Books, Design and Culture
The cover of last weekend’s New York Times Book Review featured a lovely Klaus Kremmerz‘s illustration for Playworld by Adam Scott (the cover of which, designed by Oliver Munday, was in last month’s round-up). I like how the building looks like a row of books on a shelf.
Comments closedI enjoyed Joshua Hunt’s recent New York Times article on the Criterion Collection:
Always in awe of auteurs but never in their thrall, Criterion producers have never been afraid to look beyond the biggest and most marketable names. When Criterion released “Peeping Tom,” a ’60s psychosexual thriller by the English director Michael Powell, the company chose not to ask Scorsese to record the audio commentary, though he would have been the obvious candidate, having done them for other Criterion editions of Powell films. The job instead went to a feminist scholar, Laura Mulvey, the author of the influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which brought forward the concept of “the male gaze.” Over the years, such decisions added up to an editorial voice that became influential, even authoritative, transforming a mere distributor of films into a creator of film culture.
There are also some nice details about the look of the collection:
Criterion’s distinctive visual language began to emerge in the early ’90s when [Rebekah] Audic, the former head of design, started building up its art staff with an aim “to really show the power of these films through the cover designs,” she told me. To do that it was sometimes necessary to go through every frame of film in search of the perfect image. Other times, images alone were not enough. “For the cover of ‘RoboCop,’ we had an actual aluminum-cast letterpress plate made and then photographed the plate with a 4-by-5 camera,” Audic says. It took days, she told me, but “using a physical piece of metal gave it a feeling of aesthetic truth.”
I don’t know if the Criterion Designs book, written and edited by Criterion art director Eric Skillman, is still available. It must be 10 years old now (dies) — I didn’t see it on the Criterion website — but there’s a nice piece about it on AIGA’s Eye on Design blog from around the time it came out. There is also a Criterion Designs blog, but it hasn’t been updated for a little while (am I imagining that Eric Skillman had a blog himself once upon a time?).
Oh and as an aside, the illustration for the NYT article is by Ben Denzer, who also designs book covers, and is the creator of Ice Cream Books should you ever need to pair great literature with frozen desserts (and who doesn’t?).
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Tom Gauld for the New York Times.
Tom’s new book, coincidentally called Revenge of the Librarians, is out now.
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The New York Times takes a look at how books are made, following Moon Witch, Spider King, the second novel in the Dark Star trilogy by Marlon James, through its printing process:
The book jacket was manufactured first. The cover of “Moon Witch, Spider King,” printed at Coral Graphics Services in Hicksville, N.Y., was unusually complicated, with a vivid mix of bright colors. James, who used to be a graphic designer, joked that his previous profession — and accompanying opinions — made him “the worst type of person” to consult on the cover.
Most covers are printed using black, cyan, magenta and yellow ink, but two additional colors were used to print this one: Day-Glo green and a special blue. The machine above is loaded with 8,000 sheets of paper at a time, which are then fed through the press. Each section of the machine contains a separate tank of ink, one for each color.
There are some lovely behind the scenes images if that is your kind of thing.
Tom Gauld has drawn a new cartoon for the New York Times Books section.
This is probably my favourite panel…
The New York Times interviews cartoonist Tom Gauld:
An inspiration for my drawing is my dad, who was an architect. As a kid, there was always paper around. I’d go and visit him in his office and see him drawing on the drawing board with a ruler and a pen. I think my cartooning is kind of like, I saw him drawing all day and thought, “That looks lovely,” and then I saw him go into a building site and arguing with a builder, and I thought, “That looks awful.” I basically wanted to find a job where I could do the drawing without having to shout at anybody.
Tom’s new book Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, which collects his cartoons for New Scientist magazine is available now.
I’ve been in a bit of reading slump of late so I can relate to this recent cartoon by Grant Snider for the New York Times Books Review (although, thankfully, I’ve not been banned from the library!).
Grant has a couple of new books coming out that are available for pre-order. What Color is Night? will be published by Chronicle Kids in November, and I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf will be published by Abrams in April 2020.
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