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The Casual Optimist Posts

Published May 24, 2013

Françoise Mouly: In the Service of What the Artist is Saying

In a follow up to his short Q & A with Françoise Mouly and her partner Art Spiegelman for the National Post, David Balzer has a fascinating full-length interview with Mouly, publisher of Toon Books and art editor of the New Yorker, at Hazlitt:

I think that if you set out with a scripted outcome, you don’t succeed. I’m acting out things that work on me. I spent most of my terribly unhappy childhood years immersed in books. I found early on that it was a great way to escape any kind of arguments with my parents or emotional upheaval. I loved reading and being lost in a book. I trained as an architect. As an architect you’re part of a team and no architect can build a house by themselves. But a bookmaker can make a book all by themselves. And an author: look at my husband’s book, or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis—she manages to convey a very rich world, and her personality is very well expressed in a book that shows her handwriting, that has a sense of her.

In a way I got a very classical education growing up in France in the sixties, and learning Latin, Greek, French and English. But I’m well versed in the technological part of the 21st century. The common denominator for me is stories, narrative structure. That’s how I understand things. I find them, books, the right recipient for something that is both complex and nourishing. I watch movies and enjoy them; I watch, you know, The Wire and TV shows, but still, the stories I read in books inhabit my brain in a special way. Those characters are very present in my thinking. And children’s books are a very real part of how I think. So I find it a privilege to actually be in communication, to leave a trace of something that’s actually going to be read.

Hazlitt

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Published May 24, 2013

Another Hipster In The Business: God Help Me

CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition profiles Sarah McNally, owner of McNally-Jackson in Soho, New York:

McNally-Jackson opened in December 2004, just as mega booksellers Barnes and Noble and Borders were expanding and online booksellers were rapidly gaining ground. More than 1,000 independent bookstores stores, one in every two, closed down. But Sarah McNally was cocky and figured she could make it… The lessons Sarah McNally learned as a daughter of booksellers on the Canadian prairies continue to help her survive in the Manhattan jungle.

Listen to the audio.

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Published May 23, 2013

Peter Saville at The Talks

Graphic designer Peter Saville discusses his work and influences with The Talks:

It seemed we were in a revolution in our microcosm of youth culture and we had to propose a new way forward, so I began to reference early modernism – Malevich’s Black Square, Constructivism, Modernism in Germany, De Stijl in Holland, Marinetti and the Futurists in Italy. So when I met with Tony Wilson, with whom I would later start Factory Records, and said, “Can I do something?” and he said, “Yes, we’re having a night called The Factory, do a poster,” I knew exactly what I wanted. I knew I wanted to reference Tschichold, one of the pioneers of modern typography, a Swiss designer… [From]  then on the visual side of Factory ended up being my responsibility. For instance, Joy Division gave me some elements when they were ready to do Unknown Pleasures and I was just allowed to do it the way I wanted to do it. And when there was a second album they came to me: “What have you got?” And that’s where the Closer cover came from.


The Talks

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Published May 21, 2013

Paul Pope: In Your Space


In an interview for BookExpo, cartoonist and artist Paul Pope talks about his work, influences, and, yes, his studio space:

 

Pope’s new book Battling Boy is out in the fall from First Second (and, for the sake of disclosure, distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books). He will be at BookExpo signing galleys on May 30th.

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Published May 18, 2013

More Recent Book Covers of Note

Seeing as it’s a long weekend in Canada, and The Independent, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and countless other fly-by-night operations are jumping on the book design blog train (and doing it far better than me, damn it), here’s another round of recent covers that have caught my eye (just so you know who’s boss):

 419 by Will Ferguson; Design by Dan Mogford

The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman; Design by Scriberia

Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami; Design by David Pearson

The Enchanted Wanderer by Nikolai Leskov; Design by Peter Mendelsund

Gun Guys: A Road Trip by Dan Baum; Design by Jason Booher

The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark by Josh Cohen; Design by FUEL

Watergate by Thomas Mallon; Design by Evan Gaffney

What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam; Design by Jen Heuer

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Published May 17, 2013

Something for the Weekend

They Call it Madness — Jess Nevins  reviews the H.P. Lovecraft collection The Classic Horror Stories for the L.A. Review of Books:

Lovecraft was not the best of his era in any of the genres he wrote in. Clark Ashton Smith was a better stylist. Algernon Blackwood wrote better horror. Olaf Stapledon wrote better science fiction. Yet it is Lovecraft who has been canonized with a Library of America edition, who has provided the source material for academic writings, comic books, and even game shows like Jeopardy, and who has been assimilated by capitalist culture to the point that there are plushies made of his characters.

One would never have guessed this fate for Lovecraft at the time of his death in 1937…

Nevins has been heroically annotating all of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill and, most recently, compiled notes to the very Lovecraftian Nemo: Heart of Ice (pictured above). But before you get sucked in, be warned: the annotations have a kind of Borgesian horror all of their own.

(And while were on the subject of Lovecraft and comics, you could do worse than picking up I. N. J. Culbard’s adaptations of The Mountains of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward published by SelfMadeHero)

Also at the LA Review of Books, Michael Nordine on enigmatic filmmaker Terrence Malick:

Malick has the rare distinction of becoming a celebrity — at least in part — for rejecting the notion of celebrity. At a time when we’re given a direct line into our favorite stars’ streams of consciousness via the social media avenue of our choosing, the 69-year-old continues to let his films speak for themselves. When he was nominated for Best Director at the 1998 Academy Awards, the picture that appeared onscreen was of a chair with his name on it; at last year’s ceremony, a different on-set photo from the same production was used. Each new project of Malick’s is said to come with a contractual stipulation that no photos of him may be used in the film’s promotional materials. No matter: people have repeatedly proven able and willing to create an image of their own. That this picture is incomplete at best and may well be wholly inaccurate matters little. Now more than ever, it seems we still can’t conceive of a famous person who doesn’t want to be famous, and even caricatures are more satisfying than a note reading “not pictured” in the celebrity yearbook.

And finally…

David Berry in conversation Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly at the National Post. Here’s Mouly’s take on RAW:

Basically, there were no venues for comics, and I just thought, “Well, I can do it myself.” The idea was to show people what actually could be done … that it wasn’t so much a style that was one answer to where comics should go, but was more that each person had their own voice.

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Published May 13, 2013

Inside Steven Heller’s Cave

Since I was an infant, I have feared my father’s den. Based on its ancient relics and mass clutter, I have since referred to the location as “Steven Heller’s Cave.”

Steven Heller’s son Nicolas (A.K.A. Ricky Shabazz) has made short video about the apartment where his father stores some of his more controversial design artifacts and ephemera:

Bonkers.

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Published May 10, 2013

Something for the Weekend

Arresting Charm — Writer and artist Howard Chaykin on the late Carmine Infantino who died April 4th:

My best friend Michael Abramowitz was a huge fan of Carmine’s, and I held and hold his tenure on The Flash from 1956 to 1965 in great affection. Infantino’s Flash was infused with a sleek modernism absent from other work of the period, a look and sensibility utterly different from that of his peers. His work was profoundly two dimensional, apparently uninterested in deep space. He frequently used the lower panel border as his horizon, with figures standing on that line, creating an effect somewhat like a stage apron, with flat shapes serving to represent middle and deep distance. It sounds odd, and it was, but it had an arresting charm. Infantino’s work, viewed today, is far more sophisticated, but also more emotionally detached, than that of his colleagues.

You can see more Carmine Infantino covers at The Golden Age blog.

Accidental Publishing — A feature on Seattle’ comics publisher Fantagraphics in Publishers Weekly:

The Fantagraphics publishing program began “almost by accident” in 1981, according to Groth, and over the last three decades has grown to feature some of the most critically acclaimed comics artists in the U.S. and from around the world. The Fantagraphics list includes the work of the Hernandez brothers (Love and Rockets), Daniel Clowes (Eightball, Ghost World), Chris Ware (The ACME Novelty Library), and Jim Woodring (Frank, Weathercraft) and has grown to include multi-volume archival reprint projects such as R. Crumb’s The Complete Crumb Comics and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. By championing the comics medium and the creators it has published, Fantagraphics has been instrumental in raising the profile of graphic fiction as an art form that transcends the superheroes and monsters that established the medium so many decades ago.

The Only Kind of Geography — Writer Alan Moore on psychogeography and, in particular, his work with Eddie Campbell on From Hell (via LinkMachineGo):

My approach, in keeping with Theophile Gautier’s elegant definition of Decadent literature as being capable of plundering from the most ancient past or the most recent ‘technical vocabularies’ (which is also a good working definition of postmodernism), would be to see the current model of psychogeography as evolving from and thus essentially containing earlier versions of the practice, making these original techniques available to modern artists as important tools within their repertoire. For example, one need not subscribe to any nebulous New Age conceptions with regard to ‘ley lines’ to appreciate that Brecon visionary Alfred Watkins’s idea of linking geographic points into a web of sightlines could have modern application if regarded as a linkage of ideas, as in both Iain Sinclair’s work and in my own From Hell.

Psychic Garburator — Margaret Atwood on dreams at the NYRB Blog:

Most dreams of writers aren’t about dead people or writing, and—like everyone else’s dreams—they aren’t very memorable. They just seem to be the products of a psychic garburator chewing through the potato peels and coffee grounds of the day and burping them up to you as mush. If you keep a dream journal, your mind will obligingly supply you with more dreams and shapelier ones, but you don’t always want that, nor can you necessarily make any sense of what you may have so vividly dreamt. Why, for instance, did I dream I had surged up through the lawn of Toronto’s Victoria College and clomped into the library, decomposing and covered with mud? The librarian didn’t notice a thing, which, in the dream, I found surprising. Was this an anxiety dream? If so, which anxiety?

See also: Leon Neyfakh on Margaret Atwood at Technology at The New Republic.

And finally…

An interview with Patti Smith at LA Weekly:

I’m much too self-centeredly ambitious to simply be content with the transfer of success from one realm to another. I would rather write or record something great and have it overlooked than do mediocre work and have it be popular. My goals are really work-oriented. I don’t stay in one discipline because it’s more lucrative than another. In fact, the most successful thing I ever did was Just Kids, for which I had absolutely no expectations. I just wanted to do a beautiful little book that would give Robert [Mapplethorpe] to the people. And then it became a global success. It’s so funny, because Robert always cared about me becoming successful, while I never did. It’s almost like he was suddenly saying, “Dammit, Patti, you’re gonna be successful, even if I have to make it happen!” I always laugh when I think that my greatest success came through Robert.

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Published May 10, 2013

Some Recent Book Covers of Note

I haven’t posted a lot of book covers recently, so to amend the situation here’s a completely unscientific selection of a few designs that have caught my eye recently:

Middle C by William Gass; Design by Gabriele Wilson

Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu; Design by Cardon Webb

On the Map by Simon Garfied; Design by Roberto de Vicq

Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches; Design by Keith Hayes

Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis; Design by Jamie Keenan

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner; Design by Charlotte Strick

London Underground by Design by Mark Ovenden; design by Matthew Young

The Silence of Animals by John Gray; designer unknown (image: Animalia N.1 by Carnovsky)

 

NB: You can find more book cover designs at The Accidental Optimist and my Pinterest.

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Published May 8, 2013

Google Doodle for Saul Bass’ 93rd Birthday

Google marks Saul Bass’ birthday with a neat animated short based on his work:

 

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Published May 7, 2013

Carolie Bickford-Smith—A Series Woman

In this new interview with Gestalten.tv, Penguin Press designer Coralie Bickford-Smith talks about her love of books, her design process and the importance of research:

[vimeo 65388307 w=500]

Coralie’s work is featured in Fully Booked: Ink on Paper, published earlier this year by Gestalten.


You can read my 2009 interview with Coralie here.

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Published May 3, 2013

Massimo Vignelli Makes Books

Massimo Vignelli discusses his approach to book design:

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/64811872 w=500]

The video was produced by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Aron Fay for Mohawk’s “What Will You Make Today?” campaign, and is accompanied by a limited edition journal that reproduces Vignelli’s grid from the film.

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