The Casual Optimist Posts

Psycho Cover — Penguin art director Paul Buckley discusses his new book Penguin 75 with Imprint:

I am very aware of how much product gets put out there that is completely unnecessary, be it music, movies, books, whatever—it seems that for every good piece of culture we experience, we are bombarded with 99 pieces of redundant crap. I’ve been in the industry for awhile, and of course want to show off the great work we do here, but was not going to put out yet another design book and take your money—you can get that in any annual. To me, often more interesting than the covers are the stories, the psychology that created all the variables that led to this cover over the 20 other proposed covers.

Paul has recently updated his Flickr with new covers from the Penguin Ink series, which utilizes art by tattoo artists, as well as the latest additions to the excellent Penguin Graphic Classics series, which have art by contemporary cartoonists.

My interview with Paul and Penguin 75 designer Christopher Brand is here.

Also at Imprint… Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and book editor Eva Prinz (formerly of Abrams and Rizzoli)  talk about their new publishing venture Ecstatic Peace Library.

Writing on the Wall — Andrew Franklin, publisher and managing director of Profile Books,  offers an overview of the current state of the book business in the UK (via Dan Mogford):

Bookshops enliven high streets, create communities of readers and stage author events, while good booksellers encourage reading and shape taste. For most readers, browsing is a key part of deciding what to read, and publishers put huge effort into packaging and presenting their books. Of course many of these activities can migrate online with Facebook groups, online forums, feeds and websites helping to steer readers to the books they will most enjoy. For some online shoppers bookshops are part of this process: they browse in bookshops, write shopping lists and then buy (perhaps more cheaply) online. But no bookshop can be in business as a shop window for other retailers. You don’t have to be hopelessly nostalgic or sentimental to believe something very precious is lost with every bookshop that closes.

And at the other of the spectrum…

Another Reading Revolution — Historian Andrew Pettegree talks about his new book The Book in the Renaissance with The Atlantic (via Shelf Awareness):

The situation really is that the first generation of printers, encouraged by scholars, naturally produced the sort of books these people wanted. But it’s hard to apply this sort of commercial model—this small, bespoke model used for manuscripts—to a new process that produces 300 or more identical items. The irony is that there were plenty of other readers out there. The first printers ignored the groups that we might call pragmatic readers. Literacy was already widely-disseminated in the fifteenth century. There were lots of people who could read but did not habitually buy books, so the trick was to discover how to reach them.