era … it’s worth noting that sometimes, those things we view in hindsight as revolution are, in their own time, little more than a pebble in the pond, the resulting ripples needing generations, if not centuries, to be fully felt.

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