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Tag: Publishing

Published July 6, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

60 Years of Innovation — The estimable John Self on publisher Peter Owen for The Guardian:

It cannot simply be good luck that leads one man to publish such an embarrassingly long list of riches. Owen is clear that both “literary acumen and a business mind” are essential. He has survived where other publishing houses forging a similar path, such as those of Marion Boyars and John Calder, have been closed or sold, and had their lists filleted by larger houses; if you are just “an editor buying books you like, with no idea how to run a business,” Owen says, “you don’t stand a chance.” For him, a distinctive look helped: bold (and presumably inexpensive) two-colour covers by Keith Cunningham may have lacked the cool of Jan Tschichold’s Penguin templates, but gave the list a uniform feel. The odd commercial success helped more, with titles which caught the public mood such as Siddhartha and The Man Who Planted Trees. Owen may not always have liked his authors (Salvador Dali was “a creep [but] not as mad as you’d think. When you mentioned money, he suddenly became very sane”), but it’s hard to question his commitment to new and avant-garde writing.

Goodbye To All That — The Economist glumly ponders the fate of Borders and independent bookstores:

The problem, however, is that no one seems willing to buy full-price books anymore. Campaigns to get people to buy books from their local bookstores—such as “Save Bookstores Day” on June 25th—miss the point. While there is demand for real bricks-and-mortar places to gather, drink coffee and read new books, such places can’t exist if the market can’t accommodate them… [T]he market is squeezing out a meaningful public space. It will be interesting to see what fills the void these bookstores leave behind.

“Interesting” is probably not the adjective I would have used personally…

Dead Cool — Comics critic Paul Gravett talks about his new book 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die with Bleeding Cool:

Initially, the American publishers tried to insist that every one of 1001 Comics must be available in English. But I had to insist that this would exclude loads of absolute masterpieces, and it wouldn’t make the book work in the other languages it is going to appear in, such as French or German. So somewhere around 12 per cent or so of the 1001 are not available in English, at least not yet. I seriously hope that exposure in 1001 will alert publishers and motivate them to translate them.

And finally…

Naomi Yang, designer, visual artist, publisher and founding member of the band Galaxie 500, talks with Print Magazine:

A book has always been an object! That is what can be so wonderful about them and so different than a digital book—or even a print-on-demand book. A book is an entire world: you see the cover, you pick it up, you feel the material of the cover, you turn it over, you read the back—and then you open it! You get the progression of the half-title, the title page, the table of contents and then that first page of text, that first line. And there are so many small things, the page numbers, the running heads, the proportions of the margins—the same elements in each book—but how will you do it this time?

 

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Published May 3, 2011

Flip It Back

The always dependable Fresh Signals alerted me to this French video for a new horizontal book format:

This is apparently the “flipback” format that had The Guardian so hot under the collar a few weeks ago. Please feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment if you have more details about it.

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Published April 15, 2011

Making The Trees of Codes

Here’s a short video showing the complex production of Jonathan Safran Foer’s innovative die-cut novel Tree of Codes, published by Visual Editions and printed by Die Keure in Belgium:

(via Creative Review)

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Published April 13, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Tick, Tick, Tick… — A lovely essay by Zadie Smith about Christian Marclay’s art film The Clock — a 24-hour montage of film and television clips about time — for the NYRB:

Marclay manages to deliver connections at once so lovely and so unlikely that you can’t really see how they were managed: you have to chalk it up to blessed serendipity. Guns in one film meet guns in another, and kisses, kisses; drivers in color wave through drivers in black-and-white so they might overtake them.

And still The Clock keeps perfect time. And speaks of time. By mixing the sound so artfully across visual boundaries (Marclay’s previous work is primarily in sound), The Clock endows each clip with something like perdurance, extending it in time, like a four-dimensional object. As far as the philosophy of time goes, Marclay’s with Heraclitus rather than Parmenides: the present reaches into the future, the past decays in the present. It’s all about the sound. The more frequently you visit The Clock the more tempted you are to watch it with your eyes closed… Nostalgia is continually aroused and teased; you miss clips the moment they’re gone, and cling to the aural afterglow of what has passed even as you focus on what is coming, what keeps coming.

The Real Story — An interesting and passionate post by the publishers of Two Ravens Press about the whys and wherefores of being a small press and the economic realities they face:

Why do small publishers bother? There are undoubtedly as many reasons as there are small publishers, but for people like us it’s because we’re tired of seeing the same old stuff on the bookshelves year after year after year. Safe books, based on the books that sold millions the previous year. Books that take few chances, books that fail to do anything to change the way we look at the world or ourselves. I wanted to go into a bookstore and be surprised. I wanted writing that was different, language that sang. And that’s why we started Two Ravens Press: to publish those books that big publishers were hardly bothering with any more. That’s also why the glib so-called ‘solutions’ to all the problems of an independent publisher like us that consist of helpful statements like ‘you need to have the commercial successes to fund the losses you’ll make on the literary, innovative stuff’ make absolutely no sense at all. Everyone else is publishing the commercial stuff. I don’t want to. Not doing that is my whole raison d’être. That’s the whole point! I don’t LIKE commercial stuff. I don’t think it ought to be banned, I don’t look down my nose at it, sometimes (but not often) I’ll even read it. But I don’t want to be yet another publisher churning out more of the same old writing. I want to do something different. I want literature.

See also: Lynn Michell, director of Linen Press on The Guardian Book Blog.

The Sound of Science — The New York Times on the unlikely success of WNYC’s innovative science show Radiolab:

This approach — a smaller number of shows, painstakingly assembled and treated more like small movies than like regularly scheduled programs — addresses a different tension, around new habits of media consumption. That is the tension between relevance and disposability. Discussions of technology and media tend to focus on speed — what’s the fastest way to break the story, consume the story, influence the story? After all, media consumers today seem like info-rats chewing through heaps of micro-facts and instant-expiration data points.

But the other interesting thing about media these days is that it can stand perfectly still. In fact it loiters: shows don’t simply spill over the airwaves and evaporate; they linger on DVRs, DVDs, various online services. Newspaper articles pile up in Web “archives.” And clearly we still accept, still crave, some deeper media experience too. In experimenting with a show that produces (at most) 10 episodes a year, WNYC was specifically thinking of HBO’s success in building powerful cultural franchises that ignore the mores of traditional broadcasting.

And finally…

Wall of Sound — Nikil Saval on how the iPod has changed the way we listen and respond to music:

The great 1990s magazine the Baffler spent its first half-decade analyzing how the culture industry managed, with increasing success, to recognize new musical trends and package them and sell them back at a markup to the people who’d pioneered them. The Baffler looked back to the punk scene of the early ’80s for inspiration; it spoke up for small labels that sold music to local constituencies. If you couldn’t get what you wanted on the radio, you would have to find it left of the dial—and keep looking over your shoulder for the man.

The danger now is different. The man no longer needs a monopoly on musical taste. He just wants a few cents on the dollar of every song you download, he doesn’t care what that song says. Other times he doesn’t even care if you pay that dollar, as long as you listen to your stolen music on his portable MP3 player, store it on his Apple computer, send it to your friends through his Verizon network. To paraphrase Yeltsin’s famous offer to the Chechens, take as much free music as you can stomach. We’ll see where it gets you.

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Published March 26, 2011

Something for the Weekend

“It Looks Pretty Cool” — Chip Kidd on his design for Haruki Murakami’s new novel 1Q84:

logistically the title is a book designer’s dream, because its unique four characters so easily adapt it to a very strong, iconic treatment.

F**ked — Author Dale Peck on founding  Mischief + Mayhem, a new publishing collective, in The Financial Times:

“The whole point of writing literature was that in exchange for not getting paid a lot of money, you could say whatever you wanted; now, you don’t get a lot of money and you don’t get to say what you want. All of which segues to why writing is f***ed.”

The Last of the Old-Style Hollywood Actresses — A Ballardian Primer to Elizabeth Taylor:

What did Taylor represent to Ballard? Less a sex symbol and more an emblem of the parallel landscape that celebrity culture in the 1960s and 70s inhabited, a virtual reality colonising the private lives of ‘ordinary’ people exposed, through mass communications and on a hitherto unprecedented scale, to a world as strange as an alien planet yet paradoxically erotic and near – a synthetic substitute for reality itself.

(images: cropped photograph of Elizabeth Taylor by Bert Stern via Dan Shepelavy (top). Cover of Crash by J.G. Ballard designed by David Wardle).

Too Much Information —The New York Times of the meaning and the use of the word “information”:

The use of the word “information” itself… seems to have exploded since its earliest recorded appearance in 1387. (“Fyve bookes com doun from heven for informacioun of mankynde.”) As Michael Proffitt, the managing editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, notes in an essay written for the recent relaunch of the O.E.D.’s digital edition, “information” is the 486th most frequently occurring word in Project Gutenberg’s searchable corpus of mostly pre-1900 literature. A 1967 survey of contemporary American English ranked it 346th. And the rise of digital technology seems only to have speeded its ascent. One recent survey of online usage lists “information” as the 22nd most common word.

And finally… It seems unlikely that you haven’t seen these already, but still…

New Vintage paperback designs for James M. Cain “conceived by Megan Wilson, executed by Evan Gaffney.” Stunning stuff.

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Published March 24, 2011

Picador Spring 2011 Covers

Picador have just posted all their Spring 2011 covers to Facebook. There’s some lovely work. Here are a few favourites:

The Fever: Cover design by LeeAnn Falciani

Watching the World Change: Cover design by Henry Sene Yee • Cover photograph by Patrick Witty

Winterland: Cover design by Keith Hayes • Cover photograph by eyespy/GettyImages

(Thanks Henry).

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Published March 22, 2011

“Fuck The Midtones” — How To Make A Book With Steidl

Screening at MoMA next month, How To Make A Book With Steidl is an award-winning documentary by Jörg Adolph and Gereon Wetzel about book publisher Gerhard Steidl:

(via Coudal. Of course.)

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Published March 18, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Pushing Paper — Ben Kafka asks why is there no Norton Anthology of Paperwork?:

My Norton Anthology of Paperwork would include some of the finest historical examples of boilerplate, alongside selections of letterhead, fill-in-the-blank forms, fine print, and the history of that wonderfully poetic instruction, “last name, first.” Indeed, the boilerplate metaphor could itself be a metaphor for a larger transformation, two centuries in the making, that has taken many of us away from extracting coal and forging iron and assembling boilers toward waiting for an inspector to come sign off on a certificate that needs to be filed with the local Department of Buildings. Paperwork occupies us and preoccupies us, whether we are maritime lawyers or nail-salon owners, congressional aides or human-resource managers, college professors or freelance web designers.

Hard Times — Sam Jordison on the EU investigation into the agency model of e-book pricing and what it means for publishers in The Guardian:

The customer may be unpleasant, but he or she is always right. It’s clear that publishers do need to up their game to accommodate the new demands. There’s also the fact that they’ve been pretty dreadful at digitising the backlists of their living authors, while those of dead authors are widely — and often freely — available. Publishers have to do something to win over…pretty much everyone.

The trouble is that… digital editions still cost money to produce (and indeed that the physical costs of a printed book are only a small percentage of their price), that rights are hellishly complicated, and that authors fear losing out hugely if publishers start putting up their backlist digitally (since they would never go out of print and so never be able to escape their contracts).

And on a related note…

Tearing Their Hair Out — Margaret Atwood discusses e-books with Rosalind Porter in The Globe & Mail:

[P]eople sit there putting words on the page, and some of them make a lot of money for their publishers and others create huge losses because the publishers placed their bets wrong. When people say publishing is a business – actually it’s not quite a business. It’s part gambling and part arts and crafts, with a business component. It’s not like any other business, and that’s why when standard businessmen go into publishing and think, “Right, I’m going to clean this up, rationalize it and make it work like a real business,” two years later you find they’re bald because they’ve torn out all their hair. And then you say to them, “It’s not like selling beer. It’s not like selling a case of this and a case of that and doing a campaign that works for all of the beer.” You’re selling one book – not even one author any more. Those days are gone, when you sold, let’s say, “Graham Greene” almost like a brand. You’re selling one book, and each copy of that book has to be bought by one reader and each reading of that book is by one unique individual. It’s very specific.

See also: Margaret Atwood’s keynote speech at TOC.

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Published March 16, 2011

Charlotte Strick | The Atlantic


Charlotte Strick, art director at Faber & Faber, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and The Paris Review, writes about the book design process for The Atlantic:

Even though I frequently have designs for titles from the previous season still on my plate, and just when I think I can’t possibly come up with another original idea for a cover, the creative sparks begin to fly. At the launch meetings, editors take turns presenting recent acquisitions… As the books are introduced, each of us begins to wonder: Will I solve the problem with illustration or photography? If the title is brilliant and descriptive, maybe an all-type treatment that’s bold and clever is the best solution. (These are always my favorites.) Is there even any budget for art after the copy-editing fees, production costs, and author’s advances have been tallied? No? Never mind! We’ll get out our paintbrushes and dust off our cameras and get to work.

She is also interviewed by The Atlantic’s Daniel Fromson:

Everyone has an opinion on whether or not the book publishing world as we know it is doomed. Just as the design of websites was becoming more interesting and thoughtful by the late ’90s, it’s clear that the look and feel of e-books will transform over the next decade. As a designer who makes her living creating covers for actual books, I hope to take part in this. I don’t want our work to be reproduced exclusively in black and white or viewed only at postage stamp size.

(Pictured above: sketches by Chris Silas Neal for the cover of Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, by Claire Dederer, published by FSG)

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Published February 11, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Steven Heller, editor of I Heart Design and author/editor of countless other books about design, at 10 Answers.

And Steven Heller is one of the designers featured in BBC Radio documentary I Heart Milton Glaser about the iconic I (Heart) NY logo and the designer who created it (go listen now because it’s only available for a few more days).

Print and the City –a fascinating look at whether movable type printing presses were the drivers of economic growth in cities by Jeremiah Dittmar (via The Browser):

[C]ities in which printing presses were established 1450-1500 had no prior growth advantage, but subsequently grew far faster than similar cities without printing presses… Cities that adopted print media benefitted from positive spillovers in human capital accumulation and technological change broadly defined. These spillovers exerted an upward pressure on the returns to labour, made cities culturally dynamic, and attracted migrants.

In the pre-industrial era, commerce was a more important source of urban wealth and income than tradable industrial production. Print media played a key role in the development of skills that were valuable to merchants. Following the invention printing, European presses produced a stream of math textbooks used by students preparing for careers in business.

The Savage Marketplace — A really interesting and thoughtful survey of the current state of book editing in the UK by Alex Clark , with contributions from Diana Athill, Blake Morrison, Jeannette Winterson and others, for The Guardian:

[W]hat saps the spirit are the manuscripts that leave you with the question: why did no one sit down with the writer and point out where this isn’t working? Why didn’t a red pen mark the hackneyed phrase, or the stock character, or the creaky dialogue? And, sometimes, why didn’t someone deliver the unfortunate verdict: this simply isn’t ready yet, and may never be?

And finally, if you’re in London… Kemistry Gallery have an exhibition of film posters by Saul Bass from the BFI archive, February 17th to March 17th:

SOME GOOD NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

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Published January 26, 2011

Merchants of Culture | Beyond the Book

An interesting interview with John B. Thompson, author of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, at Beyond the Book:

[R]eaders are going to be faced with a growing proliferation of possibilities in terms of the ways that they read and consume the written word, and people will make different choices about that. I think what we will see is some readers will migrate effortlessly into an electronic environment and will welcome the emergence of a variety of different ways to read texts online or in dedicated e-book readers or on iPads or other forms of device that will enable them to read in different ways and different contexts… Others will find it less attractive and will continue to value some aspects of the printed book that are important to them, because for many readers, books are not just reading devices. Books are cultural artifacts. They are social objects. They are indeed forms of art, which they like to own and possess and to put on a shelf and display and to share with others and to return to time and again and read on various occasions in the future. And they will continue to cherish that physical objective character of the printed book. And so, some will not choose to read in an online or an electronic form, because for them, the book matters as an object.

Beyond the Book John B. Thompson Mp3

(via MobyLives)

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Published November 11, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud has won the Giller Prize. Earlier this week The Globe and Mail profiled printer and publisher Gaspereau Press:

The house paper is Rolland’s Zephyr Antique Laid, which the Gaspereau website describes as “a creamy, sensual book paper.” The Quebec paper manufacturer Cascades makes it by special order for a handful of literary presses. Covers, meanwhile, are printed on Neenah Classic Laid from the U.S. papermaker Neenah. For the jacket of The Sentimentalists, Steeves selected a camel-hair colour to show off the cover illustration, a pencil sketch of a Vietnam soldier by Ontario engraver Wesley Bates who is a regular contributor at Gaspereau. Not coincidentally, The Sentimentalists has already won the Alcuin Society’s award for Excellence in Book Design in Canada.

(Well played Gaspereau, well played…)

Punk-As-Fuck — A fascinating history of Soft Skull Press, whose offices in New York closed last week:

“It will never be anything but a chronic uphill battle to run an indie publishing company,” says Johnny Temple, owner of Brooklyn-based indie publisher Akashic Books (and former Girls Against Boys bassist). “I think the efforts that Sander Hicks made when he started Soft Skull, and then Richard Nash after he took over, were pretty heroic in terms of trying to keep an independent publishing company with a radical vision afloat. Soft Skull was a company of righteous outsiders and has traditionally been a great home for people who don’t fit into mainstream society. What was particularly great was that Soft Skull has developed over time an international reputation. It wasn’t the only place for someone with a devoutly outsider sensibility, but it was one of the very best.”

MobyLives has a typically searing post on the closure of Soft Skull’s office in NYC. And while we’re on the subject, Publishing Perspectives has a Q & A with Richard Nash about his new venture Cursor.

Text for Nothing? — Ben Ehrenreich on Tom McCarthy and his novel C for The Nation:

In C, Nabokovian wordplay abounds. The characters not only have names, but each name is a web of echoes and allusions. So let Carrefax lead you to “carapace”—insects are important here—or to “caracole,” with its spiraling, cryptlike depths, even to deathly “catafalque.” Dig in deeper and you’ll find “fax,” of course, short for “facsimile” and denoting not only technology and transmission but replication—key concerns in C‘s cosmography. And in that prefix you might hear kara, Turkish for “black,” or perhaps even kar, Syldavian for “king” (Syldavian being the language spoken in the fictional Balkan nation of Syldavia, where, you may recall, brave Tintin foiled a Bordurian plot to steal King Ottokar’s scepter). Jam these associations together if you like—”black king of technological transmission” is not a bad descriptor for young Serge—or let the allusions drift and frolic, as McCarthy suggests in his Tintin study, as a “dynamic set of overlayings and cross-encodings…that resonate at levels far beyond that of any individual, re-encrypting themselves as they speak.”

And finally…

Raincoast Books has entered a team for this year’s Movember in support of Prostate Cancer Canada. If you would like to support Raincoast and/or “The Wagstache” (AKA my personal attempt to look like Daniel Plainview), you can follow our progress here. Any donations — big or small — are greatly appreciated.

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