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The Casual Optimist Posts

Published May 16, 2009

Something for the Weekend, May 15th, 2009

The Story of God — designer Arthur Cherry discusses his elegant design (which uses Marian Bantjes’ typeface Restraint to such brilliant effect) for the new edition of Michael Lodahlr’s book at FaceOut Books.

A Manifesto — Ted Genoways, the editor of Virginia Quarterly Review, on the future of university presses and journals:

University presidents need to see what articulate ambassadors they have in their journals and presses, what tangible, enduring records they present of the variety and vigor of their sponsoring institutions…[G]reat universities extend well beyond the edges of their campuses. They reach out to the larger world, they challenge and engage the public, and the most effective and enduring way of doing so remains the written word.

HarperCollins Wants to Be Your Friend — Leon Neyfakh looks at publishers and social media in the New York Observer. Ostensibly it’s about the ever so anodyne HarperStudio, but more interesting stuff comes from the other people interviewed:

“I don’t know if it’s a direct response to the fact that publishing is in a very uncertain period right now, or if it’s just an idea whose time has finally arrived, but people right now are really interested in experimenting,” said Ami Greko, a 29-year-old digital marketing manager at Macmillan. “There seems to be a real sense of, ‘Let’s get creative—nothing is set in stone yet, so let’s just try a whole bunch of stuff.’”

Das Buch vom Jazz — The German-language version of The Book of Jazz, illustrated by Cliff Roberts ,  found in a used-bookstore by Today’s Inspiration’s Leif Peng. The black and white illustrations are wonderful.

Moaning Eton-boys & Middle-Aged Hackettes — A great defense of blogging by Nina Power at Infinite Thøught  (via PD Smith on Twitter):

Print media suffers from a lack of space; certainly it is selective, but it is also exclusive — all the stories that don’t get told, the injustices that get covered-up. We may feel we can ‘trust’ print journalists more than bloggers… but the sheer quantity and variety of information online allows for the exposure and discussion of things that might otherwise get ignored.

And finally…

The Tyranny of Data — The New York Times on Douglas Bowman‘s decision to leave his position as top visual designer at Google, and the  limitations of crowd-sourcing design:

“Getting virtually real-time feedback from users is incredibly powerful,” said Debra Dunn, an associate professor at the Stanford Institute of Design. “But the feedback is not very rich in terms of the flavor, the texture and the nuance, which I think is a legitimate gripe among many designers.”

Adhering too rigidly to a design philosophy guided by “Web analytics,” Ms. Dunn said, “makes it very difficult to take bold leaps.”

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Published May 15, 2009

Paul Auster Granta Interview

“A lot of hesitation, stopping and starting, and re-thinking” — Author Paul Auster talks about his new book Invisible and his writing process with  Granta magazine’s US Editor John Freeman.

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Published May 13, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, May 13th, 2009

“Any colour, so long as it’s grey” — New typographic covers for the Faber editions of Samuel Beckett,  designed by London-based studio A2/SW/HK. You can see more from the series at Faber’s Flickr photostream.

The Publishers’ Dilemma — Tobias Schirmer on publishing’s digital future:

[D]igitalization is not about a product moving from its analogue to a digital form. It is a revolution that changes everything. The old business models don’t work the way they used to. Inevitably, publishing needs to think about how it can still inject value somewhere in between the creation of content and its distribution. Not transition but change management is needed.  Acknowledging this is the first step in getting out of the publishers dilemma.

Now is the Winter of our Discontent — Peter Olson, the former chairman and CEO of Random House, is feeling gloomy in Publishers Weekly. I wonder how much of this only applies to bloated multinationals?:

With the recession accelerating changes that are already taking place in the market, the world after 2009 will likely begin to look very different for book publishers, and a likely return to the relative security of the last decade may be wishful thinking.

Tintin and the Broken Records — 600 lots associated with the cartoonist Hergé were sold at auction at the weekend:

The sale in Namur, southern Belgium, dominated by five large hand-drawn pages of original cartoon strips, raised 1,172,000 euros (1.57 million dollars), including charges, — a world record for Herge-associated items and a cartoon strip book record in Belgium, said Thibaut Van Houtte, an expert on hand for the Rops auction house sale.

Titles Designed by Saul Bass — A collection of Bass’ incredible film credit sequences at Not Coming To A Theater Near You (via Grain Edit on Twitter):

One is pressed to cite an example of an active, self-contained, and characteristic credits sequence in film prior to the work of Saul Bass. And…  in regard to innovation, renown, and influence, Bass’ impact in credits design remains virtually unparalleled, even to this day.

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Published May 13, 2009

Parker

Darwyn Cooke (author of one of my favourite superhero comics of recent years, the award-winning The New Frontier) talks about his comic book adaptation of The Hunter by Richard Stark (AKA Donald E. Westlake) — also the inspiration for John Boorman’s film Point Blank starring Lee Marvin — with Tom Spurgeon and writer Ed Brubaker at The Comics Reporter:

The first chapter of that book is so well written it makes me want to puke, but it was like there’s nothing visual left if you put the prose down. It’s all there. It’s an external description, people’s reaction to the guy. So it’s like, “You know what? Let’s take a good chunk of space here and see if we can achieve the feeling of that chapter purely through the visuals that he’s directing. Right down to the holes in his shoe.

Publisher IDW has a preview of the first chapter here.

Am I excited? Yes. Yes, I am.

Link

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Published May 8, 2009

Somthing for the Weekend, May 8th, 2009

Anything But Saintly — More pulp goodness seen at The Old-Timey Paperback Book Covers Flickr pool.

The Decline and Fall of Books — Nicholas Clee, editor of Book Brunch, dons “The End is Nigh” sandwich-board in The Times:

A Gutenberg-style revolution is not… expected in the next few months. But if you are a lover of well-stocked bookshops, then you should enjoy them while you can.

Poets Ranked by Beard Weight — Or why I <3 the internet (via eightface).

Penguin Automaton made by artist-maker Wanda Sowry to celebrate Penguin’s 70th anniversary and available from Art Meets Matter . Apparently winding the handle “causes the Penguin to drink from a mug, its flippers to waggle and a piece of 70th Birthday cake to rise magically from the table” (via the lovely tweeps at New Directions ).

Good Typography is Invisible, Bad Typography is Everywhere — Stephanie Orma talks to five acclaimed designers about the art of type in the SF Examiner. Interesting to see some conflicting/contrasting opinions in the mix…

7 Habits of Highly Effective People I Know — A nice list from Noisy Decent Graphics Ben Terrett.

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Published May 8, 2009

Bigger May Be Better, But Old Problems Persist

Amazon launched the new large-screen Kindle DX in the US on Wednesday. The device, apparently aimed at newspaper readers and the textbook market was met with much fanfare in the New York Times (who had leaked the announcement earlier in the week), the Financial Times,  Publishers Weekly and elsewhere.

Despite the immediate gadget-lust, the hype was also met with  skepticism (and more than certain amount of unlinkable ambivalence). The DX’s $489 price tag, ‘blah’ design, lack of colour and Amazon’s decision to release the new device so soon after launching the Kindle 2 have been common complaints.

But for all these (fixable) flaws, what really nags at me about the Kindle is that whilst I can see what’s in it for Amazon, I just can’t see what’s in it for me the reader. With each launch it seems that readers continue to be secondary to  Amazon’s business strategy.

I’m unlikely to buy a Kindle because, all things being equal, I’m always going to choose a paper book over an electronic one. If  convenience is the primary concern, then I’m going to read an e-book on the phone I carry in my jacket pocket.

The Kindle DX won’t change my habits either. I already read newspapers on my laptop and I don’t want to carry 2 large devices. If I was a student, I’d want to my textbooks on my laptop too — if only because of the 2 magic words: “copy” and “paste”.

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Published May 6, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, May 6th, 2009

Vintage awesomeness — Hella Haase cover seen at the Vintage Paperbacks (Non-Penguin) Flickr Pool.

Make it Good — Jacket copy matters according to a Publishing Trends survey:

Flap copy is especially important for fiction. And title and cover impact are closely related to the impact of jacket copy. If the flap copy defies the expectation created by the cover and title—if, for instance, the cover of the book leads the reader to expect a thriller but the flap copy identifies it as horror—readers are less likely to buy it.

The Common Addiction to Mediocrity — Guy Kawasaki talks to Hartmut Esslinger, founder of frog design and professor at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna (lessons here for the book industry for sure):

Excellent products require more then just a good designer or a good design agency—they require humanistic and cultural vision, courage and discipline in execution.

Which leads quite nicely to Nora Young‘s podcast great conversation with filmmaker Gary Hustwit, director of Objectified and Helvetica, on CBC Radio’s Spark.

Thrift-Store Philosophy — some nice vintage book cover design finds at the always excellent Ward-O-Matic.

Instant Gratification — An interesting Q&A with Patrick Brown of Vroman’s bookstore in Pasadena (PW‘s Bookseller of the Year in 2008) on The Big Bad Book Blog:

People greatly underestimate how important browsing is for physical purchases, largely, I think, because it’s lacking in the online world. People come to an ecommerce site already knowing what they want to buy (for the most part). This isn’t so in our store, where people frequently come in for one book and end up leaving with a book that caught their eye on the way to the section or waiting in line at the register. The other thing we provide that I think is invaluable is a physical place for literary culture to happen.

Well-Aimed Typewriter Keys — After 70 years, Little, Brown and Co. have unveiled a new logo  designed by  Lance Hidy.

The Book Depository — who have a great range of books and offer free shipping world wide (and have this great live map), has launched an affiliate program. Can I humbly request someone develop a wordpress widget for it please?

And lastly, The New Yorker‘s The Book Bench blog has a sneak preview of the new Dan Clowes book.

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Published May 4, 2009

Why Not? Or How We Live-Tweeted Fall 09

Why Not?

One the things that really stuck with me from Michael Tamblyn’s 6 Projects That Could Change Publishing For Ever presentation at the BookNet Tech Forum in March was the idea that publishers have to “place lots of little bets quickly.”

It tied into another idea that’s been kicking around recently about reframing ‘Why?’ questions into ‘Why Not?’ questions. That is to say, whenever we — publishers, book distributors et al — ask “why would we do this?” we should flip the question on it head and ask “why wouldn’t we?”.

This doesn’t mean we should pursue every idea that someone puts forward. Sometimes there will be good reasons not to try something — “it costs too much” and “it’s illegal and/or evil” are perfectly valid reasons that spring to mind to nix something (and no doubt there are  plenty more). But, in my experience, reframing the ‘why?’ question encourages people (me included) to think creatively and be more positive about ideas/projects we might otherwise dismiss out of hand.

#rainfall09

This is all a roundabout way of explaining how I ended up twittering from the  Raincoast Books Fall 09 Sales Conference last week.

Before we got under way on the first morning, a few of the early birds were laughing about using Raincoast’s Twitter account to micro-blog the presentations as they happened. Although it started as a joke, the near-inevitable “why would we?” and “who cares?” questions came up, and that raised the stakes. I turned the questions around and couldn’t actually think of any good reasons why we shouldn’t ‘live tweet’ the conference. I had my laptop, wireless access and a power source, so it seemed easy enough to do. And I figured people would tell me pretty quickly if they were bored and I should stop.

Decision made.

We quickly adopted #rainfall09 (an identifying reference tag for twitter posts or ‘tweets’ which was accidentally shortened to #rainfall on more than one occasion) and,  with some help from my colleague Siobhan, I covered all 3 days of the conference in a series of posts of 140 characters or less.

To people who live their lives online and are accustomed to social media rather than the slightly conservative book publishing world, the response to all this is probably a very sarcastic “big whup”. But sales conferences are not usually open and inclusive, and, needless to say, there was a degree of skepticism and resistance to overcome. Certainly it was experiment for us, if not, admittedly, a very large one. And  we were, as far as I’m aware (and someone please correct me if I am wrong), the first publisher/book distributor to Twitter their entire conference.

20/20

With the benefit of hindsight, the drawbacks were predictable. It was very intensive and time-consuming and I found it was difficult — at least initially —  to interact with the people actually in the room and tweet. I’m sure I missed a lot of nuance and I passed on more than few book samples with the barest of glances. We probably over-tweeted and lost a few followers as a consequence.

That all said, the positive outcomes vastly outweighed the problems. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. We learnt as we went along — becoming better organized and tweeting less — and we gained far, far more followers than we lost over the 3-day period. Our posts were re-tweeted. Followers asked questions and made requests. We raised awareness of Raincoast, the publishers we work with, and the books we distribute. And we were able to connect with reviewers and bloggers we weren’t previously aware of.

I would do some things differently next time for sure. But, ultimately, it was definitely worth doing.

If you are thinking about live-tweeting your conference, here are my 5 Tips:

  1. Be Prepared — Whilst Twitter is great for spontaneity,  making sure you can set-up  your laptop with internet access, and a power source is essential (our conference days were 10 hours straight). And knowing the books (at least a little) in advance, definitely helps — I was often scrambling to find additional information on particular titles and bookmarking a few pages in my browser in advance would have been a plus.
  2. Be selective — Raincoast Books is primarily a distributor. We have something like a thousand titles a season from a variety of publishers. It is impossible to tweet about all of them, and it became quickly apparent it isn’t desirable to try. Our followers just wanted the highlights.
  3. Link — Readers also wanted links to more details if a title caught their eye. I had publisher websites and google open in separate tabs at all times. Even so, linking wasn’t always possible. Put your marketing materials online early and encourage your authors to update their sites (and join Twitter!).
  4. Be creative — If you can’t get your marketing material for your key titles online before conference, or something comes out of left-field, use the resources you do have to find an interesting work-around. When we had some very immediate reader interest in a book called The Quotable Douchebag and there was no information available online, the publisher Quirk Books quickly threw up a blog post with details.
  5. Tool-Up — Twitter management tools like TweetDeck and HootSuite are always useful for professional Twittering, but being able to quickly monitor replies, retweets, and references, not to mention conveniently shorten URLs was essential during conference.

Did you follow @RaincoastBooks or #rainfall09 last week? If so, how did you think it went? What could we do better next time? Leave a comment below or email me.

Note: This is my personal blog, and this post is my personal opinion. Neither reflect the opinion or official policy of Raincoast Books.

Illustrations from the Inspired Magazine Social Bird Icon Set (From the top: Chimero’s Birdie by Frank Chimero, Burdy by Tad Carpenter, and Jacque by Jessica Gonacha).

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Published April 28, 2009

Monday Miscellany, April 27th, 2009

Every battle is won before it is even fought — Amazon acquires Stanza. Like just about everyone else, I was completely blindsided by this. But should we have seen it coming?

The Black Series — Paperback covers from 1960’s Swedish crime series “Svarta serien”  illustrated by Per Åhlin seen at Martin Klasch’s blog.

100 Books on Typography — Compiled by Charles Nix president of the Type Directors Club (via Design Observer).

Writing Without Words — Stefanie Posavec’s gorgeous visualizations of text and the writing styles of various authors (via @Ashbury&Ashbury).

The Art of Penguin Science Fiction—  James Pardey is creating an archive of Penguin science fiction cover designs. If I have one complaint it’s that you can’t see larger versions of the covers, but otherwise it is brilliant (via Ace Jet 170).

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Published April 25, 2009

Something For The Weekend, April 25th,2009

Comic Shelves by Oscar Nunez for Fusca Design (via The Ephemerist)

Goodnight Mechanical Dinosaur — Neil Gaiman on Batman in Wired (via LinkMachineGo):

[T]he great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in. That’s just Sturgeon’s Law: “90 percent of everything is crap.” Can you imagine how many thousands, or millions, of words have been written on Batman? Try to read them and you’re looking at 100,000 pages, perhaps a million, and you can assume that 90 percent of it is crap. Yet the 10 percent, and even better the 1 percent of that 10 perfect, is absolutely glorious. That pays for everything.

Tea and Cake — Louise Tucker chats to colleague Scott Pack about The Friday Project on HarperCollins’ 5th Estate blog:

It is still the only imprint to specialise in taking great web content and making books from it. That gives us a much wider brief than most people think…

Our future plans are very exciting. Our author deals will now all be profit-share arrangements with us splitting the profits of the books 50/50 with the authors. We are soon to announce some bold eBook initiatives and there is more to come.

Figuring it Out — Type legend Erik Spiekermann, co-author of Stop Stealing Sheep, on the basics of typography.  Not new, but still a great primer/reminder.


Will it sell in Moosejaw? — Book designers Bill Douglas (The Bang), Ingrid Paulson, (Ingrid Paulson Design), Angel Guerra (Archetype Design), Terri Nimmo, (Random House), and Kelly Hill, (Random House), discuss their craft in The National Post (Ingrid Paulson’s cover design for Kate Ausptiz’s The War Memoir of HRH Wallis Duchess of Windsor pictured above).

Wrapper’s Delight — A librarian at the Bodleian Library has found the earliest-known book dust jacket in an archive of book-trade ephemera:

Unlike today’s dust jackets, wrappers of the early 19th century were used to enfold the book completely, like a parcel. Traces of sealing wax where the paper was secured can still be seen on the Bodleian’s discovery, along with pointed creases at the edges where the paper had been folded, showing the shape of the book it had enclosed.

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Published April 22, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, April 22nd, 2009

Blue Prints for a World Revolution — seen at the Antiquarian Bookshop 108 Buddhas, which has an amazing collection of avant-garde journals and books from Japan and Eastern Europe  in their gallery section (via Michelle McCormick’s Inspiration Resource ).

12 Steps to Better Book Publishing — Good stuff from Jonathan Karp, publisher and editor-in-chief of Twelve Books in Publishers Weekly:

It seems likely that the influence and cultural centrality of major publishers, as well as other producers of information and entertainment, will diminish as digital technology enables more and more people to create and share their work. This is exactly why publishers must distinguish themselves by doing better what they’ve always done best: champion books that offer carefully conceived context, style and authority.

The State of the Industry — Neil Nyren, senior VP, publisher and editor in chief of G.P. Putnam’s Sons talks to author  J.T. Ellison at Murderati (via @sarahw).

Poetic Interiors — Some lovely typography for Arrays of Conscious by Chanson Duvall at Beyond the Covers.

Embracing Change — Victoria Barnsley, chief executive and publisher at HarperCollins UK,  profiled in The Guardian:

There are still concerns about the digital future, such as how to continue making money. “There are some very big questions that we still have to answer – the biggest one being value,” says Barnsley. “How to make sure that consumers are going to be prepared to pay for digital content, because a lot of them are getting quite used to getting it for free?”

And yet…

Why newspapers can’t charge for online content — Dan Kennedy elsewhere in The Guardian:

I have no philosophical objection to the idea that news organizations ought to be able to charge for their online content. The problem is that it’s highly unlikely to work – mainly because there are too many sources of free, high-quality news with which they’re competing.

Font of Ill Will — Vincent Connare, designer of Comic Sans, profiled at the WSJ:

The font, a casual script designed to look like comic-book lettering, is the bane of graphic designers, other aesthetes and Internet geeks. It is a punch line: “Comic Sans walks into a bar, bartender says, ‘We don’t serve your type.'”

And finally…

Soldiers of Lead — An introduction to layout and typography for use in the Labour Party  (via Design Observer).

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Published April 20, 2009

Naïve: Modernism and Folklore in Contemporary Graphic Design

Published this month by Gestalten (thanks Siobhan!):

A minimalist design vocabulary is currently being reinvented by a troop of young graphic designers who are rediscovering the stylistic elements reminiscent of classic graphic design such as silkscreen printing, classical typography, hand lettering, woodcutting and folk art and integrating them into their work. Naïve documents this extraordinary renaissance of Classic Modernism, from the 1940s to 1960s, in contemporary graphic design.

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