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The Casual Optimist Posts

Published October 27, 2009

Monday Miscellany, October 26th, 2009

The brilliant Helen Yentus has redesigned the covers of Chinua Achebe’s books for Anchor with illustrations and hand lettering by Edel Rodriguez who has some amazing sketches of her work on the series at her portfolio site.  (Covers first seen at wonderful Caustic Cover Critic blog, with additional details and links from estimable John Gall.)

Pixellated Penguin — Anna Rafferty, Managing Director of Penguin Digital (UK), profiled in The Marketer Magazine:

Although volume sales of books has dropped 9.2 per cent this year… and the onset of digital publishing means a reassessment of how content is provided, Rafferty says the recession has not affected the way she markets Penguin. “We’ve always been against paying for things. We are a content company with access to the words and opinions of the funniest, most intelligent and entertaining authors in the world.”

Difficult Women — Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books (which celebrates it’s 30th anniversary this year), profiled by Nicholas Wroe for The Guardian.

Anti-Ironic — Product designer Joey Roth (designer of the beautiful Sorapot teapot) interviewed at Boing Boing:

I see designers and companies whose work represents a disposable, ironic, trend-driven view of product design as my ideological enemies. Irony was the dominant approach a few years ago, and it’s still popular. I think it has no place in design, since physical resources are consumed when something is mass-produced, and a joke is only witty for so long. My desire to design objects that represent a more thoughtful, sustainable view grew partially from the ironic, anti-design trend I encountered as I was getting into design.

I sort of feel the same way about books…

All Cover Archive — Ben Pieratt has posted some of his early design’s for the Book Cover Archive logo at his new General Projects Blog.

Ben also had a nice post about books and logos at the BCA blog last week…

And speaking of the BCA blog, Ben recently posted about James Le Beau-Morley‘s cover design and layout concepts for 1984:

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Published October 26, 2009

5 Secrets from 86 Notebooks

“If you do what you love and you find other people who do what they love, you’ll be successful, you’ll do great work, [and] chances are you’ll actually make money miraculously enough. If you combine that with a bit of egotism and a taste for the spotlight you could also become famous, but definitely I promise you’ll be happy.”

Michael Bierut, partner at Pentagram and author of the truly excellent 79 Short Essays About Design (yes, yes, full disclosure: distributed by Raincoast Books in Canada), shares five simple secrets for doing great creative work at the 99% Conference in New York earlier this year:

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And what does this have to do with books specifically? Well, the final thing Michael talks about is a really cool school libraries project…

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Published October 23, 2009

Something for the Weekend, October 23rd, 2009

Illustrator Jay Ryan has a new book, Animals and Objects In and Out of Water (published by Akashic Books), coming in December. Literary types might remember Jay’s cover and illustrations for Michael Chabon’s novella The Final Solution.

Jay is also touring the US in November and December with Paul Hornschemeier whose new book All and Sundry (published by Fantagraphics) is now available (via Jacob Covey).

(Un)selling — Independent sales rep John Mesjak on building trust with bookstores and readers in the Huffington Post:

I’m able to act as a guide for my bookstore buyers because they trust me. That trust comes both from recommending great books that have ended up being staff favorites and, maybe more importantly, sometimes telling a buyer, “You don’t need this book.”…Good booksellers earn trust with their own customers the same way — by providing honest suggestions and reliable advice… Booksellers shouldn’t be afraid to say, ‘I didn’t like the book.’

Small Acts of Defiance — Novelist Jonathan Lethem, interviewed in Time about his new book Chronic City, on owning a small used-book store in Maine (via Shelf Awareness):

I don’t really own the building. I guess I sort of own the books until someone comes along and buys them. I’m like the junior partner in a very funky clubhouse of a used-book store. It’s something that makes me very happy… it never crossed my mind that it was an expression of defiance. If it’s taken as that, that’s great. I did it for the pleasure. It didn’t have to do anything with my career or the Internet or the publishing world. It was just to be handling the books. I worked in used-book stores for 15 years on and off. That was the only work I ever had before becoming a full-time writer. I have a lot of osmotic book knowledge just from handling books I didn’t ever read. Turning them over in my hands, trying to figure out where they came from and why they exist and whether they should be priced at $4 or $6.

Plus ça change — Literary agent and prolific blogger Nathan Bransford summarizes (with the requisite amount hyperbole) a week that saw another wave of e-readers and an ugly price war in the US:

This was, quite simply, a massively huge week in the publishing industry. All of the various pressures on the industry seemingly came to a head: the steady rise of e-books, downward pressure on book prices… the rising clout of e-tailers, an increasingly difficult landscape for independent bookstores, and the industry’s creeping dependence on a small handful of mega-bestselling authors.

AND speaking of the pricing wars, the American Booksellers Association has asked the  Department of Justice to investigate the practices of Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, and Target.

And finally…

Co-existence — Steven Fry on on why books and the web go together in an interesting piece for the BBC earlier this year:

Very often people oddly put books against the internet… You don’t throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The beauty of living in the present day is you don’t abandon the past. The past co-exists.

ABA Asks Department of Justice to Investigate Bestseller Price Wars
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Published October 22, 2009

The World’s Most Advanced E-Reader or the Worst Product Name Ever?

Despite being lumbered with “the worst product name in recorded history”, Barnes & Noble‘s new dual screen e-reader the ‘Nook’ is getting a lot of favourable reviews.

An appallingly kept secret, the Nook was officially unveiled earlier this week and is being widely touted as a ‘Kindle Killer’ (whatever that actually means).

Direct comparisons with Amazon’s e-reader are inevitable of course — especially given the Nook will go on sale for $259, the same price as the Kindle 2.  And, if nothing else, US publishers seem relieved that Amazon finally has some serious competition from the country’s largest bookstore chain.

As reported in Publishers Weekly and the New York Times, part of what is attractive to publishers (aside from the simple fact it is not owned by the Amazon) is that the Nook is relatively flexible and supports formats, including ePub. and — perhaps more crucially in the short term — PDFs, that can be read on other devices.

Of course, that B&N has 1,300 stores and already understands books (and the publishers that publish them) doesn’t hurt.

Much is also being made of the Nook’s promising ‘LendMe’ feature, which will let readers share their books (within limits) with others, even though some people aren’t entirely happy about it.

Unsurprisingly, B&N are describing the Nook as “The World’s Most Advanced eBook Reader”, although it is unclear whether the Nook will be available outside the US, which could be problematic in the long run (especially as Amazon and Sony both have global reach). The Guardian Technology Blog does point out, however, that the Nook’s 3G wireless is provided by AT&T, “one of the GSM [Global System for Mobile Communications] providers in the US, so from a technical standpoint, it should be easy to launch the reader internationally.”

But does B&N really have the will or the way to make the Nook available beyond its US home base? And could it do so successfully?

Ultimately perhaps, the real question though is whether there is actually a mass market — either in the US or internationally — for single purpose e-readers. Some smart people clearly think so, but given that non-proprietary formats like ePub can be read on more useful, convenient and competitively priced multi-purpose devices such as laptops and cellphones (and whatever else Apple are currently cooking up), and that books still look like the most robust, simple and elegant format — I’m not so sure…

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Published October 21, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, October 21st, 2009

The lovely folks at Book City Jackets (mentioned previously here) have just released Artist Edition No.2 featuring original work by Nishat Akhtar, Cheeming Boey and Michael C. Hsiung.

“Can’t We All Just Get Along?” — Steve Ross, Former President at HarperCollins and Sr. VP at Random House, on publishing, e-books, and pricing at the Huffington Post:

Permeating… the conversation… is the sense that publishers are resistant to e-books for some reason. But publishers want e-books to succeed because they have the potential not only to expand readerships but leapfrog us over the historically insuperable and tenacious cancer at the heart of the business model; returnable books.

The New Old Thing — Jane Friedman, former president and chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, has launched Open Road which will focus on publishing e-book editions of backlist titles by well-known authors. Does this sound a lot like the original Penguin model for paperbacks to anyone else? There are more details at PW…

Stet — editor and author Diana Athill is interviewed by Vit Wagner in today’s Toronto Star. Granta recently released Life Class, which collects Athill’s memoirs Yesterday Morning, Instead of a Letter, Stet, and Somewhere Towards the End in a single volume. Athill is appearing with Alice Munro at IFOA this evening.

Vit also interviewed the fascinating Antony Beevor, author of the Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945, earlier this week.

Designer and design blogger David Airey has launched a graphic design bookstore on Amazon with his book recommendations.

And finally…

I came across this lovely looking new book on the Bauhaus while browsing  D.A.P.‘s Fall 09 catalogue. The book accompanies the exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity at MoMA in New York, November 8, 2009 — January 25, 2010.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
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Published October 19, 2009

Less is More…

Poets & Writers magazine have just published the final installment of Jofie Ferrari-Adler’s series of interviews with publishing professionals.

The last interview in this excellent series is with Jonathan Karp, publisher and editor in chief of Hachette‘s remarkably successful Twelve imprint.

Formerly an editor at Random House, Karp founded Twelve with the objective of publishing no more than one book a month. Since their launch, 15 of Twelve’s first 30 books, including Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great and Dave Cullen’s Columbine (pictured above — cover designed by Henry Sene Yee), have been New York Times best-sellers. It’s clearly a successful model, even if it is one that’s hard for start-ups to replicate (how many new imprints could have snapped up the rights to True Compass by Ted Kennedy for example?).

The interview is, of course, well worth reading in full. But here are a few passages about Twelve that stood out for me…

On founding Twelve:

I was thinking, “Okay, I want everything to be the lead title. I want to have at least a month to put it across. And I want to have the best talent. What’s the best way to do that?” It’s to make a promise to the author and to make the promise so explicit that it’s on the spine of the book: Twelve. That’s it. One a month. You get your launch and, although we can’t guarantee that the book’s going to be a best-seller, we can at least guarantee that you will have our full attention, focus, and commitment for a sustained period. We will talk about your book until people will not listen to us anymore.

On acquisitions:

I really am amazed by how often publishers decide to do something because a similar book succeeded. That is flawed reasoning. Books catch on for any number of reasons, and it’s not a mathematical formula that can be reproduced. Even more insidious is the idea that sometimes creeps into acquisition decisions in a really cynical and negative way, where people say, “Well, that nondescript work caught on, so this nondescript work could too.” I just don’t understand why you would want to go down that road. It makes no sense to me. I would think that you would feel as if you were going through your life just imitating other people, doing something you didn’t really believe in. I’m genuinely mystified by that.

On publishing fewer books:

What I do think is that the Twelve model makes a great deal of sense for unknown authors or authors who want to break out. I think that’s true. I think that this is the best way to publish a midlist author or an author who’s on the way up. Let me put it another way: I think it would behoove the major publishing houses to publish fewer books with more focus. I think that everybody would benefit from that. What I don’t know is whether the companies can meet their targets doing it. I’d have to be a CFO to know that, and it would be arrogant of me to say that a major publisher can get by without disposable books. I don’t know the answer to that. What I know is that I’m working for a company that publishes a lot less than the other major publishers with a more concentrated marketing approach and seems to be making a lot of money doing it.

On the “future of publishing”:

I have an idealistic hope that as more and more media becomes disposable, books will be increasingly regarded as the permanent expression of thought and feeling and wisdom. So publishers who can offer definitive material will thrive. Now, as I say, that’s idealistic. Plenty of publishers are going to continue to do well publishing derivative material that they don’t really believe in. But I think it’s going to be harder for them. It’s going to be harder for them to survive. I think there will be some displacement—some houses will shrink and other houses will grow. I could see some pure play digital publishers who aren’t encumbered by the weight of overhead and the history of their business relationships becoming influential factors in the publishing world. So I think it’s a transitional time and a transformative time. But it’s always been that way. I don’t think anything should be regarded as permanent. All we ultimately have is our belief in the particular books. And as long as you have that, you’re fine.

As I say, the whole interview (the whole series in fact) really is worth your time.

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Published October 16, 2009

Missed Things: Friday

Floating — Toronto illustrator Michael Cho on his cover art and interior illustrations for The Amazing Absorbing Boy by Rabindranath Maharaj (published by Random House Canada).

The Ideal Studio Library — It’s Nice That interviews designer Jason Godfrey about his beautiful new book Bibiographic: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books, published by Laurence King,  (and yes, full disclosure, LK are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books):

My aim was to create the ideal studio library of graphic design books and put this into a book format. I had always felt that there was a need for a visual reference to that could give flesh to many reading lists that have been published… The really tricky choices were the more recent books as it is difficult to know whether they will become classic points of reference, time will tell if I made the right choices on these books.

Bezette Stad —  A book of poems by Paul van Ostaijen, illustrated with woodcuts by Oskar Jespers, available in full at the University of Iowa Libraries’ astonishing International Dada Archive (via the lovely Aqua-Velvet).

And finally…

ENOUGH! — The hilariously on the money Editorial Anonymous:

I REALLY NEED A FRICKING BREAK FROM THE “FUTURE OF PUBLISHING” TALK… I don’t need to read any more of these articles, and neither do you.

A quick overview:

1. Publishing is a somewhat crappy business. Which makes it PRETTY MUCH LIKE EVERY OTHER BUSINESS.
2. Publishing has a future. NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IT WILL BE.

So everyone can stop
a. COMPLAINING
and
b. COMPLAINING.

Thank you.

No, no, Thank YOU.

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Published October 16, 2009

Mr. Peanut

From Mr. Mendelsund. Brilliant.

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Published October 15, 2009

Missed Things: Thursday

Covers for The Invincible Iron Man No. 20 and 21 by Salvador Larroca and Frank D’Armata, with design by Rian Hughes (seen at the website of the author Matt Fraction). Is it just me, or do these have a whiff of Marber’s Penguin Crime series about them? Or is it more like Olly Moss?

Grey Overcoat Music —  3:AM Magazine‘s Lee Rourke talks to photographer Kevin Cummins about his new book Manchester: Looking for the Light through the Pouring Rain (published by Faber & Faber), which documents 30 years of the Manchester’s music scene. 

The Guardian also has a slide show of  photographs by Cummins (above: Ian Curtis, 1979).

And if you’re interested in Factory Records and the Manchester music scene you might also be interested in The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club by New Order bassist Peter Hook (published by Simon & Schuster) also reviewed in The Guardian.

The Lost Pleasure of Browsing — Charles Rosen for the New York Review Blog:

I realize that mail order shopping has been going on for a long time, but have always thought that this destroys one of the pleasures of civilized life. I do not understand how one can buy clothes without trying them on, and as for books, the individual book should seduce and inspire you to buy it.

Spelling “Theatre” the British Way — Andy Ross talks to New Yorker page OK’er Mary Norris about copy editing “America’s most prestigious literary magazine” at The Red Room:

The main thing here is to respect the writer. The writers don’t have to do everything we want them to—we make suggestions. The ideal would be to give an editor a proof and have all your suggestions meet with approval. Sometimes you notice that your suggestions have not been taken, so if something bothers you, you try again. Sometimes you wear them down, sometimes you cave.

I have been on both sides of the process, as a writer and as a query proofreader. Being edited sometimes felt like having my bones reset on a torture rack. I don’t ever want to do that to a writer, but I probably have from time to time.

And bless The New Yorker for using double consonants before suffixes — “traveled” is barbaric.

And finally…

Illusive: Contemporary Illustration Part 3 published by Gestalten looks rather fine.

http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/212201723/the-lost-pleasure-of-browsing
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Published October 14, 2009

Missed Things: Wednesday

Henry Sene Yee, Creative Director of Picador, discusses the elegantly understated cover design for Time by Eva Hoffman, the latest addition to Picador’s BIG IDEAS // small books series.

And I’ve mentioned this before but it bears repeating: Picador are putting their catalogues — and, therefore, their outstanding cover designs — on their Facebook page.

Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou reviewed in The New York Times,  The Guardian, and FT. It sounds kind of awesome. The book also has a nice website with lots of content.

The Inevitable Frontier — Jennifer de Guzman, editor-in-chief at the independent comics publisher SLG Publishing, on digital comics in PW:

Right now, sales from digital comics aren’t going to mean we can pack up print publishing. Not even close. But despite being in the midst of it rather than a wide-eyed observer, I can see that in the near future digital comics are going to be playing a bigger role for all publishers than they do now. And it’s better to be so integrated in the change that you don’t notice that it’s happening than to find yourself left behind and marveling at “the things they can do now.”

“Issues” — A less than warm reception for the Kindle in Australia:

Jeremy Fisher, executive director of the Australian Society of Authors, said he was advising his 3000 members to resist publishing through the Kindle.

“As I understand at this point in time, Amazon asks for a very, very big discount from publishers for their works to be included in Kindle so that the return coming back to the publisher is smaller and the return coming back to the author is smaller,” he said.

“The person making the most money is Amazon.”

Hmm… Yes, well, moving swiftly on…

Jacket Whys — A really nice blog about children’s and YA book covers.

And on the subject of kids books…

Who The Wild Things Are –Artist Roger White looks at the inspiration Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things for the Boston Globe:

The Wild Things looked like nothing ever seen in a children’s book. Rendered in simple ink-hatch over watercolor sketches, they evoked a perfect mixture of proto-adult dread and anarchic, childlike glee – an eternal, platonic form of the kindly monster. From the moment they appeared in 1964, they seemed bracingly and completely original. But in fact Sendak’s monsters had a long series of ancestors and descendants…

But according to Bruce Handy, deputy editor at Vanity Fair, (and his children) kids don’t actually like Where the Wild Things Are… Umm… What?

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Published October 13, 2009

Missed Things: Tuesday

Thesis Project — Mikey Burton’s illustrative reinterpretations of classic book covers for junior-high-school students. Mikey’s more recent work, including gig posters for Wilco, is also awesome.

The Writer’s Reader — Michael Silverblatt, the endlessly enthusiastic host of KCRW radioshow Bookworm, profiled in O, The Oprah Magazine (via TEV).

We Are The Friction seen at The BCA, Design Work Life,  SwissMiss and others. Sing Statistics, the “collaborative concern” of designer Jez Burrows and illustrator Lizzy Stewart, and publisher of We Are The Friction, also has a great Flickr photostream (and there are images of the book launch at Edinburgh’s Analogue Books on the shop’s Flickr photostream).

It Isn’t Rocket Science — Makenna Goodman, formerly an assistant to an unpleasant sounding literary agent in New York, talks about her move to rural Vermont and happier times with publisher Chelsea Green in the Huffington Post.

Intelligent Eclecticism — Steven Heller on the groundbreaking illustrated covers used for Time‘s “soft-cover book club” throughout the 1960’s:

Eclecticism was a viable and intelligent decision. While consistent design for a series of related books makes good strategic sense, these books were bound together by the editors’ judgment. Designing them as separate entities — avoiding the impression of formulaic repetition — made the most sense for the book club but also for the artists and designers who created them. Each cover (indeed each book) had a unique integrity that raised the standard of the genre while showcasing the creators’ artistic strengths.

And finally…

On the subject of vintage book design and great illustrations, be sure to take a look at Martin Klasch blogger P-E Fronning’s set of Swedish book covers on Flickr.

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Published October 12, 2009

Missed Things: Monday

I was talking about Romek Marber right before I left the building, so it seems appropriate to get things started with him too…

In an extract from a new book called Penguin by Illustrators, the Creative Review reprints the full text of the presentation made by Marber to the Penguin Collectors Society in 2007:

Much has been made of the grid; it has even been labelled ‘the Marber grid’. I believe that the pictures for the initial twenty covers, played an important part in forging the identity of the Crime series. The grid was important as the rational element of control. The consistency of the pictures contributed, as much as the grid, to the unity of the covers, and the dark shadowy photography gave the covers a feel of crime.

And on a related note, idsgn profiles Gill Sans, the ‘Helvetica of England’ which was used by Edward Young on the early Penguin paperbacks (Marber switched to Akzidenz Grotesk if memory serves…).

Coaxing — Ron Charles, Deputy Editor of the Washington Post’s Book World, interviewed in Bookslut:

The number of books keeps rising, as far as I can tell. The number of readers is stable or stagnant or even declining. When you look at the amount of space we spend covering television… I’m not criticizing my own paper, I’m criticizing my own industry. Who needs help watching TV? Reviews of television shows, I shake my head; I can figure out if I want to watch The Office or Curb Your Enthusiasm all by myself. But help me find a good novel, in this enormous stack of books at the book store. That’s a real service.

You can also follow (the surprisingly candid) Ron Charles on Twitter.

Meanwhile, Publishing Trends looks at Book Reviews, Revamped.

Correspondence — Eric Hanson, author of A Book of Ages, commemorates the 60th anniversary of the letter that inspired the lovely 84, Charing Cross Road (via The Second Pass).

If any of you haven’t read 84 Charing Cross Road, please go do so now…

The Billy bookcase turns 30 — Lucy Mangan celebrates in The Guardian.

And lastly…

I’ve linked here before on several occasions, but I just wanted to mention the all around awesomeness that is A Journey Round My Skull. Recent posts include BLICKFANG — The Eye-Catching Covers of Weimar Berlin and Thirty More Book Covers From Poland.

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