Books, Design and Culture
Designer Jon Gray (AKA Gray318) has launched a new website.
Jon has also been interviewed by We Love This Book:
A book cover only becomes iconic because the book that it covers becomes iconic. The cover is just a face for the content. I have been lucky to work on some really great books and have benefitted from their success. People often assume that by copying the cover of a successful book it will help their book sell, and are always surprised when it doesn’t work. It always has to start with the content.
The Browser — Author Anthony Daniels on the digital challenges faced by books, at The New Criterion:
An intellectual might be defined as someone who elaborates justifications for his own tastes and preferences, as metaphysics was once defined as the finding of bad reasons for what we all believe on instinct. And so the reader of books soon finds reasons for the supposed superiority of the printed page over the screen of the electronic device: for nothing stimulates the brain quite like the need for rationalization. The dullest of minds, I have found, works at the speed of light when a rationalization is needed…
Whether the book survives or not, I am firmly of the opinion that it ought to survive, and nothing will convince me otherwise. The heart has its beliefs that evidence knows not of. For me, to browse in a bookshop, especially a second-hand one, will forever be superior to browsing on the internet precisely because chance plays a much larger part in it. There are few greater delights than entirely by chance to come across something not only fascinating in itself, but that establishes a quite unexpected connection with something else. The imagination is stimulated in a way that the more logical connections of the Internet cannot match; the Internet will make people literal-minded.
And finally…
As am I, as am I — Edward Docx on the Sherlock Holmes ‘pilgrims’ and a re-enactment of The Final Problem organised by The Sherlock Holmes Society of London:
Comments closedI have come to like the pilgrims a good deal. They’re warm-hearted, engaging and amusing people, which is more than can be said for the moped brethren. There are many from the legal profession—Moriarty is a practising barrister; Cardinal Tosca and Queen Victoria (who are married) are retired from the bar. Sherlock Holmes, I learn, is an ex-head teacher—and is (disconcertingly) married to Mrs Hudson. Watson works for Lloyd’s of London. The strangest and most impressive folk are those who have come the furthest—not least the two ladies from the aforementioned Japan Sherlock Holmes Club (founded in 1977; about 1000 members), who do not, I think, speak English and who are posing as “Baritsu Assistants”—this being some kind of martial art that Holmes knew and that saved him in his struggle with Moriarty on the falls. There are also policemen, toxicologists, bookmakers, engineers, historians, and many who—nobly—refuse to admit to any other existence save that of their character. If these people have anything in common, beyond the obvious, it is that they are all comfortable with a very elastic sense of reality… As am I, as am I.
Do It Yourself — John Self, of the excellent Asylum blog, on the power of independent readers, at The Guardian:
if publishers and authors are limited in what they can do for a book online, who is left? They want to harness word of mouth, and power lies collectively in the independent readers – you and me. Can we make a difference when the bookselling world is full of outlets, online and off, which primarily sell what already sells, or can be related to a proven success (“It’s Fifty Shades of Grey meets Harry Potter!”)? If social media has inspired a new age of grassroots political activism, why not literary activism, too?
I picked up Keith Ridgway’s new book Hawthorn & Child almost entirely on the basis of John’s recommendation (I also read Colony by Hugo Wilcken, one of my favourite books of recent years, as a result of John’s review). The astonishing cover (pictured above) is by Tom Darracott by the way.
(Semi) Colonoscopy — Mary Norris on how to use the semicolon, at The New Yorker:
So the semicolon is exactly what it looks like: a subtle hybrid of colon and comma. Actually, in ancient Greek, the same symbol was used to indicate a question.
And it still seems to have a vestigial interrogative quality to it, a cue to the reader that the writer is not finished yet; she is holding her breath.
And finally…
Imaginary Buildings — Jimmy Stamp on the locations of 221B Baker Street, for The Smithsonian:
Comments closedThe mystery of 221B Baker Street is not one of secret passages or hidden symbols. Rather, it could be described as a sort of existential spatial riddle: how can a space that is not a space be where it is not? According to Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson lived at 221B Baker Street from 1881 to 1904. But 221B Baker street did not exist in 1881, nor did it exist in 1887 when A Study in Scarlet was published and Baker Street house numbers only extended into the 100s. It was a purely fictional address – emphasis on was. Time marches on, Baker Streets are renumbered, and 221Bs are revealed…
