Books, Design and Culture
The latest episode of the PBS Arts series Off Book explores the Steampunk aesthetic and art movement:
It’s a little a bit disappointing that the video doesn’t feature any books. Didn’t it all start with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells?
Comments closedLauren Panepinto, Creative Director at Orbit Books, recently posted this entertaining “Making of the Cover Video” for Gail Carriger‘s Blameless (released in the fall) to the Orbit blog:
Over 6 hours of my onscreen compositing, retouching, color correction, type obsessing, all condensed down to a slim sexy one minute 55 seconds of cover design. Trust me, no one wants to watch it in real-time…and even then I left out the not-as-riveting-onscreen stages of my cover design process, such as reading the manuscript, sifting through… photoshoot outtakes, background photo research, etc. And since this is a series look that has already been established… there weren’t the usual batches and rounds of versions of different designs that happen with standalone or first-in-a-new-series covers. That would be a weeklong video!
And if your interested in steampunk but don’t know where to start, you might want to check out Library Journal‘s list of 20 core steampunk titles (which includes Gail Carriger’s Soulless).
UPDATE:
There is more on Lauren Panepinto’s work on this series at FaceOut Books.
Dawn of the Dreadfuls — not normally my kind of book cover, but hey it’s Hallowe’en and I think Quirk Books knocked this out of the park (full disclosure: Quirk are distributed by Raincoast Books in Canada).
And continuing the spooky theme…
Hallorave — Fantagraphics have been posting previews of the first volume of Mezzo and Pirus’ “extraordinary suburban horror trilogy”, King of the Flies, on their blog all this week. Pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. It looks intense:
Devices and Contraptions Extraordinaire — “The world’s first exhibition of steampunk art” at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, England. There is a blog accompanying the exhibition by curator Art Donovan (via ReadySteadyBlog).
Dark Star — Michael Dirda’s review of The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, published by W.W. Norton, in the Washington Post:
In “The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard” devastated worlds are matched with even more devastated psyches. But these aren’t simply “myths of the near future,” they are probes sent down into the desolate heart of the here and now. As Ballard knew, reality has become just a subgenre of science fiction.
And finally…just for Hallowe’en, here’s a great vintage cover for Bram Stoker’s Dracula seen at the Golden Age Comic Stories blog (via the awesome, but not entirely safe for work, This Isn’t Happiness):
Normal, non-spooky, service will resume next week…