Books, Design and Culture
Edward Steed for The New Yorker.
Comments closedComma Queen Mary Norris takes a quick look at the origins of the beloved ampersand for The New Yorker:
Comments closedThe New Yorker visits the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn as owner John Scioli begins to clean out his “cavern of books” in preparation of the store’s closing in May:
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I have to confess that I frequently find This American Life kind of irritating, but this collaboration with Chris Ware and The New Yorker to create an animated magazine cover is neat:
The animation was done by Ware and John Kuramoto. You can read more about how it came about on The New Yorker culture blog.
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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.
