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Published September 7, 2009

Q & A with Alex Camlin, Da Capo Press

Even though I first noticed the chunky Eisner-esque cover design for Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics at The Book Design Review, it wasn’t until much, much later — when Ben Pieratt posted about the elegant redesign of The Harvard Review at  The Book Cover Archive blog back in June — that I registered that it was the work of designer Alex Camlin.

Both Reading Comics and The Harvard Review demonstrate Alex’s incredible attention to typography, his range of his influences, and the amazing diversity of his portfolio. Currently Creative Director for Da Capo Press, I caught with Alex via email earlier this month.

Briefly, could you tell me about Da Capo Press?

By most accounts, Da Capo started as a New York based trade paperback reprint house in 1975. At the time, many mid-to-large-sized publishers licensed paperback rights to reprint operations, rather than publishing their own paperbacks. In the beginning, Da Capo focused on licensing nonfiction, concentrating on music (jazz and blues/roots mostly), military history, and biographies. This continued through the late 90s, until Da Capo was purchased by the Perseus Books Group, who added the imprint to a growing portfolio that included Basic Books, Public Affairs and Running Press, among others. Da Capo was relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1999 to set up shop alongside another member of the Perseus group, the former trade division of Addison Wesley, renamed Perseus Publishing. Since then, Da Capo has evolved to publish its front list in hardcover and paperback originals, in many more categories. In the process, we managed to spin off a sister imprint—Lifelong Books—with a list focused on self help, childbirth, parenting, cooking, nutrition, and relationships. My first day on the job was also Da Capo’s first day in Cambridge, and we’ve been hacking away ever since on a shadowy fringe of the MIT campus. It will be 10 years in September!

How would you describe the role of Creative Director?

I’m basically just a glorified art director. My ‘staff’ has taken different forms over the years. Currently, it’s myself and one in-house art director who handle the entire list by either collaborating with freelance designers/photographers/illustrators, or engaging in some good old-fashioned DIY.

Approximately how many titles do you work on a season?

50-60 titles per season has been the norm for a while now. We publish two lists per year, Spring and Fall. Due to the changing market and current economic climate (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) our list is down-sizing a bit, and we will be closer to 90 titles per year by next Fall.

What are your favourites to work on?

I really enjoy working on books that are a bit off-beat or quirky. Recently, I’ve worked covers for a Karaoke memoir, a history of jetpacks, and a fake autobiography of Steve Jobs. I find that the books with moderate-to-low sales expectations (usually due to their niche subject matter) are the best to work on. Very few people bother to deconstruct what I’ve done, and the off-beat content usually leads to some interesting visuals.

What are the most challenging?

Believe it or not, it’s the parenting, pregnancy, and self-help books. Visually, these categories are so narrowly defined that it’s a real struggle to develop a unique look for a cover. Plus, the editors and authors who are publishing in these categories tend to favour literal interpretations, which can be quite limiting. So you will rarely ever see any of these in my portfolio, because the goal is usually to make them look the same as—but different than—all of the other books on the same subject. One up-side is that I’m intimately familiar with the range of pregnant-lady stock art that’s currently available, so if anyone out there needs some, just let me know!

How are final covers decided upon at Da Capo?

Initial comps are shown to and discussed by a ‘committee’ comprised of the publisher, marketing director, the book’s editor, and myself. We meet as needed, with greater frequency as the catalogue deadline approaches. I try to address all major concerns and present as many revisions as possible before the catalogue is printed. Covers are finalized somewhere between their appearance in the catalogue and their press date, after we field the reactions of the authors, our sales force and—in some cases—booksellers. Our overall process is probably a bit less formalized compared to other publishers.

Could you describe the design process for the Winnie and Wolf cover for Picador?

A.N. Wilson’s Winnie and Wolf is a historical fiction based on a relationship between Adolf Hitler and Winifred Wagner, the heiress of composer Richard Wagner. Their real-life friendship is well-documented, but the book builds on this to imagine a complicated love affair with Hitler’s rise to power and eventual demise as a backdrop. The themes of Wagner’s operas—primarily Parsifal—are referenced, and echo throughout the book. Picador wanted a new cover for their paperback edition, and I was hired by (the eminent and talented) Henry Yee to work on it. I knew immediately that the novel’s quirky-but-dark premise plus historical setting would offer a good range of possible imagery. I submitted four comps:

COMP 1: The first was my take on an interwar-era German poster, using a photograph of Winifred Wagner as the basis for the illustration. My only reasoning for this direction was that it sort of placed “Winnie” on a pedestal, which the narrator seems to do throughout the entire book. Mostly, it was just fun to create.

A series of propaganda photographs, by Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer, of the German dictator meeting ordinary Germans in 1932 and 1933 – around the time he came to power. (Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

COMP 2: I was ambivalent about this direction, mostly because I really wanted to avoid using Hitler’s image on the cover. The beautiful ornamental border comes from the cover to a playbill for a performance of Wagner’s Parsifal. The photograph is a piece of Nazi propaganda which is somewhere between symbolic and metaphoric representation of the love affair (the normally fierce and confident Winnie is observed as being girlish and entranced in the presence of Hitler). It also doubles as a literal representation of a scene near the end of the book. Ultimately, this direction was chosen for the final cover. I made a few adjustments and re-drew the title type for the final version. The photo was a black-and-white image which I tinted using some hand-tinted photos from an old Nazi book as a color guide.

COMP 3: I loved this one, mostly because of the way the illustration (a detail from an interwar-era festival poster) worked with the title. Also, in the book, Hitler is known to the Wagner children as “Uncle Wolf”, and spends a lot of time telling fairy tales and staging puppet shows for them. With the design, I was shooting for the look of a German children’s book from the 30s. Both direction and comp #1 were influenced by posters and other design featured in a great exhibition I saw several years ago at the RISD museum: Graphic Design In Germany 1890-1945, curated by Jeremy Aynsley.

COMP 4: The art depicts a scene in Wagner’s The Twilight of the Gods from a group of fantastic children’s book illustrations by Arthur Rackham. I thought that several themes from the book could be interpreted in this.

In the end, I was happy with comp #2 being selected. I guess it has the best of both worlds: fanciful Wagnerian themes—that are true to the story, coupled with Nazis—that sell books.

How did you become involved in the redesign of the Harvard Review?

The Review’s editor, Christina Thompson, asked me to speak to a class she was teaching at Harvard back in 2000 or 2001. She had recently been appointed editor of the Review and was planning on repackaging it, and agreed to let me submit some ideas for the cover. I started designing the covers at that time, and we finally had the opportunity to reconsider the entire package (cover and text) last year, for issue #35. It was great timing, because #35 featured the work of Kara Walker and Chuck Close (in addition to the usual selection of great writers)—not bad company.

Do you see any recent trends in book design?

Blogs by book cover designers like David Drummond, Kimberly Glyder, Henry Yee and The Design Works Group offer insight into the thought processes and mechanics involved in cover design, and I think this sort of journal-keeping is really validating for the profession. As for visual trends, I’m really enjoying the resurgence of hand-lettering on covers that has been happening for a while now. There’s something very pure, expressive and organic in handmade letterforms that can somehow be infused with style and attitude, but also timeless.

Who else do you think is doing interesting work right now?

Peter Mendelsund, Julia Hasting, Paul Buckley. Gray318 always does great work. Charlotte Strick’s design for FSG’s paperback edition of 2666 raises a bar (if not the bar)—other publishers should take note. One of the most inspiring covers I have seen lately is Carol Carson’s design for My Father’s Tears by John Updike. Peter Mendelsund discusses it here. It is deceptively simple, beautiful and timeless. Carson seems to have made a point of designing all-type jackets recently, which I totally admire. There is a purist inside of me that believes ALL covers should be all-type.

Where do look for inspiration and who are some of your design heroes?

I read eye and baseline magazines regularly. The Book Cover Archive is also a great resource, it’s been fun watching it grow as a sort of visual database. As for design heroes: W. A. Dwiggins, Jan Tschichold, Alvin Lustig, Massin, Sister Corita Kent, Alexey Brodovitch, Virginia Lee Burton, Wim Crouwel, Buckminster Fuller, Karl Gerstner, Josef Albers, my mom…the list goes on, but that’s a good cross-section.

What does the future hold for book cover design?

I don’t know. For the most part, people have stopped asking me to “make sure the title can be read in that thumbnail image on Amazon”—probably because someone told them that a 3-D, 3G full-color latte-brewing Kindle is going to be the next big thing. Sadly, too many trade publishers—under pressure from mega-store retailers—are focused on ‘packaging’, and are largely concerned with making covers that fit a certain category, rather than those that offer true insight or interpretation of what’s between the covers. On the other hand, the industry is saturated with brilliant designers who flocked to publishing because of people like Chip Kidd, Louise Fili, John Gall, Paul Bacon, etc. This keeps the practice of cover design highly competitive, and we are all better because of the current standard. When you look at some of the amazing stuff that actually makes it to press in spite of the modern publishing process, it’s encouraging and quite inspirational and hints at a future full of possibilities.

Thanks Alex!

Next week: Coralie Bickford-Smith, Penguin Press

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Published September 4, 2009

Q & A with Lincoln Agnew, Harry and Horsie

Children’s picture book Harry and Horsie by Katie Van Camp has mostly been in the news because the eponymous Harry happens to be the very real son of TV host and comedian David Letterman (who also provides the foreword to the book).

But what caught my eye were the illustrations by Calgary artist Lincoln Agnew. The illustrations, which bring to mind 1950’s advertising, cereal boxes, comics, vintage toys, pop art, and Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes, give the book a distinctive retro look.

I managed to catch up with Lincoln by email and ask him a few questions about his work.

Briefly, could you tell me a little about yourself?

No.

Hahahahaha…. I kid….. apparently I think I’m funny.

I’m just an artist trying to find my way with as little compromise as possible.  I go to sleep when I am tired, get up when I’m awake and work on any project i deem “fun” during the hours in between.  I’ve gone into debt trying to maintain my “artistic integrity” and on the days that I become too hungry to care i give in to my belly and use a steel scrub brush to bathe off the guilt…. after i finish my steak dinner.

Is Harry and Horsie the first children’s book you’ve illustrated?

Yes, the first of many i hope…. i really enjoyed the process.  I had no idea what i was doing but was inspired by the challenge.

How did you become involved in the book?

A great friend of mine, Alan Rosales introduced me to Katie at a New Years party in Montreal long before she decided to write a book.  We spoke for about ten minutes before she grew tired of my jibber jabber and moved on.  Years later he heard that she was looking for an  illustrator and recommended me for the job.  Katie and I then started tossing ideas around over email for the next few years but we didn’t reunite face to face until we both arrived in New York to celebrate with our publishers.  She was taller than I remembered.

How did you create the images? Could you describe your process?

My process is clumsy at best, I fumble around with rough outlines, scanners, photocopiers, pencil crayons, ink pens, sandpaper and computers. It’s a struggle, nothing really comes easy and there’s only a small window of time before the love turns to hate.

The illustrations have a wonderful retro feel. Where did you look for inspiration?

It all started with the toys, while I was doing up some rough sketches for the story I figured the rocket ship should look like a vintage tin toy from the 50’s.  That initial research inspired the look of everything to follow.

Where else can we see your work?

It’s around. I do freelance design, illustration and photography for magazines, studios, bands and clothing companies.  I vary my medium and style to fit the project…. so very little of it looks like the book.


Can we expect more children’s book illustrations from you in future?

Absolutely! Katie and I learned a lot during the initial process so we are eager to apply our new found knowledge to create something bigger and better than the first!  We are currently working on a second Harry and Horsie adventure with the lovely people over at Balzer and Bray/Harper Collins.

Thanks Lincoln!

And special thanks to Melissa Zilberberg, Marketing and Publicity Coordinator at HarperCollins Canada, for helping arrange the interview.

All illustrations copyright (c) 2009 by Lincoln Agnew

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Published September 3, 2009

Chris Ware’s Cover for Granta 108

Chris Ware’s cover design for Granta 108: Chicago:

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Published September 3, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, September 2nd, 2009

Watching Gideon — A nice new cover design with some great typography from Nate Salciccioli. Read my Q & A with Nate here.

A Manifesto for Slow Communication — An excerpt from The Tyranny of E-Mail by John Freeman, AKA acting editor of Granta, in the Wall Street Journal:

Slow communication will preserve these threads and our ability to sensibly choose to use faster modes when necessary. It will also preserve our sanity, our families, our relationships and our ability to find happiness in a world where, in spite of the Internet, saying what we mean is as hard as it ever was. It starts with a simple instruction: Don’t send.

And on the topic of slow communication…

On Feeding — an older, but lovely, post from A Working Library on the difference between unread books and an unread RSS reader (via booktwo.org):

those two sights—the stack of books and the unread count in my feed reader—evoke dramatically different responses. To the books, I feel excitement, eagerness… The act of reading is always unfinished…

Yet my feed reader—also always unfinished—evokes within me a dread… I grow weary as the unread count increases, as it fills up with new articles before I can skim the old ones. In it’s timeliness—most blog posts have short half-lives and so must be read now—and the mathematical precision with which the reader measures its contents, I am stripped of my eagerness to read and filled, instead, with despair. Instead of a thing to enjoy, it makes reading a thing to get done with… It’s reading made efficient.

The minimal design of the A Working Library site is really nice too by the way.

Book Cover Design in India 1964-1984 at A Journey Round My Skull.

Prix Fixe — Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette Livre, makes some interesting comments on e-book pricing in the Financial Times, notably that publishers are “very hostile” to Amazon’s pricing strategy:

“On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Mr Nourry said…

There was a “muscular” debate in the industry in the US, he added. Retailers were paying publishers more than $9.99 for each e-book, so were selling them at a loss: “That cannot last . . . Amazon is not in the business of losing money. So, one day, they are going to come to the publishers and say: ‘by the way, we are cutting the price we pay’. If that happens, after paying the authors, there will be nothing left for the publishers.”

Mike Shatzkin has written an interesting follow-up piece about pricing.

Noury also makes more interesting observations about consolidation in the industry in a separate article in the FT, which seem very prescient in light of Disney’s acquisition of Marvel this week.

And finally…

46 Essential Rock Reads — A list to argue over on the LA Times‘ Jacket Copy blog.

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Published August 30, 2009

Q & A with Michel Vrana, Black Eye Design

Michel Vrana, AKA Black Eye Design, has been on my radar since we first crossed paths on Twitter in the run up to Book Camp Toronto earlier this year.

I had hoped to run into the Montreal-based designer in person at Book Camp, but unfortunately, in the dehydrating hustle of the day, I didn’t get chance to introduce myself.

Nevertheless, a few weeks after the event, I came across a series of reissued cowboy books from publisher Gibbs Smith in a Raincoast sales meeting. The witty retro cover designs — with their pop culture references and knowing wink to the distinctive letterpress work of the Hatch Show Print studio — stood out among the more traditional covers in the catalogue.

It turned out that they were designed by Michel.

Small world, I thought.

A little later I found out that Michel also designed covers for Casual Optimist favourite Drawn & Quarterly (also distributed by Raincoast for the record).

And then it seemed Michel’s work was everywhere. Or perhaps it just seemed that way. My love of letterpress, comics, vintage magazines, typography, ephemera and stuff certainly make me notice his work, which often seems to draw on these elements.

Although we still haven’t met in person, we’ve stayed in touch through the electronic wonder of Twitter and email over the past couple of months, and despite some major changes at Black Eye Design during that time, Michel seemed a natural fit for this series of interviews.

You can see more Michel’s work at his design:related portfolio and, of course, follow him on Twitter @michelvrana.

 Briefly, could you outline the history of Black Eye?

In 1993, I started Black Eye Productions as a comic book publishing company. Inspired by Drawn and Quarterly, I sought to do justice to all the hard work that the cartoonists put into the books I published by making sure they were well packaged and designed. Over the years, I did more and more graphic design, and less publishing, in order to pay the bills, and eventually decided to dedicate myself design full time in 1998.

From 1998 onward, Black Eye Design became a boutique design studio specializing in publication design. I spent much of my time running the studio and art directing and not as much time as I wanted doing what I enjoyed most: the hands-on design. Starting in 2006, I rolled up my sleeves and started doing book design again, though I was really splitting my time between running the company and doing hands on work. In 2009, I decided to shutter the studio and concentrate on book design full-time. It’s really what I’ve enjoyed the most over the years, from those first days as a comics publisher onward.

 

Do have a ‘house’ style? How would you describe it?

I’m sure anyone looking at my work would see a style more than I can. I’m sure the word ‘retro’ applies. Someone once described the work I do as ‘prop design’, where the design emulates something else but that is not always the case. My business card, for example, is set up like a vintage boxing ticket. Two of my most recent fiction covers have the titles incorporated into a matchbox and a postage stamp. So that’s probably a trend in my work.

I try to incorporate, whenever I can, a subtle ‘punchline’ into my covers. For example, the book that has the match box is called The Last Shot; it’s a collection of short stories where many of the characters are stuck at a dead end in their lives, and are looking for that one ‘last shot’ to change things. The cover has a few spent matches, and a matchbox with one last match sitting in it. I like to think a reader is going to look at the title, look at the visual and then it will click and they’ll get that little ‘Aha!’ in their head, and feel like they’re in on the joke.

 The (English-speaking) Canadian book industry is largely focused in Toronto. What are the pros and cons of being a book designer based in Montreal?

It’s a pat answer, but in this day and age, you can be anywhere in the world and succeed as a graphic designer. As long as you get the word out there to the right people, you’ll find contracts. I’ve worked very hard in promoting my studio, and now myself. Not having lived/worked in Toronto, maybe it would be easier to find new projects if I lived there, but it’s hard to say for sure.

Could you describe your design process?

I front-load my process with questions, thinking and pencil sketching, rather than sitting down straightaway at the computer.

When I’m not sure I have enough info from my design brief, I’ll usually ask many questions of my publisher, editor, or art director for the project. I find that that really helps clarify things.

When possible, I also try to get a sample, or the whole manuscript to read. I use Stanza on my iPhone to read manuscripts and annotate them with ideas, as I read. When I don’t have a manuscript, I just start by writing out ideas and brainstorming.

I usually delay sitting down at the computer as long as I can. I sketch out rough thumbnails for myself, and sometimes even show these (very) rough sketches to the art director, editor or publisher I’m working with, to get the discussion going. I find that keeping everything loose and unpolished at the beginning frees me from getting too attached to any one idea, from it becoming too precious, and that keeps creativity flowing. It’s a valuable lesson I learned from designer Jan Wilker at the SVW 2008 workshop.

 What are your favourite projects to work on?

I’m going to be a cliché and say that I love working on all book covers. To me, the fun in visual problem solving remains the same whether it’s a kids’ humour book about Gross Stuff, or a collection of short stories by a budding young talent. That being said, my absolute favourite ones are the ones that require me to push myself out of my comfort zone and try something new. Scary, but fun.

What are the most challenging?

The ones with a short design brief. I’ve come to realize that these seemingly ‘easy’ projects are deceptively so, and the covers often require the most revisions. Now when I get a quick design brief, I try to dig deeper with my art director, editor or publisher to find out more about their goals with the cover.

What are some of the common frustrations working with publishers?

My number one frustration would be that sometimes publishers underestimate their audience. As a culture, we’re a lot more savvy about visual communication than many people assume. We’re all continually exposed to clever ad campaigns, posters, book covers; so let’s not underestimate the intelligence and experience of the audience. For books this seems especially important, since you’re talking about a segment of the population that’s especially literate.

 What do you think makes a good cover design?

Marketer Seth Godin hit the nail on the head for me, when he described the role of a cover as ‘to tee up the reader so the book has maximum impact’. The goal of a book cover is to engage the reader, and get them to pick it up, to interact with it (look at the back cover copy, maybe read a quick passage). That’s the stuff that sells the book. The cover is the invitation, and that invitation needs to be enticing.

Do you see any current trends in cover design?

Illustration and hand-drawn type are definitely a trend these days. And I think that Peter Mendelsund‘s design for Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opened up the idea of type layered with the image. In fact, dimensional type, or maybe even ‘environmental type’ seems to be a meme in graphic design these days.

Where do look for inspiration?

I’m a big fan of ephemera: retro packaging, book design, comics. I love that stuff. I also try more and more to keep up to date with what other ‘big’ designers are doing, hopefully without finding myself overly influenced by their work. There are so many talented designers, photographers and illustrators online that it’s hard not to be inspired! Of course, if I ever get ‘stuck’ on a design, I find that tuning out for a while is the best way to go for me, knowing that somewhere in the back of my head, the ideas are still percolating.

 Who are some of your design heroes?

The first designer I was ever aware of was Art Spiegelman. The work he did on Raw magazine, and on Maus has always been influential (right down to my love of the font Metro, which Spiegelman often uses). David Mazzucchelli would also be another cartoonist/designer that’s always impressed me: from his work on Batman Year One to his self-published Rubber Blanket, to his newest Asterios Polyp.

In 1992 I picked up a copy of Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion in London, and it was part of an edition of tiny hardcovers published as Bloomsbury Classics. The design of that first book, and the series, has always stuck with me [see pictures pf the Bloomsbury Classics here and here]. Jeffrey Fisher is the amazingly talented illustrator who worked on the series.

I’m also a big fan of Paul Sahre: I bought Rick Moody’s Demonology completely based on the elegant Paul’s cover: a photo of the multi-coloured ‘Rocket’ candy. I thought the design was brilliant at conveying the idea of the book being a collection of short stories.

Amy King is great, her work shows such variety, but it’s all so well executed. John Gall‘s paperback covers for Haruki Murakami are lovely. Of course, Henry Yee‘s work always blows me away – his cover for The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay is a favourite. And let me not forget fellow Canadian designers Peter Cocking and David Drummond. Not to mention the work of my colleagues on twitter Ingrid Paulson, Christopher Tobias, David Gee.

 What do you think e-books mean for book designers?

It’s going to be interesting to see how new e-book readers shape the reading experience. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that fine typography and graphic design will continue to be important. What I can see in the future is the incorporation of more rich media into book design – childrens’ books with motion graphics, novels with musical cues, or even embedded video. Who knows, maybe we’ll even see book covers with motion graphics on the e-book front? Ultimately, I think it means that books are going to evolve. Down which path I’m not sure, but book designers will have to evolve along with them. Whether we end up with books that act like the publications in the Harry Potter world, or if they’re something completely different.

Thanks Michel!

Next Week: Alex Camlin, Creative Director at Da Capo Press.

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Published August 28, 2009

Something for the Weekend, August 28th, 2009

Now, About That Cover — Ted Striphas, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, discusses the cover of his new book The Late Age of Print, which uses a dramatic photograph by artist Cara Barer:

The Late Age of Print is a book about the past, present, and future of book publishing, and so I knew early on that I wanted some type of cover image that would represent the themes of permanence and change.  Much later, as I looked at the books about books appearing on my bookshelf at home, I decided that I wanted a more abstract type of design, since many titles in my opinion overly-literalized their subject matter.

Another other Cara Barer’s images can also be seen on the cover Michael Greenberg’s  Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life released in September.

You can download a PDF of Striphas’ book under a Creative Commons license from his site, cunningly called The Late Age of Print.

Why Are Artists Poor? — Author and professional  contrarian Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur),  looks at how the creative class make a living in the “new digital economy” for The Telegraph.

Keen is as provocative as ever, but his conclusions — that self-promotion is a requirement for all artists and that being paid for content can be replaced by getting paid to perform in person — are a little underwhelming.  Ernesto Priego offers more thoughts on Keen’s article in his blog post “Portrait of the Artist as a Digital Native”.

And finally…

Having mentioned the  Richie Fahey illustrations that adorn the covers of  Megan Abbott‘s crime novels earlier this week, it would be remiss of me not mention the remarkable R.A. Maguire Cover Art site, which includes an amazing collection of the artist’s book covers, paintings, and source photos from the 1950’s and 60’s:


(And if you can’t get enough of pulp covers and vintage paperbacks, you probably should check out the slightly potty-mouthed Pop Sensation.)

Self promotion and making money in the new digital economy

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Published August 26, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, August 26th, 2009

Black Jackets — The mighty Peter Mendelsund is giving away all of Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack manga series in return for some assistance designing the next cover.

Take That! And That! And That! — Sony, having recently announced a pocket-sized reader and their switch to the ePub format, have now unveiled a new wireless electronic book reader with a 7-inch touch screen.

And on a related note, E-Reads tries to unpack some of the complex issues around Sony, ePub, and DRM.

Typedia — much linked to elsewhere (causing a severe strain on their servers earlier this week), Typedia is “a community website to classify typefaces and educate people about them.” I have no idea what I might use it for, but it looks pretty neat. You can also follow them on Twitter.

On the subject of typography, check out The Alphabetography Project, a photography blog cataloging found letters of the alphabet.

And hell, why not take a look June Corley’s charming typographic sculptures while you’re at it (via The Daily Heller and pictured below)…

Board — Also much linked to elsewhere, the New York Observer‘s Leon Neyfakh looks at three new hardcover books designed without dust jackets. It’s not exactly “the new thing” — more a case of the mainstream catching up with indies perhaps (and a light news day) — but there are still some interesting comments about book design:

Most of the publishers experimenting with jacketless hardcovers, including Viking, FSG, and Graywolf, are consciously taking their cues from the folks at McSweeney’s, who have been putting out beautiful books designed in this style for years. For Eli Horowitz, the managing editor at McSweeney’s, the method is a means of restoring some of the permanence and singularity to the book as object.

From the Design Desk — Designer Suzanne LaGasa talks about the cover design process at Chronicle Books.  (Full disclosure: Chronicle are distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books, my employer).

Big Comics — reviewsnthings asks notable comic artists, writers, publishers, editors and the like “what’s your opinion of the term ‘Graphic Novel’?” stirring up some interesting reactions. Here’s Leigh Walton, comics editor, and Top Shelf’s marketing coordinator, for example:

I find it intensely frustrating, in the sense that I can’t fully support it and I can’t fully dismiss it. Great minds have worked for ages to invent a better term, and they’ve failed. Its shortcomings are obvious — it’s based on a term, ‘novel,’ which has specific requirements of length and content, and it can never replace ‘comics’ as a general term for the medium… Yet ‘comic book’ was reserved ages ago for a format that isn’t really very booklike at all.

Mixtape — Robin McConnell is compiling cartoonists’ playlists for Inkstuds (the radio show about comic books), including Love and Rockets legend Jaime Hernandez.

And lastly, something for the fanboys to argue over: The Top 70 Most Iconic Marvel Comic Panels. (via LinkMachineGo)

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Published August 25, 2009

Megan Abbott Noir Covers

For all my love of clean lines and Swiss modernism, I’m also a total sucker for trashy pulp paperback covers and film-noir movie posters, so when I stumbled across these covers illustrated by Richie Fahey for Megan Abbott‘s crime novels, I thought I should post the series:

Meg Abbott interviewed in 3:AM Magazine.

7 Comments
Published August 21, 2009

Something for the Weekend, August 21st, 2009

Picador Paperback have posted their fall catalogue to Facebook. Apparently they also did this with their spring list too . Needless to say, I think this is  a great idea. Is any one else doing it? (via Arthur’s Design)

Control — An interview with Alan Rapp, former senior editor of art, design, and photography at Chronicle Books and the new Associate Director of Hey, Hot Shot!:

for all the possible flaws in the trade publishing model, one thing I always liked about it is the collaborative process. It defies the auteur model; the author is almost never the sole creator. I suppose that this could sound like the ex-editor making a case for the value of his role in an industry that is really undergoing massive and fundamental changes, but I stand by the principle: all content benefits from editing. The author, whether a verbal or visual one, is almost always too involved with the material to see how it can be best adapted to another form. And the design and production processes are also critical to making the best book possible; one thing [that] I think is in danger of getting lost in self-publishing is the production potential. The physical aspects of books make important, and often subliminal, effects on the reader, but we are getting a much more homogenized offering through the current self-publishing models.

Final Crisis — A short Q & A with Chip Kidd about designing comic book covers at the NY TImes‘ ‘The Moment’ blog.

And finally, thinking of comics, Will Kane (The World of Kane) recently posted some mind-blowing pop-art pages from French comic “La Vie Privée de Dyane” drawn by Michel Quarez, published in 1968 (pictured below). Also check out Will’s post on Quarez’s 1967 Mod Love.

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Published August 19, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, August 19th, 2009

‘The 100 Best Comic Book Covers’ Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 at Kelly Thompson’s 1979 Semi-Finalist blog. I am not a comics nerd (believe that if you will), but there’s some great stuff (new and old) in this epic list…

Open to Question — The New York Times reports on Sony’s decision adopt the “open standard” ePub format for all their digital books. This means that “books bought from Sony’s online store will be readable not just on its own device but on the growing constellation of other readers that support ePub”. Progress of sorts I would say, but before you break out the bunting, David Rothman questions how “open” this format actually is at TeleRead.

Book Design on Twitter — Ben at the Book Cover Archive has posted a list of book designers who Tweet.

Ben’s list was also a nice reminder to mention  Jennifer Tribe‘s amazing directory of book industry people on Twitter.

Book Worship —  Shawn Hazen’s blog cataloging “graphically interesting, but otherwise uncollectible, books that entered and exited bookstores quietly in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.” Lovely (via Book Cover Archive blog).

Penguin Symbols — I know I just mentioned designer David Pearson’s Flickr the other day, but how fantastic is this? “An investigation by Production Manager Hans Schmoller into the origins and usage of Penguin devices”

And speaking of Penguin…

Covers And That — Jim Stoddart, Art Director of Penguin Press, discusses their book cover process and looks at some of the new covers for book released this month:

Each cover may face a wide range of hurdles and conflicting opinions, this is the very nature of book covers. Good designers tend to be very focussed and resiliant, and the value of a good sense of humour cannot be underestimated. As with most design jobs there is a balance of concept, craftsmanship and time dexterity required. Any number of changes to the brief may occur even once the design is finished. But in Penguin Press it is widely appreciated that the more a cover is ‘tweaked’ by a committee the less chance there is of retaining that original spark that we all know helps a book stand out in a world where thousands of books are vying for attention.

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Published August 14, 2009

David Pearson’s Flickr

Print designer David Pearson‘s Flickr stream has all the new additions to Penguin’s Great Ideas series, but also his abstract covers for Éditions Zulma, including this one for Pierre Albert-Birot’s Mon Ami Kronos (via the BCA).

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Published August 12, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, August 12th, 2009

Typographic book covers by Ed Cornish for the 2009 D&AD student award brief for typography (via We Made This).

Tools of the Trade — The Montreal Gazette talks to Hugh McGuire about Book Oven and the new self-publishing landscape:

Call it Self-publishing 2.0. And it’s one of the fastest-growing sectors of the book world, which is itself enjoying a nice growth period despite the recession and the glut of competing media choices.

“Like in any other media, when you the make tools of publishing easy, people will take advantage of it,” said Hugh McGuire, founder of Montreal self-publishing start-up Book Oven. “It’s just now coming into public consciousness.”

It is troubling however that the photograph accompanying the article suggests that Hugh only rents the top-half of his office space!

Richard Green’s redesigns for ten of Penguin’s classic romance thrillers seen at Noisy Decent Graphics.

Dirty Stories — Eric Reynolds, Marketing Director for the Seattle-based art comics publisher Fantagraphics, interviewed in PW:

The book industry has been in a state of flux for at least a year or two years. I think that’s going to continue as everyone adapts to the larger challenges that print media is facing, and that’s going to affect anybody that publishes in print. It comes down to electronic delivery and the shrinking book market in general and just how you navigate these sorts of things… Without making it sounds like we’re totally awesome, we face the same problems that any understaffed, under-funded company does, but we’re streamlined, and there’s not a lot of fat to be cut.

Ornament — Doug Clouse and Angela Voulangas, authors of The Handy Book of Artistic Printing (published by Princeton Architectural Press), have created a nice website and blog for their book about letterpress type.

(I do love this book, but for the sake of full disclosure I should stress that PAPress are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books).

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