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Published April 15, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

McGraw-Hill paperbacks designed by Rudolph De Harak — A nice Flickr set of vintage covers from Joe Kral, who apparently has an amazing book collection (via Words & Eggs).

Free Libraries Are Full of Books That No One Reads — Author Paul Theroux talks to The Atlantic about e-books (via The Second Pass):

I don’t think people will read more fiction than they have in the past… but something certainly is lost—the physicality of a book, how one makes a book one’s own by reading it (scribbling in it, dog-earing pages, spilling coffee on it) and living with it as an object… I can’t predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive—no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer’s life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.

Not Dead Yet — An interesting post at Personanondata on what the resilience of the CD format means for books:

Many believe the physical book will disappear within in the next ten years yet the example of the music CD suggests the future of the book may be more nuanced. The availability of electronic versions of trade content will approach 100% in less than ten years… Despite the availability however, electronic content is likely to represent only one of a number of ways consumers will engage with book content…  Rather than disappear, the lowly print book may retain a position of wide distribution… and become the focal point of a facilitated interaction with numerous content acquisition options for consumers.

The information on CD sales in the post comes from a recent report in The Economist, which also ran an interesting article about the future of copyright on the same day:

The lawmakers intended… to balance the incentive to create with the interest that society has in free access to knowledge and art… Over the past 50 years, however, that balance has shifted. Largely thanks to the entertainment industry’s lawyers and lobbyists, copyright’s scope and duration have vastly increased… They are now calling for even greater protection, and there have been efforts to introduce similar terms in Europe. Such arguments should be resisted: it is time to tip the balance back.

The New York Times obituary for publishing executive and copywriter Nina Bourne:

The campaign she created for “Catch-22” is now regarded as a classic. Ms. Bourne was the most passionate in-house champion of the book, a darkly comic tale of World War II by a first-time novelist. Pleading for an increase in the initial print run, she turned to her colleagues during a production meeting, tears in her eyes, and asked, “If I can’t get this, why am I here?”

And finally…

Architecture Under Construction — a beautiful set of photographs by Stanley Greenberg from a new book published by the University of Chicago Press. Pictured: Untitled, Toronto, Ontario, 2005 — Royal Ontario Museum, Studio Daniel Libeskind (via PD Smith).

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Published October 15, 2009

Missed Things: Thursday

Covers for The Invincible Iron Man No. 20 and 21 by Salvador Larroca and Frank D’Armata, with design by Rian Hughes (seen at the website of the author Matt Fraction). Is it just me, or do these have a whiff of Marber’s Penguin Crime series about them? Or is it more like Olly Moss?

Grey Overcoat Music —  3:AM Magazine‘s Lee Rourke talks to photographer Kevin Cummins about his new book Manchester: Looking for the Light through the Pouring Rain (published by Faber & Faber), which documents 30 years of the Manchester’s music scene. 

The Guardian also has a slide show of  photographs by Cummins (above: Ian Curtis, 1979).

And if you’re interested in Factory Records and the Manchester music scene you might also be interested in The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club by New Order bassist Peter Hook (published by Simon & Schuster) also reviewed in The Guardian.

The Lost Pleasure of Browsing — Charles Rosen for the New York Review Blog:

I realize that mail order shopping has been going on for a long time, but have always thought that this destroys one of the pleasures of civilized life. I do not understand how one can buy clothes without trying them on, and as for books, the individual book should seduce and inspire you to buy it.

Spelling “Theatre” the British Way — Andy Ross talks to New Yorker page OK’er Mary Norris about copy editing “America’s most prestigious literary magazine” at The Red Room:

The main thing here is to respect the writer. The writers don’t have to do everything we want them to—we make suggestions. The ideal would be to give an editor a proof and have all your suggestions meet with approval. Sometimes you notice that your suggestions have not been taken, so if something bothers you, you try again. Sometimes you wear them down, sometimes you cave.

I have been on both sides of the process, as a writer and as a query proofreader. Being edited sometimes felt like having my bones reset on a torture rack. I don’t ever want to do that to a writer, but I probably have from time to time.

And bless The New Yorker for using double consonants before suffixes — “traveled” is barbaric.

And finally…

Illusive: Contemporary Illustration Part 3 published by Gestalten looks rather fine.

http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/212201723/the-lost-pleasure-of-browsing
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Published July 24, 2009

Something for the Weekend, July 24th, 2009

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:

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Published April 10, 2009

Something for the Weekend

The Alcuin Society announced the 2008 Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada this week. Utopia/Dystopia by Geoffrey James, designed by George Vaitkunas, published by Douglas & McIntyre, (pictured above) won first prize in the pictorial category. A full list of the winners is available here (PDF).

The Hidden Revolution — Inside Higher Ed discusses an article (sadly not available online) by Sandy Thatcher, director of the Penn State University Press, about digital publishing at university presses:

Thatcher’s argument, in brief, is that the peculiar challenges faced by university presses have given them an incentive to use digital resources in ways that put them somewhat ahead of their peers in the world of trade or mass-market publishing. Given the small market for most scholarly titles, academic publishers were in a unique position to benefit from short-run digital publishing (SRDP) and print-on-demand (POD) technologies.

Ten Grids That Changed the World — Swiss Legacy reviews Hannah B Higgins’ The Grid Book:

Charting the evolution of each grid, from the Paleolithic brick of ancient Mesopotamia through the virtual connections of the Internet, Higgins demonstrates that once a grid is invented, it may bend, crumble, or shatter, but its organizing principle never disappears.

Also: The Grid Book reviewed in The Guardian.

The Need for Balance — Novelist Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware on fatuous articles about self-publishing:

For most writers… the path of self-publishing offers substantial downsides and pitfalls… and successes… remain few and far between. These hard facts are way less sexy than the vision of a brave new technological world that makes it possible for (a few) authors to bypass the traditional route to success–but they are no less real. In my opinion, journalists who write about this issue have a responsibility to cover both sides.

Taking the Internet and Printing it Out — Ben Terrett (Noisy Decent Graphics and Really Interesting Group) talks about publishing Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet — a newspaper collecting some of the best blog posts of 2008 — with Nora Young on CBC Radio’s Spark.

This week’s Spark also has a neat interview with YouTube remix genius Kutiman. If you haven’t seen/heard Kutiman’s Thru You music project, check  out The Mother of All Funk Chords.

“God Damn That’s A Good Looking Blue” — Winston Eggleston talks about his father, the photographer William Eggleston (whose work was recently used for the cover NYTBR):

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Published September 30, 2008

Mickey Smith – Volume

Volume by artist Mickey Smith is a lovely photographic tribute to bound periodicals and professional journals in public and private libraries:

The irony and graphic quality of repeating titles fascinate and draw, no matter how mundane, from known to obscure, from Vogue to Blood. I focus on simple, provocative titles that transcend the spines on which they appear.


(Thanks Siobhan!)

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