A short documentary by Coudal Partners about the production of the new limited edition Field Notes notebook Raven’s Wing:
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Published November 5, 2010
The Casual Optimist Posts
Published November 5, 2010
Something for the Weekend
The Guardian‘s obituary for graphic designer S. Neil Fujita, who died last month aged 89, and a slideshow of his work, which included album covers for artists Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis, and book covers for John Updike, Truman Capote, and Mario Puzo.
The New York Times obituary, which ran in October, is here.
And a 2007 Steven Heller interview with S. Neil Fujita for AIGA is here.
Dead Air — Mike Doherty talks to Tom McCarthy about his most recent novel C for the CBC:
While researching the project, McCarthy was struck by the fact that Guglielmo Marconi and Alexander Graham Bell, the inventors of the radio and telephone, respectively, had originally sought to contact the dead. McCarthy dreamed up a character whose sister dies in early age; working as a radio operator later in life, he finds coded messages everywhere around him, perhaps from his sibling. McCarthy viewed this story as a Trojan Horse into which he could “smuggle” his “philosophical and avant-garde preoccupations,” in a “conventional Dickensian trajectory from birth to death in a historical setting. I thought, This is a winner. Surely some f—er’s going to publish this one!'”
You can find my conversation with Tom and book designer Peter Mendelsund about C here.
Pass Notes — MobyLives talks to John Williams founder of online literary journal The Second Pass:
I found after leaving publishing that I was reading a lot of older books, some classics and some that I had just happened upon foraging at the Strand and other places. I thought there was room online to treat reading the way a lot of big readers actually do it, which is not to simply go straight through all the new releases but to haphazardly combine some new books with some old ones, some very popular books with some that have been out of print for decades. Plus, I was hearing a lot of moaning about the fate of books coverage in the age of the dying newspaper, and I thought trying to do something about it would be much more fun than talking about it (and much, much more fun than listening to other people talk about it). And it has been.
It just so happens that I will be chatting with John soon as well… Fingers crossed.
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Published November 4, 2010
Incidental Media
I’m not exactly sure how the ideas in these videos by Dentsu London and BERG relate to books and print, but I’m pretty sure they do in some tangential way.
There’s a lovely sense of how new media can connect and adapt old media in interesting, unobtrusive ways, and it seems much more human-shaped than the rather linear idea that a new technologies must replace or destroy existing ones:
(via Russell Davies)
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Published November 3, 2010
Midweek Miscellany
Pattern covers by Ray Fenwick for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (thx Sio).
A look inside Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World’s Great Graphic Designers by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico at Fast Company.
Link Drop — A nice list of design blogs to sink your teeth into compiled by David Airey, author of Logo Design Love.
Photographs from Kevin Cummins‘ book about Joy Division at Flavorwire.
Show Me The Money — Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants and co-founder of Wired, talks to PW:
For readers, this is the best time in history. There’s never been more selection, more media types, or quality books. There’s never been more backlist books available. This is a high point for readers. For publishers, though, it is a low point, as their businesses are in transition. But I’m very optimistic, because in my research, money follows attention. Wherever attention flows, money follows.
And finally…
Telling Stories About Superweapons — In an awesome (if slightly sprawling clearly-has-too-much-time-on-his-hands-and-might-be-bonkers) post, Christian Thorne, associate professor of English at Williams College, discusses Godzilla, Iron Man II and weapons of mass destruction (via Coudal):
3 CommentsTony Stark is the Japanese scientist of the American Empire, the inventor who will not share his invention, the engineer who withholds the newest technology of death so that only he can command it: “You can’t have the suit. … I’m not giving you the suit. … You’re not getting the suit.” What the new movie shares with Godzilla is the notion that the perfect and ethical weapon would have to be entirely singular—there would literally only be one of them—and so would not be available for manufacture: a permanent prototype, forever in beta. By investing the killer armor with artisanal qualities, as though ICBMs could be blacksmithed, they suggest that the weapon’s uniqueness could be maintained into the future, since it is the hallmark of any handcrafted object that it is in some strict sense unrepeatable. That’s a fantasy, yes, but it’s an unsettled one; unease is simply built into its scenario. The conceit of an unshareable weapon comes with a worry automatically attached, which is simply that one will become two. Arms proliferate, and then so do anxieties, in their wake.
Published November 3, 2010
His Face All Red
A bit late in the day on this — it would have been a perfect post for Halloween — but Emily Carroll’s chilling short-story comic His Face All Red is still pretty darn great.
(via The Ephemerist)
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Published November 2, 2010
Daddy
A typographic interpretation of the poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath, printed from 80 hand-carved woodblocks by Copenhagen-based design studio Daddy.
The book “seeks to capture and express the emotions and atmosphere of the text through the typographic treatment and woodblock printing.” Beautiful stuff:
(via Inspiration Lab)
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Published October 29, 2010
Thomas Allen AV
An AV introduction to the work of artist Thomas Allen who takes vintage paperbacks and cuts, creases, and crimps them into incredible pulp pop-ups:
(thx Jacob)
(And Small World of Happy Coincidences: The remix of Sarah Vaughan that accompanies the video is by Max Sedgley an old pal from university)
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Published October 27, 2010
Type Case
Martin Bircher’s oddly hypnotic art installation Type Case uses a printers’ type case and 125 LED lights to display the latest headlines:
There’s more about the project here.
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Published October 27, 2010
Don’t Go To The Castle
Published October 27, 2010
Midweek Miscellany
Bespoke — Richard Weston, AKA Ace Jet 170, on the book designs for the soon-to-be-launched Bespoke Editions:
Bespoke Editions is a one-off edition press; offering beautiful custom-made classic books, printed on demand and hand-finished to order. Personalised and unique, each edition will be made using specially selected cover papers and finishes… The editions will be in a Demy format and the page layouts will be based on the Van de Graaf Canon. After a set of tests, we’ve settled on the beautiful Hoefler Text for the typesetting and each title page will feature a carefully chosen typographic ornament that has some relevance to the particular book.
All Programs Considered — Bill McKibben on the new public radio for The New York Review of Books (via the always astute Edward Nawotka at Publishing Perspectives):
[I]n one sense this is the perfect moment to be a young radiohead. It’s like 1960s and 1970s cinema, with auteurs rewriting the rules. New technology lets you make radio programs cheaply: Pro Tools sound-editing software has now replaced much of the equipment used in big, expensive studios. Listening is even cheaper: the iTunes store has thousands of podcasts… available for free download in a matter of seconds. “It’s a transformative and exciting moment, a huge revolution,” says Sue Schardt, executive director of the Association of Independents in Radio.
But there’s one problem, and that’s the economics of this new world. Radio is now cheap to make, true, but the people who make it still need to live. And it’s very hard to get paid anything at all…
Sounds awfully familiar…
The beautiful Ligature Loop and Stem poster at For Print Only:
Aside from being a purely creative outlet devoid of typical restrictions… one of the goals for anything produced under the Ligature, Loop & Stem moniker is that it educates as well as inspires. This piece scratched an itch for us in wanting to have a quick reference for letterform characteristics — in essence, so we can all speak the same language when talking about type.
A Pointy Tool — David Carr talks to the founders of The Awl for The New York Times (via Kottke):
“My friends keep talking to me about how they want to start a Web site, but they need to get some backing, and I look at them and ask them what they are waiting for,” Mr. Sicha said. “All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing. Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”
And finally…
Tintin Gets Scalped — An annotated page from Charles Burn’s new graphic novel X’ed Out at New York Magazine (via Bookslut):
Comments closedNitnit’s name—and shock of hair—betray his origins. “Golden Books put out six of the Tintin books in English. This was before I could read, but I was looking at them very carefully. The books’ endpapers were filled with images from other Tintin stories that hadn’t been translated. I studied these endlessly. There was a little sentence on the back of each book that said, ‘Look for future titles.’ I kept looking but they never came.”
Published October 22, 2010
Something for the Weekend
Equations — Lauren Panepinto’s stunning op-art covers for a new trilogy of novels by Simon Morden, published by Orbit. From the Orbit blog:
These online cover images truly don’t do the packages justice — each book has a single bright colour and in the printed version that will actually be a fluorescent ink. Spot gloss lamination and subtle embossing will heighten the effect of the illusions and make them very nice objects to pick up and stare at — they really draw you in when you see them in person. Here they are separately, and larger, to really start to mess with your eyes…
I immediately thought of Bridget Riley when I saw these…
In Praise of Big Cities — Typographer Erik Spiekermann, author of Stop Stealing Sheep, on cities for blueprint Magazine:
I hardly ever go out; I love to eat at home and can think of nothing worse than a weekend house in the country somewhere. All I would ever need to take my mind off things is right outside. It’s actually a long time since I’ve been to a theatre or the opera, but I wouldn’t want to live in a place that has neither. The thought of all this activity happening outside my front door makes living here attractive. There are lots of cafes, and they always seem to be busy, full of people who seem to neither have a home nor an office to go to. Coffee shops have been described as the perfect place to be out in public while on your own and a good reason to leave your house while avoiding fresh air. I don’t need to go there, but the thought that I could at anytime is enough to avoid feeling lonely.
Iambik — Hugh McGuire walks the talk and launches a new audiobook company with an eclectic collection of literary fiction from independent presses.
And finally…
Good Ideas — Nora Young interviews Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, for CBC Radio’s Spark:
CBC Radio Spark: Steven Johnson
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