Books, Design and Culture
In Influencers, a short documentary Paul Rojanathara and Davis Johnson, New York creatives discuss pop culture trends and what makes a person creatively influential:
(via Kitsune Noir and others)
Comments closedThanks for the CBC Books blog for including The Casual Optimist in their list of 10 ‘Book Blogs We Appreciate’ earlier this week. It is always nice to be appreciated — I only hope I can live up to the billing… :-)
The Story of Eames Furniture — Written and designed by Marilyn Neuhart together with her husband John, who both worked with the Eames Office from the 1950’s until 1978, the year Charles Eames’s died. Published later this month by Gestalten, the book comes in two full-colour volumes with a slipcase.
The Future of the Future — William Gibson interviewed in The Atlantic:
I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F—it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well… I’m not going all Sex Pistols, shouting No Future!—I’m suggesting that we’re becoming more like Europeans, who have always retrofitted their ruins, who’ve always known that everyone lives in someone else’s future and someone else’s past.
Respect for the Users — Jay Rosen‘s inaugural lecture to incoming students at Sciences Po école du journalisme in Paris earlier this month:
The Web effortlessly records what people do with it. Therefore it is easy to measure user behavior: what people are interested in, what they are searching for, clicking on, turning to… right now. What should a smart journalists do with this “live” information?… [Y]ou should listen to demand, but also give people what they have no way to demand because they don’t know about it yet. In fact, there is a relationship between these things. The better you are at listening to demand, the more likely it is that the users will listen to you when you say to them: you may not think this is important or interesting, but trust me… it matters. Or: “this is good.” Ignoring what the users want is dumb in one way; editing by click rate is dumb in a different way. Respect for the users lies in between these two.
And finally…
Graphic designer James Patrick Gibson talks to Babelgum about his photoblog New Type York , an archive of images of typographic artifacts — signs, directions and building inscriptions — around New York City (via DesignRelated):
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Michael Cho‘s cover for the Best American Comics annual 2010 published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Fantastic.
Undefined — The Caustic Cover Critic interviews illustrator and designer Alice Smith:
After sketching ideas, I make compositions using inks and pens to bring collages together, the pen marks might have disappeared in the finished composition, but it’s the pen marks and the rough sketch that helps bring it together. I use old imagery for ethereal effect, playing with visual alchemy and nostalgia. And the quality of printing pre 1950s, photoengravre and proper litho is so much nicer than the pixel fuzz and dots of newer digital printing.
Alice’s portfolio is here.
Scraps of Paper — An interview with superstar designer Rodrigo Corral in Metropolis magazine:
[T]he parts of the process that are unique and special really come from the individual designer’s experience. I think about the people who might read this article, and assuming some will be design students or younger people just getting into book design, I have to say that in order to come up with ideas—which, aside from a solid understanding of typography and typographical context is the most important part of all of this—you have to have an understanding of what has come before and what is current. I’ve spent years in used bookstores and magazine shops looking, admiring, and collecting, and this is all a part of the “design process.” The things I have stored in my brain and all that is still out there to see and learn are all part of the process.
Bought and Discarded — Simon Akam explores the sidewalk booksellers of New York for More Intelligent Life:
What wasn’t clear was what it meant to have a big presence on secondhand stalls. Was it an honour for a book, or a slur on its author’s reputation? Which was more significant—the fact that so many copies had been bought by someone, or the fact that they had since been offloaded again? To add insult to injury, were the titles I encountered in droves lying on the stalls because today’s reading public chose not to pick them up, even at a much reduced price? I needed to find out whether the champions of my survey were much loved, or doubly scorned.
And finally…
The Road: Scenes From the Post-Print Apocalypse by Peter Kuper for the New York Times (via The Ephemerist).
Group Thinkery — Book-designing, tuba-playing Christopher Tobias has launched a new blog to discuss books, design, and publishing. Group Thinkery is also on Twitter.
I came across the stellar portfolio of High Design’s David High — which includes this rather brilliant cover for The Management Myth for W.W. Norton — earlier this week thanks to a tweet from the chaps at FaceOut Books. Go take a look.
Luck — In another one of those long, fascinating Agents and Editors Q&As from Poets and Writers that are always well worth your time, Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, looks back at his career and comments on the current state of the industry:
One of the really hard lessons was realizing how much of a crapshoot publishing is—how you can love something and do everything you can for it, and yet fail at connecting it to an audience. Maybe you misjudged it. Maybe it didn’t get the right breaks. One of the hardest things to come to grips with is how important the breaks are. There’s luck in publishing, just like in any human activity… That was one of the hardest lessons: how difficult it is to actually be effective… Writing is its own reward. It has to be. I really believe that. This is a part of publishing that’s really hard to come to grips with. But publishers can’t make culture happen the way they want it to happen… We can huff and puff and pay money and advertise and everything else, but in the end, if the readers don’t come, we can’t do anything about it.
The lovely-looking limited edition, hand-made Done Walking With My Regular Shoes by recent graduate Stina Johansson. The cover design is screen-printed onto canvas (via DesignWorkLife).
Andy designing — The New Directions blog looks at the book designs of Andy Warhol:
Andy Warhol worked for New Directions as a book designer off and on for almost 10 years. Our editor-in-chief recalls James Laughlin telling her an Andy Warhol anecdote:
“He was a very strange looking man. But all the secretaries loved him because he would sneak little origami creatures on their desks when they weren’t looking. One time as he was walking out of the office he looked bashfully over at a secretary goggling at him and said ‘I like you. You’re so hirsute.’ Her reply? A very soft and giggly ‘thank you.’”
Personalization — Steven Heller talks to Rick Smolan about The Obama Time Capsule, a book that can be customized by the reader before it is printed:
I wondered if there was a way to create a book that wove together all these amazing images with each individual book buyer’s own story, photos and even their children’s artwork, so that every single copy was unique. I intentionally didn’t want to do a trade book edition because part of the goal was to have no books in warehouses, no print run, no books printed that might have to be later pulped and destroyed, no books shipped over by container ship from China or Korea (where all the big coffee table books are printed). The idea was to do the book of the future 10 years ahead of its time.
In this particular instance the customization of the book sounds a little gimicky to me, but possibilities it opens up seem pretty endless…
And lastly… Not being very quick on the uptake (what, you noticed?) I just came across the winners of The Strand bookstore’s Eye on The Strand photography contest. The Grand Prize was awarded to Josh Robinson for ‘Strand Shadows’ (above) and the contest exhibition, which opened on July 15th, will run through August 26, 2009 at the Pratt Institute CCPS Gallery, located at 144 West 14th Street, New York. I’m also rather fond of Cary Conover’s ‘Upside Down’ which took second place:
New York Places and Pleasures — Cover design by Elaine Lustig and Jay Maisel from Kyle Katz’s amazing Flickr photostream (via Design Observer).
A Very Bad Man — Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, reviews the forthcoming Darwyn Cooke comic book adaptation of The Hunter by Richard Stark (AKA Donald Westlake) — which I can’t wait to get my hands on — for the Washington Post:
Cooke has a particular gift for the space-age designs and stripped-down chiaroscuro that were in vogue a half-century ago — he previously explored them in his “DC: The New Frontier” comics — and his loose, ragged slashes of black and cobalt blue evoke the ascendancy of Hugh Hefner so powerfully you can almost hear a walking jazz bass. At times, he seems to be demonstrating how few brushstrokes it can take to communicate a precise degree of amoral machismo. Parker’s a very bad man, but it’s hard to take your eyes off him.
More stuff about Darwyn Cooke and his Parker adaptation can be found at Almost Darwyn Cooke’s Blog (but not quite).
Buy Your Own Chains — The New Yorker’s Willing Davidson painfully accurate observation that low industry pay and unpaid internships skew what is published (via GalleyCat):
Tiny salaries in the low ranks of publishing are miserable for the young workers, but they’re probably worse for literature… It’s a truism of the industry that most of these jobs are held by people who can afford them—people with some parental support and no student loans. Often they’ve had unpaid internships, that most pernicious example of class privilege. Their superiors are the same people, ten years later. They—we!—are smart, cultured people with good intentions, but it’s easy to see how this narrow range could lead to a blinkered view of literature.
Which leads rather nicely to…
The Intern — Dark (and darkly funny) secrets from the lowest rung of this business we call publishing. See also Editorial Ass.
Gotham — I started with New York (and linked to The New Yorker somewhere in the middle), so I thought I’d wrap up with New York too. I came across The Mythic City: Photographs of New York by Samuel H. Gottscho, 1925-1940 a couple of weeks ago while looking for something completely different. It’s not new (it was published in 2005 to coincide with an exhibition at Museum of the City of New York), but the cover has stuck with me (something to do with the chunky cinematic type I think) and, by a happy coincidence, a copy of the book landed on my desk this week. It is beautiful. (Full disclosure: The Mythic City is published by Princeton Architectural Press who are distributed in Canada by the people who pay me).
Comments closedColin Robinson, former editor at Scribner (a division of Simon & Schuster) and previously at The New Press and Verso, has written an excellent diary piece for the London Review of Books on Publishing’s Demise.
It’s always interesting to read an experienced insider’s take on the state of the industry, and although it covers some very familiar ground, Robinson’s article is particularly comprehensive and thoughtful (and, given he was fired by Scribner in December 2008, dignified).
It is also interesting that Robinson notes — as Allan Kornblum of Coffee House Press did in his recent interview with Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading (mentioned yesterday) — that electronic communication has made “life easier for writers and harder for readers.” As more and more stuff is published fewer of us are actually reading. We’re becoming more concerned with being heard than with listening, with being read rather than reading:
Books have become detached from meaningful readerships. Writing itself is the victim in this shift. If anyone can publish, and the number of critical readers is diminishing, is it any wonder that non-writers – pop stars, chefs, sports personalities – are increasingly dominating the bestseller lists?
And yet, Robinson doesn’t think the book is doomed. Publishers just have to change the way they do business:
A system that requires the trucking of vast quantities of paper to bookshops and then back to publishers’ warehouses for pulping is environmentally and commercially unsustainable. An industry that spends all its money on bookseller discounts and very little on finding an audience is getting things the wrong way round.
According to Robinson, the opportunity is in curating the mass of material that is out there and finding niche audiences:
The roles of editor and publicist, people who can guide the potential reader through the cacophony of background noise to words they’ll want to read, will become ever more important.
Sounds about right.
Comments closedThere has been relentless torrent of grim publishing news coming out of New York the last few days.
It has, at times, been hard to keep up with it all, and I don’t know the people involved well enough or understand the machinations sufficiently to offer much in the way of trenchant analysis. I hope that a summary of ‘Black Wednesday’ and the rest of this week’s events — with appropriate links — will, at least, offer some kind of context.
The details are sketchy, but Houghton Mifflin Harcourt acknowledged that there would be further changes at the company, including job-cuts. According to Publishers Weekly, at least eight people have been let go including executive editor Ann Patty, senior editor Anjali Singh and legendary editor Drenka Willen. GalleyCat has spokesman Josef Blumenfeld’s full statement about the changes.
Personally I’m stunned that the recipient of the 2007 Maxwell E. Perkins Award Drenka Willen, the US editor of Günter Grass, José Saramago and Umberto Eco, has been let go by HMH. PW profiled Willen in 2002, and, after pointing out that she has edited four Nobel Prize winners, MobyLives asked, pertinently, “do the proprietors of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt really know what they’re doing?”
I think my favourite quote, however, came from an unnamed ‘publishing veteran’ who told GalleyCat:
“Those fuckers have destroyed two venerable publishing houses in less than a fucking year.”
Elsewhere things are not much better.
Earlier in the week, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson announced it would be laying off 54 employees, or about 10% of its workforce. CEO Michael Hyatt said in a statement on his corporate blog From Where I Sit :
This was the second round of reductions this year. Unfortunately, this one was no less painful. We did the first round after significantly cutting our SKU count. However, this second round was purely a result of the slowdown in the economy.
According to GalleyCat , Hyatt apparently first made the announcement by Twitter. Stay classy Michael, stay classy…
After Doubleday cut 16 jobs in October, the “long anticipated” restructuring of Random House was announced on Wednesday. Maud Newton offered some bleak analysis and reprinted the full memo from Random House CEO Markus Dohle. Sarah Weinman has questions. Kassia Krozser at BookSquare thinks it’s all irrelevant:
“Who really cares if Crown or Knopf or Ballantine or Bantam Dell survives? I’m serious. Who. Cares… Focusing on imprints is focusing on the wrong problem.
The hyperbole-prone New York Observer called it “The End of an Era”.
In addition to the upheaval at Random House, Simon & Schuster announced it was eliminating 35 positions on Wednesday. Publishers Weekly reported that the Rick Richter, the president of the company’s children’s book division, and Rubin Pfeffer, senior v-p and publisher of the children’s group, would also be leaving.
On Thursday, Penguin Group chairman and CEO John Makinson announced the company will not give pay raises to anyone earning more than $50,000 in the new year. PW quoted Makinson as saying: “I cannot of course guarantee that there will be no job losses in Penguin in 2009. In this financial climate that would be plain foolhardy.”
And, according to a recent wire story from the AP on this week’s events in publishing, pay raises at HarperCollins have been delayed until next July. Spokeswoman Erin Crum says that “no decisions had been made” on job cuts, whatever that means…
All in all, it’s been quite a week. Thursday’s New York Times had a thorough summary and postmortem, and Andrew Wheeler has been keeping a running tab of the changes on his blog if you want more details.
Do I see a silver lining? Well, my hope is that all the talented, smart people who got unceremously dumped this week will stay in publishing (but who could blame them if they don’t?) and take their brilliance and vast experience to smaller more flexible companies and deliver a resurgence of creativity in New York. That would be nice wouldn’t it?
UPDATE:
Ron Hogan has posted some that trenchant analysis that I was talking about over at GalleyCat.
Also, what are the implications of all this, if any, for Canadian publishers? Anyone…?
*Thanks to Pete for the best blog post title ever.
Comments closed“The news heard ‘round the publishing world” is how Sarah Weinman described the decision of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) — the US publisher of Philip Roth, Gunter Grass and José Saramago — to temporarily stop acquiring manuscripts.
Certainly the story has been ricocheting around the book blogs — and beyond — for the last week as everyone tried to figure out what the wider implications were.
GalleyCat, Sarah’s former stomping ground, quoted Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management :
“I think it’s smoke and mirrors,” she said of the announcement. “If they want something, they’re going to get it.” She pointed out that some HMH editors were known, even before yesterday’s freeze, for extremely judicious buying practices, and questioned how much less they could acquire (other than, of course, nothing)… “This is a whirlwind blown out of proportion to what it really is,” Reid continued, calling yesterday’s buzz a consequence of “the first huge economic downturn in the age of transparency.”
And, as the dust settled, HMH themselves tried to played things down.
According to The New York Times, Jeremy Dickens, president of Education Media (HMH’s owners), simply wanted HMH to be “extremely prudent about the way that we allocate our capital and where we make our investment decisions.” And HMH’s distinctly chipper-sounding spokesman Josef Rosenfeld described the new policy as “freeze-lite” to the Associated Press:
“A headline about a freeze is very appealing, but in reality all we’re doing is taking a good, hard look at everything that comes in, much the way this company is watching all expenses and expenditures… It’s just a higher degree of scrutiny.”
Back at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, Sarah cited literary agent Colleen Lindsay’s advice not to over-react (“publishers do this kind of thing all the time”), but sounded unconvinced:
“So no, we’re not in panic mode, not yet. But as long as… HMH’s parent company… continues to take a bath and the economy stays moribund (or worsens in the first quarter of ’09), the gloom feels rather warranted, even if it’s only a metaphorical sign of what may well come in other places.”
Personally, I was reserving judgment on the whole situation. But, I have to admit, Sarah was looking bloody prescient this afternoon when AP reported HMH senior vp and publisher Becky Saletin had resigned, and The New York Observer began speculation that “the C.E.O. of HMH’s parent company, a man named Barry O’Callaghan whose core business in K-12 textbooks is not generating enough money to offset his massive debt, will sell the trade division and its illustrious backlist.”
Yikes.
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The maverick publisher of Grove Press Barney Rosset is to receive a lifetime achievement award on November 19th, 2008, from the National Book Foundation in honor of his many contributions to American publishing, according to the New York Times:
In its heyday during the 1960s, Grove Press was famous for publishing books nobody else would touch. The Grove list included writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Che Guevara and Malcolm X, and the books, with their distinctive black-and-white covers, were reliably ahead of their time and often fascinated by sex.
Also the subject of a new documentary ‘Obscene’ about his life and work, Mr. Rosset said:
“All my life I followed the things that I liked — people, things, books — and when things were offered to me, I published them. I never did anything I really didn’t like. I had no set plan, but on the other hand we sometimes found ourselves on a trail. For example, out of Beckett came Pinter, and Pinter was responsible for Mamet. It was like a baseball team — Mamet to Pinter to Beckett… Should we have had more of a business plan?” he added. “Probably. But then the publishers that did have business plans didn’t do any better.”
UPDATE:
More on Barney Rosset and ‘Obscene’ at New York Magazine
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