Books, Design and Culture
At Vulture, Jonathan Galassi, the current president of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, reflects on Boris Kachka’s new book Hothouse, a history of the New York publishing house:
Comments closedFSG came into its own at a moment when postwar America was opening up and out—when “semi-outsiders,” in the words of critic Irving Howe, were “starting to break into the central spaces of American culture.” What made FSG significant, though, was its ability to catch a long series of literary waves. Straus and Giroux and a whole series of talented younger editors made stars out of Southerners (and Catholics) like Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy and Jews like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and the émigré Isaac Bashevis Singer. There were the poets of the Lowell-Bishop-Berryman generation; Susan Sontag, an entire typhoon on her own, who clued Straus in to great, obscure European writers; and the late-sixties Latin American “boom” (Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Neruda). There were the New Journalists (Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion) and New Yorker epigone John McPhee; the internationalist poets Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Joseph Brodsky; and great children’s writers like Maurice Sendak, Madeleine L’Engle, and Roald Dahl. All contributed to what Kachka calls “FSG culture,” which he describes as “high-minded and scrappy, aggressive and refined, quintessentially American but thoroughly international.”
WHAAM! — Comics historian Paul Gravett on Roy Lichtenstein’s appropriation from comics:
Lichtenstein’s… success, his getting away with turning supposedly anonymous ‘found’ comic art into high-priced paintings, continues to directly encourage others to do the same. But there is a difference—comics are no longer uncredited, trashy mass culture, and what worked as a lucrative schtick back in the Sixties art world is now largely drained and devoid of any shock value or irony… Five decades on… it is high time for the comics world and the art world to properly debate these issues, and to celebrate these hugely talented but still largely ignored visual storytellers.
(Pictured above: a page from ‘The Star Jockey’ drawn by Irv Novick, from All-American Men of War #89 February 1962)
See also: David Barsalou’s Deconstructing Lichtenstein project
(If Gravett underestimate’s Lichtenstein’s ingenuity in recontextualizing comic book panels, and his lasting influence on art AND comics, it is truly astonishing to see how poor Lichtenstein’s paintings are in direct comparison to the work he borrowed from.)
Blowing Shit Up — A long essay by Richard Nash on the business of literature at the VQR:
Selling a book, print or digital, turns out to be far from the only way to generate revenue from all the remarkable cultural activity that goes into the creation and dissemination of literature and ideas. Recall again all the schmoozing, learning, practice, hustling, reading upon reading upon reading that goes into the various editorial components of publishing; the pattern recognition; the storytelling that editors do, that sales reps do, that publicists do, that the bookstore staff does. Recall the average feted poet who makes more money at a weekend visiting-writer gig than her royalties are likely to earn her in an entire year. You begin to realize that the business of literature is the business of making culture, not just the business of manufacturing bound books. This, in turn, means that the increased difficulty of selling bound books in a traditional manner (and the lower price point in selling digital books) is not going to be a significant challenge over the long run, except to free the business of literature from the limitations imposed when one is producing things rather than ideas and stories. Book culture is not print fetishism; it is the swirl and gurgle of idea and style in the expression of stories and concepts—the conversation, polemic, narrative force that goes on within and between texts, within and between people as they write, revise, discover, and respond to those texts.
See Also: Book Publishers Scramble to Rewrite Their Future by Evan Hughes for Wired.
And finally…
The New Statesman has posted five classic book reviews from their archive, including V. S. Pritchett’s review of 1984 by George Orwell:
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book that goes through the reader like an east wind, cracking the skin, opening the sores; hope has died in Mr Orwell’s wintry mind, and only pain is known. I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down. The faults of Orwell as a writer – monotony, nagging, the lonely schoolboy shambling down the one dispiriting track – are transformed now he rises to a large subject. He is the most devastating pamphleteer alive because he is the plainest and most individual…
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The Many Lives of Donald Westlake — Michael Weinrab on the work of Donald Westlake, for Grantland:
The Outfit is 213 pages, which is actually somewhat long by the standards of the early Parker novels. There are 24 Parker titles in all, and most of the early ones are tight little symphonies of spare and rigid prose, split into four distinct movements; they somehow manage to adhere to a rough formula and still blow your hair back every time. Their tone is brutal and unsentimental, and their themes are Nietzschean to the extreme: People act, without adverbial accompaniment, and the whys and wherefores are utterly beside the point. The protagonist is a career criminal, a sociopathic utilitarian who despises small talk. When someone asks him if he had a good flight to his destination, he thinks, This wasn’t a sensible question. He is concerned entirely with the successful execution of crimes and with his own self-preservation amid this process. One memorable chapter ends with the line, “He buried him in the cellar in the hole the kid had dug himself.”
The Parker novels, written by Westlake under pseudonym Richard Stark, have been republished by the University of Chicago Press, with covers designed by David Drummond.
Simulations — Tim Maughan on Extreme Metaphors, a new collection of interviews with J.G. Ballard, at Tor.com:
You can perhaps argue that Ballard missed the big change that was to come just years after his death—the apparent crisis of global capitalism, the shift of industrial and financial production towards the east, and the tightening pressure on the suburban middle classes that this would result in. But the kicking back against these pressures, in the form of the online rebellion and well mannered protest of Anonymous and the Occupy movement, seem to fit perfectly into this description. Both are, in many ways, more of a simulation of a protest than an actual protest themselves—one involves doing little more than clicking a mouse, the other seemingly owing more to music festivals and camping than to hard-fought political resistance.
Let It Bleed — An interview with cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi at Hazlitt:
The parents were really up in arms about these bad books. Manga at that time was different than it is now. It was friendly manga, so little kids could read it too… On the page you have the same number of panels, the people move from left to right and they’re all the same size and it all looks the same on the page… There was no movement or anything like that. We took inspiration from movies, doing zoom shots or close-ups. Using the camera. We wanted to use these techniques in manga, really violent movement. We were trying to move the panels in a realistic kind of way, to make work without lies, true work.
Tatsumi, Eric Khoo’s 2011 film based on Tatsumi’s memoir A Drifting Life, is currently showing at the Lightbox in Toronto.
And finally…
The Names Change But… The conclusion to Mark Medley’s fascinating series on House of Anansi, ‘A Publisher’s Year’, at the National Post:
Comments closed“The truth about publishing is that publishing houses change their names and identities all the time. It’s the nature of this perilous trade. When I started in the business there was a Collins, and there was a Harper & Row. I can’t even remember when it became HarperCollins. There was Doubleday Canada, and all of its imprints, and there was a Random House, and all of its imprints…”
Publishers fail and new publishers emerge to take their place.
Sturm und Drang — Author Nick Harkaway (Angelmaker and the forthcoming The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World) on Amazon and the publishing industry for The Guardian:
The most thunderous argument in Amazon’s favour is that the market has spoken, and demands cheaper product. This one I find utterly bizarre. We know very well, in this post-crash age, that the market can be an idiot. The market wanted easy credit extended to all, low taxes and plenty of public spending. The end result was a financial catastrophe that has just plunged us into a double-dip recession and shows no sign of being played out. Sometimes, things cost more than we want. That is a truth we were encouraged to forget in the 90s, but it’s one we’re going to have to remember.
See also: Jason Epstein in the NYRB and Dennis Johnson’s on-going commentary on the Department of Justice’s legal shenanigans at MobyLives (archive).
Literature Needs More Than E-books — James Bridle for Wired Magazine:
What we are coming to realise is that no one thing can pick up where the book left off; instead it is everything, all of our networks, our services, our devices, the internet plus everything else, which will carry literature forward. Literature is unique among art forms in that it is enacted entirely in the minds of author and reader; a psychic dance. Literature is everything, and thus everything must be employed in its support. And publishers, so long accustomed to doing a couple of things well, are adrift in a world that needs them to do everything — or GTFO.
And finally…
No Sympathy for the Creative Class — A fascinating piece by Scott Timberg for Salon:
Creative types, we suspect, are supposed to struggle. Artists themselves often romanticize their fraught early years: Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” and the various versions of the busker’s tale “Once” show how powerful this can be. But these stories often stop before the reality that follows artistic inspiration begins: Smith was ultimately able to commit her life to music because of a network of clubs, music labels and publishers. And however romantic life on the edge seems when viewed from a distance, “Once’s” Guy can’t keep busking forever.
Yes, the Internet makes it possible to connect artists directly to fans and patrons. There are stories of fans funding the next album by a favorite musician — but those musicians, as well, acquired that audience in part through the now-melted creative-class infrastructure that boosted Smith.
(And on that cheery note, have a good weekend).
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Elegant Simplicity — A nice profile of book designer David Pearson at Spitalfields Life:
On the basis of “Penguin By Design,” David was given the job to design the covers for Penguin Great Ideas, an experimental series of low-budget books with two-colour covers. “I’m not an illustrator and I can’t take photographs, so I decided to do all the covers with type,” explained David, almost apologetically. Yet David’s famous landmark designs for these books, derived from his knowledge of the history of Penguin covers, were a model of elegant simplicity that stood out in bookshops and sold over three million copies. “I saw people picking them up and they didn’t want to put them down!” he confided to me, rolling his eyes in delight, “They were a phenomenon.” Then he placed a hand affectionately upon a stack of copies of this series for which he has now designed one hundred covers.
My interview with David is here.
Books Mattered — David L. Ulin on the late Barney Rosset for The LA Times:
For Rosset, the mission was simple: Books mattered, they could be dangerous, they could change your life. Writers were heroes, “cosmonauts of inner space,” to borrow a phrase from “Cain’s Book” author Alexander Trocchi, their function less to reassure than to destabilize, to challenge the assumptions by which society was made.
This could happen in all sorts of ways — Beckett’s unflinching absurdism (“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better”), Burroughs’ scabrous cynicism (“A functioning police state needs no police”), Miller’s sense of living at the end of history, when all the so-called verities had collapsed beneath their own sanctimonious lies.
See also: Barney Rosset obituary in The Guardian.
Sprawling Tentacles — Alexandra Manglis reviews Alan Moore: Storyteller by Gary Spencer Millidge for the Oxonian:
The work and the man have morphed together resulting in a giant Moore myth that fans and comic creators alike have difficulty surmounting, its tentacles sprawled out far beyond his small Northamptonshire home. The infamous Guy Fawkes mask, for one, created in Moore’s anarchist comic V for Vendetta, has been worn by protesters from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street, and Moore is indubitably proud of the anarchist symbol’s use in real civil unrest. Yet the symbol’s popularisation is largely due to the comic’s adaptation into a Hollywood blockbuster, from which Moore removed his name and refused to take royalties. Moore’s stories have become bigger than the man himself; the images he has authored have grown beyond him and often, as in the case of V for Vendetta, in spite of him.
See also: Paul Gravett’s review for The Independent; The Guardian celebrates 35 years of British comic 2000AD
And finally…
Geoff Dyer, author of Zona, interviewed at Bookforum:
Comments closedFailure is quite interesting, and it’s something I have a certain amount of experience with. I wasn’t a failure in the way lots of people are failures—I could always get published, that was pretty straightforward. Literary failure is funny because it’s not like you get this massive slap in the face and become a figure of ridicule. It’s more that you do this thing, you write this book, and then this big thing is poised to happen on publication. And nothing happens. It’s just a weird non-event. The literary Richter scale doesn’t register any kind of tremor. That was happening to me for a very long while, and then I managed to persuade myself that these serial failures were perhaps a kind of liberation in that it meant I was free from any kind of pressure from publishers. The stakes were so low that it didn’t really make any kind of difference to anybody that I went from writing a novel to writing a book about the First World War. So I’ve certainly known what it’s like for a book to simply, well, disappear.
Blown Covers — The New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly has a Tumblr (pictured above: “Eustace at a Stoplight—Right?,” by David Urban)
Spanking — Charles McGrath remembers the late Barney Rosset in the New York Times:
Mr. Rosset was far from a highbrow. Sometimes he signed up books without having read them. He determined to publish “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” for example, while riding in a cab and hearing on the radio that other publishers had turned it down. And he was proud of publishing a profitable line of Victorian spanking pornography. To a considerable extent the dirty books made the arty ones possible, and Mr. Rosset wasn’t the least abashed about it.
See also: WNYC has reposted two archive interviews with Rosset from 1995 and 2008, and John Gall has posted a collection of links to reminiscences about Rosset on his blog Spine Out.
Form and Fortune — A fascinating review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs by Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, in The New Republic which discusses Apple’s relation to the Bauhaus and Braun:
The design philosophy of Dieter Rams, Braun’s legendary designer, has shaped the feel and the look of Apple’s latest products more than any other body of ideas. Since joining Braun in 1955, Rams—who likes to describe his approach to design as “less, but better”—began collaborating with the faculty at the Ulm School of Design, which tried to revive the creative spirit of Bauhaus with a modicum of cybernetics and systems theory. Eventually Rams produced his own manifesto for what good design should accomplish. His “ten principles of good design” encouraged budding designers to embrace innovation and make products that were useful but environmentally friendly, thorough but simple, easy to understand but long-lasting, honest but unobtrusive. Rams wanted his products to be like English butlers: always available, but invisible and discreet.
See also: Maureen Tkacik’s on Steve Jobs and Isaacson’s biography at Reuters.
And lastly…
James Wood reviews Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels for The New Yorker:
Comments closedPatrick Melrose, the protagonist of what is now a quintet of novels devoted to the Melrose family, is the scion of a wealthy dynasty almost as monstrous as the dodgier Roman emperors; he has spent much of his adult life trying to kill himself with drugs and booze. St. Aubyn’s novels have an aristocratic atmosphere of tart horror, the hideousness of the material contained by a powerfully aphoristic, lucid prose style. In good and bad ways, his fiction offers a kind of deadly gossip, and feeds the reader’s curiosity like one of the mortal morsels offered up by Tacitus or Plutarch in their chatty histories.
Tracing History — Alice Rawsthorn on the beauty of printed books for the New York Times:
Some things seem to designed to do their jobs perfectly, and the old-fashioned book is one. What else could be quite as efficient at packaging so many thousands of words in a form, which is sufficiently sturdy to protect them, yet so small and light that it can be carried around to be read whenever its owner wishes? The pages, type, binding and jacket of a traditional printed book do all of the above, as well as giving its designer just enough scope to make the result look beautiful, witty or intriguing.
(pictured above: Blaise Cendrars’s 1919 book ‘‘La fin du monde, filmée par l’ange,’’ designed and illustrated by Fernand Léger.)
Down bpNichol Lane — Founder and publisher of Coach House Books Stan Bevington talks to The Varsity about the history of the storied indie press:
Coach House purchased a photo-offset lithography machine, which allowed images to be transferred photographically to aluminum printing plates. Oil-based ink adhered to the images on the plates, which were then used to print the pages of a book… In the 1960s, this was cutting-edge technology. According to Stan, offset lithography was a tremendous step forward in the publishing industry because it “drastically liberated” the process of creating printing plates. But the text of a book still had to be typeset by hand, which left publishers relatively restricted in other areas of design. As Stan thumbs through additional books that were printed using offset lithography, he laughs and points out that they are all set in the Helvetica typeface.
Captain Crunch — Alan Moore on DC Comics planned Watchmen prequels at Fast Company:
“There’s been a growing dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional publishing industry, in that you tend to have a lot of formerly reputable imprints now owned by big conglomerates… As a result, there’s a growing number of professional writers now going to small presses, self-publishing, or trying other kinds of [distribution] strategies.
“The same is true of music and cinema… It seems that every movie is a remake of something that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book. Now you’ve got theme park rides as the source material of movies. The only things left are breakfast cereal mascots.”
See also: Tom Spurgeon’s ‘21 Not Exactly Original Notes On More Watchmen, Written At A Slight Remove‘:
Comments closedWatchmen is something of a perfect Internet-era story, and as such serves as a reminder of how much we’re driven by and limited to the nature and form of the way news stories develop now. You couldn’t build a story like this in a laboratory. The… Watchmen story is about a product; people like products. It’s about the hype for a product, which in many ways and for many fans has become the best part of any arts-product experience. Because the work itself doesn’t exist yet, arguments can be made on its behalf positing an ideal outcome or a disastrous one — your choice.
I’m sorry — there won’t be a round-up of fascinating things from around the internet today. A lot of emails and late night with some of Canada’s most illustrious book designers is largely to blame. Take my advice, if a book designer offers to buy you a drink, the sensible thing is to say “no.” Pictured above are shots of Riga Black Balsam. The less you know about those the better. Trust me.
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A short interview with Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C, in The Guardian.
Heart of Darkness — William Deresiewicz on Harold Bloom and his new book The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life:
I started to develop the Heart of Darkness theory of the Yale English department. Conrad’s novel is about colonialism and racism and the shadowed reaches of the human heart, but it is also a dissection of bureaucracy. My first clue came when I realized that my chairman was a perfect double for the manager of the Central Station, that creepy functionary who has “no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even,” who “could keep the routine going—that’s all.” But what clinched it was the recognition of the role that Bloom played in the paradigm. Bloom was Mr. Kurtz… Bloom, like Kurtz, ignored the rules and was strong enough to impose his own. Bloom, like Kurtz, was the shadowy genius who had sequestered himself in his private domain and was managing to produce, by methods however “unsound,” more material than all his colleagues put together… Bloom, like Kurtz, was a legend, a rumor, a vaguely malevolent presence (or absence) to be spoken of in awed and envious tones. What was not to like?
Paying For It — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on paywalls and the transformation of the newspaper business:
The newspapers that will survive, and perhaps even thrive, in the years to come will be those that are able to offer the most distinctive products and to tailor those products to a variety of consumption modes, spanning payment methods and devices, in a way that maximizes revenues and optimizes readership. And because an online news site is not a perfect substitute for a printed paper for either readers or advertisers – I cancelled my paper subscription a couple of years ago but ended up resubscribing after realizing that I was missing something – print editions will likely remain a crucial element in the mix indefinitely.
Browsing or Browsers? — The Economist neatly summarizes the effects of digitization on publishing:
Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is the gradual disappearance of the shop window. Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins, points out that a film may be released with more than $100m of marketing behind it. Music singles often receive radio promotion. Publishers, on the other hand, rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to books that they might not have considered buying. As stores close, the industry loses much more than a retail outlet. Publishers are increasingly trying to push books through online social networks. But Mr Murray says he hasn’t seen anything that replicates the experience of browsing a bookstore.
And on a related note, The Toronto Review of Books, edited by former bookselling colleague Jessica Duffin Wolfe, launched this week.
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Designed by the brilliant Michael Salu, the cover for Diana Athill’s forthcoming collection of letters, Instead of a Book, features a stunning portrait of the author by acclaimed British photographer Rankin (co-founder of Dazed & Confused in case you were wondering).
To coincide with the release of the new book in October, Granta are also reissuing paperback editions of Athill’s books Stet, Yesterday Morning and Instead of a Letter with cover designs incorporating Rankin’s photographs.
I don’t think I have made any secret of my love of Stet, Athill’s book about her time as an editor at Andre Deutsch. But I have always been disappointed by the discouraging cover on the tatty copy on my bookshelf, and it makes me incredibly happy to finally see an edition that seems to capture something of Athill’s personality.
Athill’s writing is unflinching and it is remarkable to see that reflected in Rankin’s stark portraits. According to Michael, who art directed series and designed all the covers, “the idea was to not to shy away from age and experience, but to celebrate it and Diana’s distinct personality.” Certainly, it is hard not to be taken by the keenness of Athill’s eyes. One gets the sense she does not suffer fools gladly. There is something of a retired headmistress about her. But I love how in the photograph for Instead of a Letter, Rankin captures Athill’s thumb hooked under her necklace. The author doesn’t appear to be particularly aware that she’s doing it, but it is beautiful and poignant touch.
The type is set in Gill Sans. Of course.
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