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Tag: tom mccarthy

Published July 7, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

The Good, The Bad… — design:related‘s Karen Horton (also Art Director at Little, Brown and Co.) interviews Paul Buckley, Creative Director of Penguin US, about his new book Penguin 75: Designers, Authors, Commentary (The Good, The Bad…):

Everyone was asked to keep their comments to 100 words or less, and though there are a few exceptions that I let run long, my own included, most contributors stuck to my request. As to the sarcasm, there are plenty of good natured jabs throughout the book as I was very clear with the participants that this was a true opportunity to let it all out – if you hate your cover, please by all means tell us about it; that is the point of this book.

You can read my interview with Paul from September last year here, and I’m hoping to chat with him and designer Christopher Brand about Penguin 75 soon. Fingers crossed.

Rewound and Remixed — Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C, interviewed in The Times:

If McCarthy… presents a radically fresh prospect for the future of the novel, it is probably, paradoxically, because he has instinctively ignored contemporary literature almost completely. He would argue, in fact, that it is only by immersing oneself in all that has gone before that any contemporary novelist has even the faintest chance of coming up with something new. “I don’t think most writers, most commercial middlebrow writers, are doing that,” he says. “I think they’ve become too aligned with mainstream media culture and its underlying aesthetic of ‘self-expression’. I see what I’m doing as simply plugging literature into other literature. For me, that’s what literature’s always done. If Shakespeare finds a good speech in an older version of Macbeth or Pliny, he just rips it and mixes it.”

See also: My Q & A with Peter Mendelsund and Tom McCarthy about the cover design of C.

Paywalls vs. Potential — Clay Shirky interviewed in The Guardian. This has been much linked to elsewhere because of Shirky’s comments about the online “paywall” at the aforementioned The Times, but I actually Michael Wolff’s Vanity Fair article on Rupert Murdoch from October last year is more interesting on this point. See also: John Gapper’s op-ed “Murdoch must become an elitist” in the Financial Times (registration required).

Necessary Agent — Jofie Ferrari-Adler, senior editor at Grove/Atlantic, on literary agents and their relationship with book editors in Poets & Writers Magazine. It’s an interesting article, although — just for the record — not everything that goes pear-shaped in the publishing process is the fault of the Sales & Marketing department…

And finally…

Cats Without Dogs — At some point I will shut up about Jason… Until then, you might be interested to know he has just started a blog…

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Published April 20, 2010

Q & A with Peter Mendelsund and Tom McCarthy

In the early days of The Casual Optimist I scribbled out a short list of book designers I wanted to interview. More designers have been added since then, but a few of the original list remain un-interviewed. At the top of the list has been the name I actually wrote down first: Peter Mendelsund.

As Senior Designer at Knopf, Mendelsund’s designs feature here regularly. Much as I love his covers, however, Peter has been interviewed extensively elsewhere. I just haven’t known how to approach his work in a way that he would find interesting.

That was until I saw the shockingly subversive jacket design for Tom McCarthy‘s new novel “C”. The pairing of Mendelsund, the designer who is a musician, and McCarthy, the author who is an artist, was — it seemed to me — inspired.

A perfect opportunity…

What follows is primarily an interview with Peter about that design for “C”. But over the course of a few emails, Peter and I both decided to bring Tom into the conversation. I had met Tom shortly after the release of his debut novel Remainder and Peter had, it transpired, met Tom in New York after Knopf had signed “C”. It made sense to both of us.

It is a long, but absolutely fascinating exchange. Peter kindly answered my questions more fully than I had any right to expect and Tom, who was contributing from Stockholm, was more than gracious in less than ideal circumstances. I’m grateful to them both.

Continue readingQ & A with Peter Mendelsund and Tom McCarthy
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Published April 16, 2010

Something for the Weekend

John Squire‘s 1980’s covers for the Penguin Decades Series at The Creative Review. The art direction was by Penguin’s Jim Stoddart, but yes, it is THAT John Squire (i.e. awesome).

Fine Independent Publishing — An interesting interview with Barbara Epler, Editor-in-Chief at literary publisher New Directions, at KCRW’s Bookworm (although I could do without the decline of literature being blamed squarely on sales and marketing people. Again):

Permanent Crisis — A post by Rebecca Smart, Managing Director of military history publisher Osprey Publishing, at Digital Book World:

If you perceive that your only environment is that encompassed by your current supply chain then you’re only going to adapt to changes in that environment – so the response to the digital challenge viewed in this way would be to create and sell e-books. If you put the consumer at the heart of your thinking you can consider instead each group of customers you serve and what they might want on top of what you already provide, how they might want you to serve them differently in the future. More to the point, you can ASK them, listen and respond.

Proletarian Erotica — Lorin Stein, former senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and new editor of the Paris Review, interviewed at The Economist‘s ‘More Intelligent Life’ blog. The National Post also ran a nice interview with Stern last month.

Going Deutsch — Tom McCarthy, whose new book “C” I’m reading right now,  interviewed at the New York Times ‘Paper Cuts’ blog:

One critic described “Remainder” as a French novel written in English; well, by that token, “C” is my German novel. What the next one will be is anyone’s guess. Swedish, maybe…

More from Tom on The Casual Optimist soon (if I can twist his arm)…

Print Junkies — An interview at The Second Pass with the publisher and editor of Stop Smiling magazine J. C. Gabel on the launch if the Stop Smiling book imprint:

We’re still operating with the same mentality… but have adopted a Less Is More mindset — and a production schedule to match. It does feel nice to know that what we spend months or years working on is now being released in a permanent format. We’re really trying to reinvent the DIY aesthetic of the magazine to apply it to editing, publishing, and promoting books. The book-making process itself, of course, is much slower and drawn out, which is refreshing as we all get older.

And finally, I give you Oliver Jeffers’ moustache (via Tragic Right Hip)…

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Published March 14, 2010

C

Tom McCarthy and Peter Mendelsund, together at last…

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Published January 9, 2010

Something for the Weekend

Megan Wilson‘s new cover design for An Education by Lynn Barber.

Of a Certain Blockheadedness — Scott McLemee on the internet’s “gigantic plot” to get him to write for free:

The idea that new media has somehow abolished the old hierarchical structuring of the field (making everything level and equal and rhizomatic and whatnot) is only half right, at best. The hierarchies aren’t as well-marked as they used to be but they aren’t gone. Talk of an “army of amateurs” is at this point persuasive only to people who enlist without paying any attention to the fine print.

The Art of Fontana Modern Masters — Much linked to elsewhere, James Pardey (of the The Art of Penguin Science-Fiction site mentioned here) has new project on the Op-Art inspired Fontana Modern Masters book cover designs. He’s also written about the series for Eye (via Ace Jet 170 and Daily Discoveries on Design).

The New Sleekness — Ami Greko and Pablo Defendini (and other “bookish types”) try to fill a hole in publishing punditry. Having tried that myself and failed horribly, I can only wish them good luck.

Around The World with the Bodoni Family — A beautiful new 60-page book by graphic designer Teresa Monachino seen at The Creative Review. Each letter of the alphabet is printed in Bodoni to illustrate a place beginning with that letter.

Wave of Mutilation — Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder, on the films of David Lynch in the New Statesman. Yes, it is as weird and unlikely as it sounds (via 3:AM):

Try to count the instances of deformity in Lynch’s work, or of people being deformed on camera, and you’ll lose count pretty quickly…  Deformity, for Lynch, is not simply thematic: it is instrumental. In his films, what the continual, almost systematic replacement of body parts and faculties by instruments – crutches, wheelchairs, hearing aids and ever weirder apparatuses sometimes as large as rooms – produces is a whole prosthetic order, a world of which prosthesis is not just a feature, but a fundamental term, an ontological condition.

Information Wants to be Valued — Ian Grant, Managing Director of Encyclopaedia Britannica, at BookBrunch:

The new online world has given book publishers good reason to review everything that they do, from what to publish to how to run their businesses. It is a noisy call to new action and fresh efforts, but publishers are well-placed to respond. The core skills we have had for generations – imagining our users, creating shapely products that meet their needs, and identifying the transfer of value that results in a sale, are precisely the skills that make good publishing online successful and satisfying. Information does not “want to be free”; customers want to be inspired and satisfied.

And finally: It seems I’m not the only one who doesn’t take predictions about the book industry entirely serious… Laurence Hughes over at the Huffington Post:

Some time in the next decade, someone will download both The Bible and The Satanic Bible to their e-reader, triggering the Final Conflict and ushering in Armageddon and the End of Days. Expect a slight dip in book sales during the thousand-year reign of the Antichrist.

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Published November 4, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, November 4th, 2009

Fluid — John Gall discusses his brilliant cover design for the Vintage edition of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, which is still one of my favourite novels of the last few years.

Hamilton Wood Type Catalog No.14 (1899-1900) at Unicorn Graphics’ Wood Type Museum. I quietly obsessed with slab-serifs right now so this is like crack (via Draplin Design Co.).

And The Beat Goes On — Sarah Weinman (much missed at GalleyCat) is writing about publishing for AOL’s money and finance news blog DailyFinance.

Gigantic Robot — Awesome cartoonist and illustrator Tom Gauld has a new website (to accompany his excellent Flickr photostream).

BOOM! — PW talks to Mark Waid, Editor-In-Chief of independent comics publisher BOOM! Studios:

We’re great at getting a focused message out. Because we don’t publish eighty comics a month, our inestimable marketing department does a great job of making every title important in the marketplace and every launch an event. We’re also better than the big guys at taking risks because we don’t have stockholders to answer to, or lenders who would call us crazy… We’re very much a writer-driven, idea-driven company. We start with the story first (with a talented writer) and focus on getting that right.

30 Conversations on Design — Designers, including luminaries such as Massimo Vignelli, Erik Spiekermann, Ellen Lupton and Paula Scher, answer two questions: “What single example of design inspires you most?” and “What problem should design solve next?”

Unheimlich — Sam Leith argues for scary kids books in The Guardian (confession: I’m mostly linking to this story so I could type “unheimlich” which — rather disappointingly — means “unhomely” rather than “the act of undoing the heimlich manoeuver”).

And finally…

Dutch Picture Books 1810 – 1950 at BibliOdyssey (above: ‘De Gouden Haan’ by Marietje Witteveen, 1940).

‘De Gouden Haan’ by Marietje Witteveen, 1940
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