Books, Design and Culture
ABDA, the Australian Book Designers Association, recently announced the shortlist for the 64th Australian Book Design Awards. As in previous years, the shortlist includes some cracking designs in a wide-range of categories. The finalists for literary fiction are pictured below:
The winning books will be announced on Friday 13 May at the Awards Party in Melbourne.
Comments closed
Last month, Canadian designer Steve St. Pierre started asking people what the title of their life story would be and creating book jackets for the replies. The results are both brilliant and weird.
Leah Collins recently talked to Steve about his project for CBC Arts:
“I love book cover design,” St. Pierre says, and the thing that makes it special, he says, is that a successful cover is “kind of like a blind date.”
“You’re trying to essentially put charm into a book cover,” he says. But unlike drinks with some random from Tinder, the relationship you have with a novel is likely going to be longer. Probably way more meaningful, too.
“It’s that negotiation, trying to be charming and trying to get someone to just think twice about what’s in front of them,” says St. Pierre. “That, to me, is my favourite part of designing these things.”
For the record, Steve just asked me to contribute a title. I’m thinking about it.
All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage; design by Mario Hugo (Knopf / March 2016)
The Assault by Harry Mulisch; design by Oliver Munday (Pantheon / April 2016)
The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan; design by Matt Vee (Viking / March 2016)
Beloved Poison by E. S. Thomson; cover art Jordan Metcalf (Little, Brown & Co / March 2016)
Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space by Janna Levin; design by Janet Hansen (Knopf / March 2016)
Dada Presentism by Maria Stavrinaki; design by Anne Jordan & Mitch Goldstein (Stanford University Press / April 2016)
Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain by Barney Norris; design James Paul Jones (Doubleday / April 2016)
In the Name of Editorial Freedom edited by Stephanie Steinberg; design by Isaac Tobin (University of Michigan Press / September 2015)
I’m so embarrassed that I missed this great type-only cover by the brilliant Isaac Tobin last year that I’m including it here.
Speaking of which, I also missed this rather fine David Drummond cover from late last 2015 too…
Life and Other Near-Death Experiences by Camille Pagán; design by David Drummond (Lake Union Publishing / November 2015)
A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar; design by Marina Drukman (Melville House / March 2016)
Ben Summers’ cover design for the UK edition of A Man Lies Dreaming published by Hodder and Stoughton was a book cover of note waaaaay back in October 2014!
The Miles Between Me by Toni Neale; design by Alban Fischer (Curbside Splendor / April 2016)
Model Disciple by Michael Prior; design by David Drummond (Vehicule Press / April 2016)
Olio by Tyehimba Jess; design by Jeff Clark / Quemadura (Wave / April 2016)
The One-In-Million Boy by Monica Wood; design by C. S. Neal (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt / April 2016)
A Pillow Book by Suzanne Buffam; design by Alysia Shewchuk (House of Anansi / April 2016)
She Weeps Each Time You’re Born by Quan Barry; design by Joan Wong (Vintage / February 2016)
A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro; jacket art Dan Funderburgh; design Katie Fitch (Katherine Tegen Books / March 2016)
Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue; design by Stephen Parker; photograph Mark Vessey (Harvill Secker / April 2016)
The cover of the US edition published by Riverhead and designed by Rachel Willey was in last month’s post.
Susuzluk (Thirst) by Steven Mithen; design by James Paul Jones (Koc University Press / April 2016)
The Tempest by William Shakespeare; design by David Pearson (Penguin / April 2016)
Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss; design by Rodrigo Corral (Gallery/Scout Press / April 2016)
To the Left of Time by Thomas Lux; design by Jackie Shepherd (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt / April 2016)
We’ll Always Have Paris by Emma Beddington; design by Justine Anweiler; lettering by Cocorrina (Macmillan / April 2016)
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell; design by Justine Anweiler (Picador / April 2016)
This is a variant on the cover of the US edition from FSG designed by Jennifer Carrow, which is also very nice (especially the zig-zag of the type), but I especially like the Andreas Gursky-like edge-to-edge grid and hyper-real colour of the UK edition.
Illustrator Roman Muradov has drawn a beautiful adaptation of Lydia Davis’s (very) short story ‘In a House Besieged’ — originally published in the collection Break It Down (1986) — for The Paris Review:
You can read the rest of the story here.
Comments closed
Related to my post earlier today, typographer Alan Kitching also talked to It’s Nice That this week about printing with letterpress, and a new monograph documenting his work:
Kitching started Omnific studio with Martin Lee and Derek Birdsall, who he had met through Anthony Froshaug, in the late 1970s. They worked from a studio in Covent Garden, then still surrounded by typesetters and other service people, until rents shot up and they moved out to a toy factory in Islington. By this time some foundries were starting to sell off their type, and Omnific bought up a press and installed it at their new studio: “All this type was selling off cheap, cheap-ish, and it was the last chance to get this stuff. So we bought it all and I continued printing there for around three years until I decided I wanted to leave. I didn’t really know what I was going to do but I wanted to buy the press and the type and go and print somewhere”, Kitching says. “I didn’t want to be a jobbing printer but I wanted to start out on my own. It was a very precarious thing to do because we were successful, well-established, and I was taking a backwards step, it was a bit of a leap in the dark.”
The new book, Alan Kitching: A Life in Letterpress, will be published Laurence King on April 7. A ‘Collectors Edition‘ of only 200 copies featuring a limited edition, numbered print by Kitching will also be available. Laurence King have produced four short teaser trailers for the book:
Comments closedComma Queen Mary Norris takes a quick look at the origins of the beloved ampersand for The New Yorker:
Comments closed
The Guardian visits the London home of designer, artist and typographer Alan Kitching:
Comments closedThe rooms in Alan Kitching’s home are arranged like one of his letterpress prints. Some are stacked, some are wedged, some aren’t in the right place. One dominates, while others bow out. But each room, like each letter, makes an impact and has a purpose.
From the outside, it’s obvious this isn’t an ordinary home: three large, shop-style window panels showcase Kitching’s iconic prints – word-based images in big, bold type. A fourth is given over to local notices: jumble sales and student art shows. “That was Celia’s idea,” Kitching says. “She was more gregarious than me.” Celia Stothard, his late wife, bought the property 19 years ago. She chose it for its flexibility: a place for them to live and hold talks, exhibitions and performances. She was a designer and artist, too, as well as a jazz singer.
The building is a former alehouse in Kennington, south London, buttressed up against a courthouse (local folklore has it that Charlie Chaplin used to come here to fetch jugs of ale for his mother). Storage rooms cascade off the back of the ground floor, where Kitching runs the Typography Workshop, into a cellar crammed with his extensive, 19th-century type collection. Upstairs, a high-ceilinged mezzanine has a reading nook reachable only by the swivel of a library ladder.
Tom Gauld on lost literature for The Guardian.
And in related news, Tom’s new book Mooncop will be published by Drawn & Quarterly in September. Can’t wait.
Comments closed
Before the desktop computer revolutionized the way the graphic design industry worked, type and image were painstakingly put together by hand with the aid of various ingenious machines and tools.
Currently in production, the documentary, Graphic Means explores graphic design production of the 1950s through the 1990s—from linecaster to photocomposition, and from paste-up to PDF.
It looks fascinating:
You can support the production the film by pre-ordering a copy from the Graphic Means website.
Comments closedIn a special report, WNYC’s On the Media recently took a look at the publishing industry and print books. It covers a lot of ground — including the subversive history of adult colouring books, Amazon’s bricks-and-mortar bookstore, and South Korea’s quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature — but the opening segment, ‘Why the Publishing Industry Isn’t in Peril‘, with LA Times books editor Carolyn Kellogg is an excellent overview of the current state of US publishing:
Comments closed
