Books, Design and Culture
Following on from their horror classics series selected by Guillermo Del Toro, Penguin US is publishing six hardcover science fiction and fantasy classics this fall with introductions from Neil Gaiman, and (more importantly!) brilliant typographic covers by Brooklyn-based Spanish designer Alex Trochut. Available in October, the finished covers will be foil on uncoated paper over board.
Comic Shelves by Oscar Nunez for Fusca Design (via The Ephemerist)
Goodnight Mechanical Dinosaur — Neil Gaiman on Batman in Wired (via LinkMachineGo):
[T]he great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in. That’s just Sturgeon’s Law: “90 percent of everything is crap.” Can you imagine how many thousands, or millions, of words have been written on Batman? Try to read them and you’re looking at 100,000 pages, perhaps a million, and you can assume that 90 percent of it is crap. Yet the 10 percent, and even better the 1 percent of that 10 perfect, is absolutely glorious. That pays for everything.
Tea and Cake — Louise Tucker chats to colleague Scott Pack about The Friday Project on HarperCollins’ 5th Estate blog:
It is still the only imprint to specialise in taking great web content and making books from it. That gives us a much wider brief than most people think…
Our future plans are very exciting. Our author deals will now all be profit-share arrangements with us splitting the profits of the books 50/50 with the authors. We are soon to announce some bold eBook initiatives and there is more to come.
Figuring it Out — Type legend Erik Spiekermann, co-author of Stop Stealing Sheep, on the basics of typography. Not new, but still a great primer/reminder.
Will it sell in Moosejaw? — Book designers Bill Douglas (The Bang), Ingrid Paulson, (Ingrid Paulson Design), Angel Guerra (Archetype Design), Terri Nimmo, (Random House), and Kelly Hill, (Random House), discuss their craft in The National Post (Ingrid Paulson’s cover design for Kate Ausptiz’s The War Memoir of HRH Wallis Duchess of Windsor pictured above).
Wrapper’s Delight — A librarian at the Bodleian Library has found the earliest-known book dust jacket in an archive of book-trade ephemera:
Comments closedUnlike today’s dust jackets, wrappers of the early 19th century were used to enfold the book completely, like a parcel. Traces of sealing wax where the paper was secured can still be seen on the Bodleian’s discovery, along with pointed creases at the edges where the paper had been folded, showing the shape of the book it had enclosed.