JACKET MECHANICAL

Reminder!

2012-02-07T16:10:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Nathaniel Bellows for the heads-up on the display

The Indies get it.

The above photo is of Book Culture on Broadway—one of my favorite uptown browsing spots.

My favorite uptown browsing spot used to be Books and Co. on Madison, but it is, alas, no more. Long ago, in 1997, its landlord, The Whitney Museum, raised the bookstore's rent and it was forced to fold. There was a hue and cry, and plenty of outrage, but money being money, and outrage being impossible to monetize, (that is, unless there is some outrage-backed securities fund out there I am unaware of*) it went under.

A trip to Books and Co. usually went something like this:

1. You'd look through their books for hours you didn't know you'd had free, on occasion spending a good portion of the day on the floor, propped up against a stack, reading. (ok- this was back before I had a regular job) On an afternoon you might find Susan Sontag, or William Maxwell, or even mid-fatwa Salman Rushdie browsing alongside you ("Allahu Akbar! No, no, only kidding! So jumpy Salman..."). If you walked in knowing what you wanted, the salesperson would: know of the book; have read it; could pronounce the author's name; could show you where in the store you'd find it; would have recommendations for something similar or better. Then they'd ask you if you'd prefer to read it in the original Uzbek like they did and you'd feel suddenly really bad about yourself and angry at them. Next...

2. You'd walk out with an armful of books you didn't know you needed, thinking "I can't believe I just spent so much money on esoterica, extranea, superflua" (They kept the Horkheimer, Gramsci and Cioran by the register—and maybe a Latin dictionary or two) and subsequently...

3. You'd go home, read your purchases, at which point you'd recognize that a good book buyer (in this case Steven Varni- who now lives in Venice, Italy, with his family) is much like a conductor, in that, out of a mass of voices, he will pick out only the most rewarding for your attention.

The space that Books and Co. once occupied became: a short-lived furniture store, a short-lived appliance store, some other short-lived stores I can't quite recall due to their short-livéd-ness, and now, what is surely to be, a short-lived deli.

All of which is to say:

Attend the tale of Books and Co.! Subsidize your local independents!

On the East Side there is still the fantastic Crawford Doyle...

and downtown, well, howsabout Three Lives?

or maybe:

McNally Jackson!

And by the way- a gentle reminder that i am going to be in conversation at McNally Jackson this thursday night. To be discussed, literature, design, music and practicing.

Please join us. It would be nice to have a big, book-buying crowd.

Looking forward to seeing you!

Thursday, February 9, at 7 p.m.

McNally Jackson Books

52 Prince St. (btw. Lafayette &; Mullberry)

*Note to Goldman Sachs: outrage backed securities- the fund that feeds itself!

Alea iaca est: continued!

2012-02-06T11:34:00.000-05:00

Another Die-cut! This one from the wonderful Matt Dorfman.

Textured stock, foil-stamp, matte pre-printed case.

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Wiretapping

2012-02-02T14:56:00.000-05:00

On occasion, I use a freelancer for a jacket at Pantheon. On occasion, that freelancer happens to be frighteningly talented.* Which is to say: Paul Sahre.

Here is his gorgeously simple and clever work on Thomas Mallon's fantastic new novel WATERGATE. (Die-cut, sculptural deboss, matte pre-printed case.)

*and a design icon.
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Dog and Pony Show Continued!

2012-01-27T21:55:00.001-05:00

Next talk I'm doing will be at McNally Jackson...

This one is pure enjoyment for me. I'll be speaking off the cuff (no pesky PowerPoint files to prepare) with a good friend (fellow musician, scholar and Knopf author Glenn Kurtz) in a warm environment (best bookstore in the city) to an audience of like-minded people (no hecklers please).

Subjects we will most likely cover: Music; Kafka; Design. And lord knows what else. Once Glenn and I get talking it's pretty hard to shut us up again.

Please join us. (did I mention that it is free?)

Thursday, February 9, at 7 p.m.

McNally Jackson Books

52 Prince St. (btw. Lafayette & Mullberry)

The Hall of Justice

2012-01-13T20:55:00.003-05:00

THE DESIGN OF CRIME at The Vera Institute of Justice (which turns out is not this place).

There might still be space for you. Free admission, but seating is limited.

For info follow this link.

An arbitrary sampling of slides to wet your whistles:

What does the above says about gender roles in pulp crime fiction?

What IS the Bouba Kiki Effect and what does it have to do with YOU?

Why is the Statue of Liberty bearing arms? Wait- what?

How do you get all those pesky blood stains out?

Was Jane Austen a pistol-packing mama?

All these questions and more will be answered next week.

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Alea iacta est

2012-01-11T15:37:00.001-05:00

For some reason every Pantheon freelancer working on the last list wanted to employ a die-cut as part of their proposed jacket design. We accommodated (almost) everyone (can you believe it?!). Finishes started rolling in last week. Three below: mine, Paul Sahre's, and Matt Dorfman's. I'll flip some of them over for you in a week or so.

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Before the Law

2011-12-30T15:36:00.001-05:00

The first of a couple of speaking events in NYC this winter:

The Design of Crime: One Man's Journey Through a Graphic Life of Murder and Justice.

What does crime look like? How do we visually represent justice? From Dostoevsky to P.D. James; from Justice Rehnquist to Stieg Larsson; from Franz Kafka to Guantanamo—a designer’s ten-year attempt to capture the changing face of criminality and the law.

January 19th:

The Vera Institute

Admission is free but seats are limited.

Details are here

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Design Matters

2011-12-18T22:31:00.000-05:00

I remember, years ago, one fall evening, driving back from Vermont on i95 south, my wife in the passenger seat strobed by the oncoming traffic, my two children, still young enough to be in kid carseats in the back, sleeping with their heads lolled over in opposite directions, their mouths wide open. I was passing the time by listening to my ipod, which I had loaded up with episodes of Design Matters in an effort to learn something or other about design; my fledgling career. Debbie Millman was interviewing someone (Carin Goldberg, I think, first, though the memory is hazy and I wouldn't swear on it—and then, I imagine, Michael Bierut) and I was concentrating hard enough on the interviews that the long stretch between Brattleboro VT. and Hartford Conn. had gone by without my noticing.

When you practice a profession that you weren't explicitly trained to do, you become not only an autodidact, but a particular kind of neurotic—fretful about what you don't know; panicky of being called out for some bit of ignorance which, unbeknownst to you, turned out to have been critical. Being just such a neurotic, I was in the habit of sleuthing out every way, oblique or otherwise, to fill in the gaps in my design knowledge. Hence the podcasts.

I thought to myself later that night, as we crossed the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge into Manhattan, after having now listened to a dozen or so of these interviews, that I had learned more on that car trip than I had through any and all of the Intro-to-Design books I'm embarrassed to say I bought in those early years of my design career.

About a month or two ago, without preamble, and with no discernible reason for doing so, Debbie asked me to come on the show. Below: the upshot. I'm not sure if any of the subjects that Debbie and I covered will be as helpful or informative as the podcasts I listened to on that drive years ago—I assume they are not, and in any case I'm not trying to build up that particular parallel. I just remember that night drive with such clarity, the feeling of renewal that comes from having young children and a new job, and it seemed, now is an appropriate moment for me to stop and look at the ground I've covered since that fall night. The trip, as it were, has gone by without my really noticing.

So if you are interested, you can listen on the Design Observer site, or download the podcast on itunes. I hope you enjoy it.

Some brief notes to accompany your experience:

The organ at Columbia University's St. Paul's Chapel is an Aeolian Skinner.

Louise Fili's gorgeous jacket for The Lover looks like so:

Editing: Though I am reading submissions from agents to edit, and working behind the scenes on some projects, I am still searching for that perfect project to sign.

John Gall deserves, frankly, the lion's share of the thanks for hiring me at Vintage. Carol Carson for bringing me to Knopf.

Chip Kidd does, actually, sometimes, "suffer fools gladly." He "suffers" me in particular. Except for the "gladly" part.

The fact that books are, among other things, souvenirs, came to me one night while I was writing. This felt like an important realization. In the subsequent months I have learned that many have come up with this same metaphor independently; among others, the great James Bridle, who writes, and speaks beautifully on the topic of the various kinds of work a book does.

And, Fictions III, you ask? It is coming. I promise. not sure when. As soon as i can.

Any other questions, you know where to reach me.

Peter

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Fictions. Part II

2011-11-16T11:00:00.001-05:00

The first section of this article can be found:

Here

I apologize for the delay in posting this second part—I really have no free time at all.

Disclaimer:

This is part two of what is, even after being dramatically cut for web consumption, a very long piece indeed. If I can stand it I'll post the whole thing ( in multiple installments) though I reiterate that I reserve the right to stop in the middle—even mid-sentence—if I so desire. Editing the thing down and formatting it takes more time than I thought it would.

But enough with the dithering—onward.

Thanks again for reading,

Peter

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"Everything is a cipher..." —Vladimir Nabokov, Signs and Symbols

"Symbols have one characteristic in common with signs;
they point beyond themselves to something else. " —Paul Tillich

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If you'll recall—last week I began to examine the jackets for Nabokov's masterpiece Lolita, and, for the most part, found them wanting. 1

Though many of these covers are formally satisfying—

and though many are successful in representing some facets of the text—

few of them, I thought, addressed the true critical (or ethical) difficulties the book confronts readers with.

More importantly, none of these jackets seemed, upon desultory glance, to tackle what I called the book's "underlying significance;" it's tacit agenda. This led me to ask whether we designers are, or should be, in the business of representing 2 the underlying themes put forward by the works of fiction that we are charged with making jackets for.

"...is it our job, in the case of Lolita, to represent "the central sexual relationship between a young girl and an older man;" or are we being asked to delve deeper?"

In order to answer this question properly, it's necessary that we understand the role of the jacket in the marketplace, in the home, and in the culture at large. It is further required that we delve into the mechanics through which novels and stories themselves convey meaning, such that we may observe how jackets mimic and map this process. 3

A daunting assignment...

So l will begin here at the narrow end of the discussion: the construction of the jacket itself—as that is my particular area of expertise. 4 I will work my way, slowly, laboriously, back towards the broader questions (the larger role of the jacket; the semantics of fiction), and at the end of the day, I hope that through this process we will have come closer to understanding whether "delving deeper" into the thematic significance of novels and stories is indeed part of our purview as jacket designers.

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When setting out to design a book jacket for a work of fiction, whether we are aware of it or not, we designers are picking our subject matter from a limited set of bins. Though the choices we can make as designers are unlimited, the categories that define most of the choices we make when we pluck these ideas from their native fictions, are, on the face of it, quite easy to list.

To wit, some broad categories for fiction jacketing subject matter: 5

1. “Character”

Put a person on the cover. Frequently a winning design tactic, though also tricky— as we designers don’t want to rob readers of their satisfying acts of imagination. One should always show a portion of a character rather than the whole magilla. Body parts: hands, feet, hair, ears, etc are, and should be, more common than full frontal facial disclosure. Much of our work is spent hiding, occluding, interrupting faces.)

Above, we see John Gall's lovely cover for the Vintage edition of Lolita. 6

2. “Object”

Put a thing on the cover. Always compelling, and sometimes serves to establish place, tone and character as well. Paul Sahre’s covers for Rick Moody’s books spring to mind, as do the pair of shoes Gabriele Wilson put on her cover for Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

The loathéd, yet somehow obligatory, Lolita lollypop. I hereby declare a moratorium. The above is not an actual Penguin cover- I just borrowed the format to prove a private supposition of mine that almost any image whatsoever, when placed in a fetishistic context like the one above, will resonate metaphorically. In other words, all the art here is in the template, the frame, itself (Jaime Keenan's I believe?). 7

3. “Event”

Put a recreation of, or documentary evidence of an event on the cover. Especially useful if our work of fiction is historical, for which a wealth of extra-fictional reference materials already exist (think of all those Napoleonic War paintings adorning War and Peace jackets). The “event” can refer to any occurrence which transpires during the course of a work of fiction (or is alluded to) and which feels particularly resonant (Like, say, the bullfights in The Sun Also Rises).

4. “Place”

Put a place (or something indigenous to or indicative of a place) on the cover. Deploying this category is a very common method for constructing fiction jackets. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been told by editors and publishers that a novel needs a jacket which provides “a sense of place.” NB often the “place” category also provides the “Time” category, as well as the “Theme” category, and obviously all these categories overlap in a myriad of ways...

5. “Time”

Indicate a narrative’s time period on the cover. Provided most often as an ancillary benefit of categories 1-4, often of several at once. Imagine, for instance, a jacket with Wiener Werkstätte wallpaper adorning it. One would see this book jacket and one might guess that the story inside came to pass some time around the early part of the Twentieth century and most likely took place in some kind of mitteleuropan setting. An example of the above (Here—substitute Art Deco for Wiener Werkstätte) is Coralie Bickford Smith’s jacket work for Penguin UK’s F. Scott Fitzgerald series. The Art Deco patterns (as well as the high production values) tell you everything you need to know: that this book unfolds during, and amidst the trappings of the Jazz Age.

6. “Text Sample”

Put an image that corresponds specifically to a line of text on the cover (frequently this line of text will be the book’s title). One frequently sees jackets designed to represent a gobbet of text. If a designer was given “Gone with The Wind” as a title, I see no reason (except for one of taste) that he couldn’t invoke wind, or the “windblown” as his jacket design subject matter (though we designers hate to simply parrot or re-iterate book titles on our jackets).

As I mentioned above, titles are frequent sources of inspiration for jacket designers as they often reference the previous categories and are frequently, themselves, windows into the author’s main thematic concerns.

Which is to say that these two publishing instruments (titling and jacket design) do similar work on behalf of the narrative and in the selling thereof.

As it turns out, fiction titles themselves can also be categorized in the groupings listed above:

Character: Anna Karenina; Tristam Shandy; Gilgamesh; Lolita
Object: The Maltese Falcon; The Scarlet Letter; The Golden Bowl; The Overcoat
Event: Sophie’s Choice; The Tempest; The Crying of Lot 49
Place: Moon Palace; Howard’s End; Berlin Stories; London Fields
Time: 1984; Parade’s End; Light in August; Spring Awakening
Text Sample: The Catcher in the Rye; Handful of Dust; The Day of the Locust; Tis a Pity She’s a Whore; Rememberence of Things Past (though only in English)
Etc. 8

7. “Affect, or Tone”

Put an image that represents the tone or overall emotional disposition of the narration. Sometimes a jacket amounts to no more than the mood it sets 9

8. "The Tell-All"

Put as many explicit plot elements as possible on the cover. "The Tell-All," I realize, is not really a category of material in the sense that the others are—it is, rather, comprised of the other categories and is thus more of a methodology (an extremely ill-advised methodology).

(Character: check; Setting: check; Time period: check; Object: gotta assume that sword's going to come into play...)

I've chosen a deliberately jarring example here— but let it be said that the raison d'etre, as well as the pictorial grammar of this romance novel cover above is no different from that of countless literary fiction jackets produced every day. As it happens, this category, this crammed-together grab-bag of plot points I'm calling the "Tell-All" is a tried-and-true favorite of those in publishing who would believe that the primary job of the jacket is to report as much of the storyline to the viewer as possible and that signaling a book's genre through character and setting is paramount.

The "Tell-All" represents the apotheosis of the diegetical 10 form of jacket design. There is no editorializing here; there are no veils to penetrate. Only one part of the author's output is being addressed here- the most mundane part. Namely: "what happens" during the course of a given tale. 11

Which is to say: The "Tell-All" is not merely an admixture of the above categories. Almost all book jackets for works of fiction are admixtures of the above categories. Rather, the "Tell-All" crowds out all other forms of representation, leaving us with nothing more than the particulars of plot.

I detest this kind of jacket for reasons which will become clearer soon.

And, finally:

9. “Theme itself”

Put a representation of the book’s “big idea(s)” on the cover…

1980 US Putnam, Perigee Books

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As we can see- all of these categories I've just identified seem to collapse neatly into two classes:

1. The narrative facts (Character, Object, Event, Place, Time, Text)
2. The meta-narrative facts (Theme, tone, affect…)

We might now come to the logical conclusion that jackets are either literal or metaphorical; narrative or thematic.

And we would be wrong to do so.

It is obvious that these two classes coincide and interact—that jacket imagery can perform some kind of semiotic double duty 12.

Good fiction jackets, it seems to me, relay information to the viewer by means of imagery constrained to the particulars of a given plot, whilst hopefully, simultaneously, signifying something of the meta-narrative facts as well. Just look at that plucked flower above: It is clearly participating in both the "Object" and "Theme" categories...13

But:

What is the exact relationship between these two classes? How is this mutuality brought about? What is the nature of the interaction between the specific image and its general metaphoric implications? How can the representation of a specific plot point on a jacket also be a reference to a clearly established thematic denotata? Let's return to some concrete examples and see…

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1. At the very end of this catastrophically long series of blog posts I might itemize all the Lolita covers I've designed myself (like the Coke comp in part 1) and will find them wanting as well. (i do not put myself above the fray here). Also—it's extremely tempting to design covers to serve as illustrations for each and every argument made here, but a guy's only got so much time...

2. The vast majority of book jackets for works of fiction are representational (we will discuss both ABSTRACT, as well as ALL-TYPE jackets in a later installment).

3. As David Hume famously pointed out, you can't turn an "is" into an "ought." Nevertheless, understanding the "is," (how designers actually work) goes a long way towards clarifying the "ought" (how designers should work)

4. The "construction of the fiction jacket itself" will be broken down into four sections: 1. Materials 2. Methods 3. Medium and 4. Meaning. The Four M's!

5. Though I've tried to be as thorough as possible, it is entirely possible that I've omitted some obscure miscellaneous category here (bearing in mind that there are a couple categories like "All-Type" and "abstract" I have still in my back pocket).

Also:

I realize that this entire section will seem willfully reductive. Building blocks are supposed to be irreducible. So this crudeness is purposeful. Does that excuse it? Perhaps not.

(I should mention as a footnote to this footnote that the true irreducible components of any two-dimensional design are shape and color.)

6. What I find compelling here in John's treatment is that through the use of extreme cropping he has effectively transformed the face (of Lolita, one presumes) into an almost-abstraction. One senses instantly that this face is more than just a face. So then, one wonders, what does this mouth, pregnant with import, stand for? I'm not entirely sure, though, if we look at John's rejected comp for this same edition, we get some indication...

Rotating the image, John radically alters its meaning:

What was once a mouth, is now...er...

This rejected cover does quite a nice job addressing the appropriation, manipulation and distortion of innocence spoken of in Nabokov's text. An innocuous image here is force-ably transformed into something lubricious. The photo's treatment, at the hands of the designer, becomes an apt visual analogy to the forced degradations little Lo must endure.

(We are getting a tiny preview here of ideas that are coming imminently in this essay—ideas on meaning and usage. Manner of usage is an important concept in jacket design and, I would imagine that we are all tiring of me saying this, but: it will be referred to in a later post)

7. See?

8. And: lo and behold...

9. On a related note (and as an addendum to the earlier “wit in design” screed: if I never see another book jacket that portrays, through its graphics, the opposite of its title (i.e. if the book is called “Happy”, the jacket looks sad; if the book is called “Black” the jacket is white; etc) it will be too soon. This is an example, not of cleverness- but of obstinacy. When I worked on Thomas Bernhard’s book Frost for example,

the temptation to be shunned was not that of making the jacket look “frosty.” But, rather, I had to practically physically restrain myself from making the jacket look hot, or fiery. That contrarian solution might have been more pleasing to segments of the design community, but it would have made the book look droll when it is anything but.

10. Diagetical meaning relating to characters, things, etc inside the primary narrative

11. I am making an important distinction here between implication and outright regurgitation. This is a distinction that will become vitally important later in this essay when we begin to dissect the work a jacket does over time...

11. All imagery, in fact, performs "some kind of semiotic double duty", whether intentionally or not.

13. though this particular object, this flower, does not have relevance to the plot per se, and thus is more of an emblem of the plot as a whole, rather than an instance of something specific mentioned in the course of the story's unfolding.

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Section III coming up next (maybe next week or the week after if I can get to it).

I will continue the conversation above; examine some examples of fiction jackets which take on "Theme" without recourse to narrative particulars; I will contend with abstract fiction jacket designs, the "non-sequitur" fiction jacket, and I will discuss the all-type jacket for fiction as well.

See you soon I hope.

PM

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1. Fictions

2011-11-03T12:05:00.000-04:00

Hello blog readers!

Below: the first in some promised posts about the process of jacketing works of fiction.

Some caveats: I've cut this piece down quite a bit (almost in half)— though it will still range over five or more installments (if I decide to post that much of it...) If you feel I've left a particular question I've raised in this section unanswered, well, that's because there is more writing coming down the pike—so please be patient.

This essay is heavily footnoted. I found that footnotes didn't work so well in this Blogger format—so I made the decision to place the notes at the conclusion of each section as end-notes. The end-notes are in red. Hopefully they contain interesting info so don't skip em! You can jump back and forth if you want to, or read them at the end. Suit yourself.

In any case, thanks for reading,

Peter

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Fictions

"Lolita discussed by the papers from every possiblepoint of view

except one: that of its beauty and pathos."—Vera Nabokov

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1.
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I was recently asked to judge a book cover competition. I’vejudged several of these things over the years but this contest was ratherunique; it was comprised of unpublished covers commissioned expressly for thejury to ponder, rather than being made up of titles already commercially sold.More unusually, the style of the covers was set in advance. If you’reinterested in the complete brief, here it is.

I began here with the intention of discussing how theparameters of this contest and several other factors over-determined the highquality of the final results- but I found myself repeatedly coming back to oneparticular contestant’s book cover, dwelling obsessively on it, and my mind, asis it’s want, spiraled off into territory that seemed more fertile andcompelling than my original topic might have been.

The cover in question was submitted by Emmanuel Polanco, and it’s a proposed jacket for Nabokov’s Lolita.1

(Here’s another version)

Is it the crude handwritingthat makes it so effective? Doesn’t the entire composition, in itsoffhandedness, carry the faintest suggestion of the childish about it? It isneither lusting nor leering, nor overly proud of its own wit.2

It seems to eschew the urbanegaze of Nabokov’s old-world narrator in favor of a naive and guileless one. Thepainted lips hint at an underdeveloped and mythologized understanding ofromance; it is the cover, I could imagine, that a young Dolores Haze might havedrawn.3

I’m sure the effect is unintentional.

And yet, the naiveté suggested by this cover reminds me thatthe unequal object of Humbert Humbert’s attentions is a child. And this line ofthinking, in turn, reminds me that Lolita is, and should continue to be treated as (despite its verbal gymnastics, lasciviousness,and intermittent humor) a shocking and sad book (Dolores, or sorrows). It is not a sexy book- not an erotic book.

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It is easy to forget, especially easy given the soft-core Lolita renderings (book jackets, filmadaptations…) one sees down the years. Nabokov’s is a tale ofperversion—unequal partnership, corrupted youth, and non-consensuality. Lolita is, for sure, a tragicomedy, and there are elements of theglib, the sensual, and the pure slapstick in it—but these days we tend to overemphasize these easy aspectsof the tale and its telling. Furthermore, we think on the various rejections,bans, and the generally shocked reception the book was given upon publication,and we mentally admonish our predecessors for their prudishness. We then makebook jackets and other portrayals that are self-congratulatory in theirsensuality and/or lack of gravitas. But are these representations of Lolita truly speaking on behalf of thebook, or rather, some modern attitude towards mid-century mores? The more Ithink on it, the more I feel like this kind of jacketing solution, for Lolita, is false, and pernicious in itsown way. It is at best, amisrepresentation, at worst a kind of whitewashing, and it does no justice to the text it putatively represents.4

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“Here seemed to be nothing to prevent my muscular thumb fromreaching the hot hollow of her groin-just as you might tickle and caress agiggling child”

Ick.

It’s repulsive.

But it is wonderfully alliterative.

But still: ick. This is a child we are talking about here.Explicitly.

This dialectic is partly the point. If one examines the onesex scene we are privy to in full, this infamous lap scene, what is salient isthat only one member of the couple is fully aware that a sexual act istranspiring. Lolita wiggles, squirms on her stepfather’s lap, her stepfatherachieves “the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known.”

Double ick.

It is the discordant lop-sidedness of the encounter, in ageas in awareness, (coupled with the dual resonance of the lap as both the safeseat of childhood- the place where trust is implicit-as well as theintersection of sexual congress), which makes the scene rich, if stillrepugnant. This friction incriminates the reader, who is also, for reading thepassage, in collusion, and now, like H.H. a “monster”. This incrimination, Iwould posit, is partly the point. We are complicit- we readers of Nabokov’s Lolita. We are witnesses to a crime,moreover witnesses who are seduced bythe crime, by its trappings, by the cadence of its sentences, by Nabokov’s genius,and we just can’t turn away.

Pretty depictions of softly lit Lolitas (anatomized or whole)on book covers seem to perform the opposite function: they downgrade ouroutrage and our complicity (and in so doing they also lessen the effect of the book’scentral metaphor—but I’ll get to that anon.) They are the cover design analogueof porn stars in schoolgirl uniforms-there is no longer anything obviouslydiscordant about them as they are the fantasy-fulfillment of a culture that haslong since sexualized its young. We don’t see those plaid skirts and feel thefrisson of an unusual juxtaposition. We see merely the vague promise of sex, ifeven that. The uniform in this case is just another symbol that has lost itsoriginal immediacy. And through repeated use it has become meaningless. It nolonger represents innocence, thus cannot represent fallen innocence either.5

So what’s a designer to do?6 Does a designer attempt a(truly) shocking cover, in order to properly represent the ethical disquietthat Nabokov’s narrative provokes?

“She was shaking from head to toe(from fever) She complained of a painful stiffness…and I thought ofpoliomyelitis as any American parent would. Giving up all hope of intercourse…”

Groan.

In surveying the extant editions I don't see many that rise to the challenge.

Perhaps the first edition had it right: theso-straight-it-must-contain-something-dangerous approach, otherwise known asthe “brown paper wrapper gambit,” (which in this case is green.)

Megan Wilson's Lolita cover for the Vintage edition is an interesting case—and stands as one of my all-time favorites. (Though—let's ignore the Vanity Fair quote shall we? What could "The only convincing love story of our century" possibly mean?) When I first encountered this edition I assumed our supposed Lolita's pose was flirtatious. One knee bends in front of the other—in almost a curtsy. She seems locked in some sort of stylized sexual demurral. However as time passes (and my reading of the text evolves) I begin to factor in the stark, ominous lighting, and the gaze of the photographer becomes threatening; the pose of the subject one of real discomfiture. The knee crosses protectively. What seemed to me at first as "come hither" has evolved into "please don't."

Thiscover (below) is satisfying (in it's imagery at least- the typography isanother matter entirely…), and comes pretty damn close to achieving therequisite unease I’ve been discussing thanks to a stark visual double entendre. And yet, though clever, the jacketsomehow feels too narrow in focus to be a proxy for Nabokov’s striking array ofideas. It performs its circumscribed task well, but it doesn’t capture the book’sgestalt.

Which leads me to my next point: maybe it’s simplyimpossible to give this book the jacket it deserves if one believes it deservesa representation of the central sexual relationship between a young girl and anolder man.

But as it turns out, this book, Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, isnot, actually, about 7 a deranged pervert lusting after a nymphet.

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I mean, it is, butit is clearly much more than merelythis. Lolita’s central argumentconcerns the young and the old, but the old world and the new world-As most of you know- Lolita is a book about America: A young, robust,bobby-socked, dewy-eyed and apple-cheeked America- an America of

“Sweet hot jazz, square dancing,gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth . . .”

This is an America of license plates, motel room keys, cokebottles, chewing gum . . . a young, fresh, insolent, unaware America.

"We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001"

Lolita is the taleof a gentleman caller, hailing from an exhausted continent, (exhausted in itslinguistics as it is in its literature) to adopt, as HH adopts his ward, a newlanguage—to inhabit it, fetishize it, tyrannize it. 8

Nabokov’s is a book about America and its language.

Isn’t it?

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Every book, or (or rather: every good book) contends with acalculus greater than the mere facts of its narrative. If books were only dramadelivery-systems, than we’d have nothing to talk about in literature classes,and Stephen King 9 would be a Nobel Laureate. The facts of the narrative maykeep us turning the pages, but it’s a book’s greater purpose, as it were, thatmakes it truly worthy of our attentions. We come for the liter-al, but we stayfor the liter-ary.

This much is obvious- but it begs an important question fordesigners of book jackets.

(We) book jacket designers are delegated the responsibilityof representing a text- That is unless we see ourselves as meager decorators ofit. 10

But assuming for themoment that we’ve taken on the task of representing the text, rather than justadorning it, we designers must determine, must we not, what a book is about before we design a jacket for it? I find, when I’m reading amanuscript, I’m constantly on the lookout for images, characters, ideas thatcan serve, metaphorically, as proxies for the whole. But the question isconstantly emerging in my mind: is this “whole” the narrative itself, in itsliteral details, or the thing(s) the narrative is driving towards- its greaterunderlying significance? 11 Which is to say: is it our job, in the case of Lolita, to represent "the central sexual relationship between a young girl and anolder man;" or are we being asked to delve deeper?

The answer to this question turns out to be more complex than one would imagine.

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1 Directly after I judged this Polish Book Cover competition, I was asked by to participate in John Bertram’s excellent Lolita project (wherein he asked a slew of book jacket designers to make their own Lolita jackets). I’m not sure if this particular Lolita cover above would have resonated with me quite as much if this second assignment hadn’t come along. In any case, because of these two factors Lolita was on my mind...

2. Book jackets these days, for reasons I won’t unpack, seem to revel, overtly, in wit, conceptual deviousness, unusual clever or droll juxtapositions- we, as a professional community, seem to have elevated the visual bon mot above all other virtues. Again, I won’t delve into the “why” of the matter here for want of space, but suffice it to say that clever work is the work that is celebrated in our community. Not that wit in itself isn’t valuable, and doesn’t have an appropriate place in design- but wit is not the same thing as insightfulness, and often insightfulness is what is called for in a book jacket. Our fetishizing of cleverness has taken a toll I believe, in that (quite often) these clever solutions work at cross-purposes to the (more often than not sincere) narratives they represent. A book in which an author has gone out on a considerable limb in order to write in a genuine and unaffected fashion does not want a cover that winks at the reader. Wit, when it becomes compulsive (as anyone knows who has a friend who puns too often) quickly becomes its opposite- dullness or predictability. Are we, as a professional community, that punning guy? I hope not.

3. Or, could it be the work of the young HH?

4. Christopher Hitchens, describing his (and my own) mutating relationship with the narrative: “When I first read this novel, I had not experienced having a twelve year old daughter…I dare say I chortled, in an outraged sort of way, when I first read, ‘How sweet it was to bring that coffee to her, and then deny it until she had done her morning duty.’ But this latest time I found myself almost congealed with shock.” Hitchens also judiciously reminds us that “immediately following each and every one of the hundreds of subsequent rapes the little girl weeps…” Read that sentence again. Now survey again the treatments this book has been given. Feel the disconnect?

5. The book jacket which always springs to my mind when thinking of exhausted metaphors and their remedies is Chip Kidd’s brilliant jacket for Richard Lattimore’s translation of The New Testament. In lieu of yet another meaningless cross or crucifixion scene (divorced from any real notion of death, torture, or sacrifice) Chip gives us a photo of a real, actual, honest-to-goodness dead person. Offensive you say? I counter that you are inured to the once vibrant meanings that underlie your sacred texts.

6. This is a good a time (I.e. Sooner rather than later) to mention that book designers are onlypartly responsible for the covers they produce, in the sense that their workhas to pass muster with a marketing department as well as an editorial division(not to mention authors, agents, etc. who also must be appeased). It bearsrepeating that in attempting to sella book, designers must, not always, but sometimes, pander to the very public Iwas just dressing down- a public which can on occasion lack the interpretivesubtlety to parse literary subtext. I.e. if the general reading public expects a schoolgirl, or schoolgirluniform on a Lolita jacket, then bookbuyers and book sellers will also be expecting a schoolgirl or schoolgirluniform on a Lolita jacket; and onecan then reasonably assume marketing departments in publishing houses will wantthem as well. In the end, going backwards, upriver towards its source, eveneditors begin to take their cues from misinformed readers at large. I willreveal that on one occasion, a good friend, who is a multiply best-sellingauthor (ahem) was told by his editor (NOT AT KNOPF) that his latest work wasn’tup to snuff because it “didn’t seem enough like the kind of thing” he writes.Ie, on occasion, even authors cannot beat back the tide of their own marketingexpectations. (Dead authors have no say in this process, which is one reason wedesigners love them as much as we do). In any case, managing these expectationsis, sadly, also part of our jobs as jacket designers.

7. I am aware that “about” is a tricky word. We’ll get to that in a minute.

8. "Even Lolita, especially Lolita, is a study in tyranny." Martin Amis, Koba The Dread

9. For the record, I am a big fan. Just— not for the same reasons that I am a fan of say, James Joyce's

10. I will confess that many times I find, in my own work, that decorating a book jacket is a more efficacious approach than that of attempting to represent or explain its meaning The “explication” versus “decoration” schools of book design will be discussed later.

11. ABOUT-NESS:

It is extremely complicated to explain what one means when one says that a book is “about” something or other (difficult because the word “about” is hard to define; difficult in the sense that most good books proffer more than one central argument; and difficult, especially difficult, in the wake of the putative “Death of the author,” Barthes, Saussure, Derrida, pluralities of meaning, and nearly fifty years of intertextuality, etc.)

And yet…

what I call “the cover design test” would be useful in Comp Lit discussions: i.e. if your theory of meaning (Marxist, Post Structuralist, Feminist, Freudian, Post Colonialist, etc.) cannot translate into a commercially viable book cover, then it fails at properly describing your text. (For instance: what would Roland Barthes have envisaged for the cover of Balzac’s Sarrasine—The subject of his structuralist analysis in S/Z? I would posit that this imaginary jacket would be a catastrophe, as his famous interpretation of the text was highly idiosyncratic and personal.) All of which is to say that I believe there to be more consensus around what books are “about” than most may think. We designers, in our jackets, attempt to capture meaning which is not exactly consensus-driven, but rather meaning that is both true enough, and flexible enough such that most readers won’t find it a stretch to believe. That is to say that we are trying to maximize understanding. In this sense, jacket design is a kind of interpretational utilitarianism.

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Next installment—a continuation of the first. Examining the jacketing process for fiction in more detail (I will break it down, index the processes...). Along the way: a brief conversation about fiction titles. After which we return to Lolita with (hopefully) greater understanding.

Coming Soon

Oh- and one more thing...

2011-10-29T11:58:00.000-04:00

(I know. Steve Jobs OWNS that expression.)

In any case, immediately after publishing that last post, this thing below arrived in the mail. It's my good pal Jason Fulford's contribution to EXPOSURE magazine. Jason and I spent a day together this summer taking photos and recording weird music. Here, on Track 2 of a flexidisk, a recording of me torturing a serial tone-row on the piano.

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Update

2011-10-29T11:30:00.000-04:00

I've been writing a bit.

Not for this blog—but, rather, for various extra-curricular projects I've been juggling.

It occurs that I should post some excerpts from the various pieces here on Jacket Mechanical—as a method of sharing my thoughts, and more importantly, as a method for clarifying my thoughts before these pieces get sent off to their destinations. Often I find that the moment I click "publish" on a blog post, some fresh insight will arise concerning the very thing I was posting about. Of course in the digital universe, making changes after publishing something is no trouble at all; in the real world of ink-on-paper, it's all a tad more complex.

So, in the hope that sharing some of my thinking on this blog will bring some new intelligibility to said thinking: prepare ye for a hefty dose o' prose ... coming your way in the ensuing weeks.

(As I mentioned: these posts will be excerpts. In Installment One I will wrestle with Lolita and its jackets; In installment Two I will begin to unpack the jacket designing process for works of fiction; and Installment Three— well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.)

In the meantime—a handful of new and new-ish jackets:

George Dyson's TURING'S CATHEDRAL.

What a remarkable book. The story of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study and the pursuit of the theoretical universal machine. From Pantheon. This one is off to the printer fairly soon (comping up the jacket involved me, in our printer room, weilding a hammer, a hand held tin stamp, and a whole lot of apologies for the racket). There will be a (better made) die-cut jacket and a pre-printed case.

The new Jens Lapidus's (Easy Money is out now; the other two are to come soon)

This series of jackets was generated by my wondering what a QVC, a Home Shopping Network of blunt-force instruments might look like.

NB: I convinced the powers-that-be to go with the old "Mötley Crüe" diacritical treatment of the copy here. My reasoning was, the title of the second book in the series, which translates as "Never Fuck Up" wouldn't fly with the chains. So what if we retained the original Swedish word "Fukka"? The diacriticals were a natural result of that first decision.

Unfortunately EASY MONEY in Swedish is "SNABBA CASH" and that wasn't ever in the running for an English title (though it hasn't precluded me and others at Knopf from using this expression. Often. Example: "How does the publishing establishment feel about the advent of ebooks? Snabba Cash?").

And this next one is VERY EXCITING—

as it is a new story collection from the much beloved Charles Yu, author of

HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE:

Here with the spine:

Here's Ingo Schulze's re-telling of the Adam and Eve story;
set during the fall of communism in Eastern Europe...

John Berger.
Nuff said. (un-coated, stamped case wrap- no jacket)
Sorry the scan is so crappy.

The end of the Black Jacks ...Volume SEVENTEEN for chrissakes:

Another Tezuka...(this one has a two inch spine. it is MASSIVE)

A book on the, er, piano...(foilstamped) The colors all match my Mason & Hamelin's.

Another Tezuka...

Some oldies- from August and September. Can't remember if i posted these...?

Why humans maintain an irrationally positive outlook on life (humans—but not this human):

Freud does blow. I printed this with a matte UV finish. Those
of you in the know will remember that when you print with

a gritty matte lamination on a black surface it leaves a white powdery residue,
which is to say that this jacket is more fun in the real world then it is on screen.
(Don't try snorting the Matte UV please...)

Stories from Adam Ross of MR. PEANUT fame:

The first Sandor Marai I've ever worked on that isn't a teeny trim size....

The Yale University Press paperback of Nick Fox Weber's Knopf hardcover

There are many, many (too many?) more—but I've run out of time to post.

See you all soon,

PMendy

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2011-10-06T23:24:00.000-04:00

Steve Jobs was a designer first, CEO second.

"His focus on the little things like the 'space between different letter combinations' was a constant from the development of the Macintosh to the iPhone, which was released more than 20 years later.
This is what separated Mr. Jobs, as a chief executive, from everyone else."

I wish I could send this, the article above, to all my design clients- if only to point out that a good design, whatever its intended use, is an aggregation of many small decisions- each one as important as the next. The resulting design is no more or less than the sum of these decisions. Each choice, no matter how seemingly insignificant, matters.

I've come to realize that many people seem to subscribe to the view that there is such a thing as "a design" which exists in the abstract— platonically; independent of its component parts. This belief in turn gives rise to the misapprehension that changing a design (a bigger font here, a different color there, a change in layout) does not, in fact, make for a different design altogether. "We're keeping the design," I'm told, "but we want some changes." Such a thing isn't possible. These details are the design.

All of which is to say: the bevel on that power indicator matters. The size and placement of that typeface matter. That color matters. It all, in fact, matters.

It is exactly these "details" that separate products we tolerate from those we love.

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2011-10-06T17:04:00.000-04:00

As a postlude to that last entry:

Sam Potts designed covers for Stephen Jay Gould's oeuvre in February for Harvard University Press. See what i meant about a collective unconscious? Either that, or this is one of them "memes" you read about...
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2011-10-01T11:18:00.000-04:00

Egregiously late to the party, as ever, but:

Writers No One Reads

Well, not exactly no one, but few people anyway.

Case in point: Did you know that the son of G.E. Moore (my favorite of the Cantabrigian analytic philosophers**) was a poet? Did you know that he, Nicholas Moore, pseudonymously published translations of Baudelaire's Spleen? Oh SURE you did. I for one, did not.

There are many fun obscurities here*

Some writers are better known than others. Clarice Lispector, for instance, ("resurrected" by New Directions; actually, the fantastic Ben Moser already "resurrected" her thank you very much) is having some volumes re-released- here designed by the amazing Paul Sahre:

Interestingly, I've been talking about designing a series in which all the covers, collectively comprise a single head, for years- and now, in a single year, two such series have appeared (Cardon's Oliver Sacks's and Paul's Lispectors) it just goes to show that there is, indeed, a collective design unconscious. (unless, of course, Cardon and Paul have been reading my dream journals which i wouldn't put past either of them).

I love the design of this New Directions series, with its restrained palette, beyond measure. My jealousy makes me want to kill Paul Sahre, burn his crops, and sow the earth with salt. But I mean that in a good way. Hi Paul!

* the blog in question is brought to you by, among others, 50 Watts
** Who else are you going to warm to? Wittgenstein? Russell? Please.

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Design Bureau

2011-09-21T12:35:00.000-04:00

Design Bureau Magazine recently asked me to participate in a wee interview- go pick up a copy if'n you're interested. They also devoted six pages to some of my music designs (designs for records and cds and animations and other music-related items) which was super nice of them.

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Kafka outtakes #3

2011-09-21T12:29:00.000-04:00

Not that you care, but, all these outtakes were killed by yours truly. They were never shown. So they are more sketches than killed covers.
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Kafka Outtakes. #2

2011-08-15T14:08:00.002-04:00

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China In Ten Words

2011-08-15T13:59:00.013-04:00

Made this, (coming in November) using these:

Had an afternoon of ink stamping, with help from Linda Huang (who also translated) and Brian Barth. Printed on uncoated craft paper.
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Kafka Outtakes. #1

2011-08-12T11:16:00.005-04:00

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Quaint

2011-08-12T11:00:00.008-04:00

Just found a copy of the 1968 AIGA 50 Books Catalog- here are a handful of pages: The editors, on the putative death of the book, and Herman Zapf on the "electronic future."

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Ben Marcus

2011-08-11T10:54:00.013-04:00

Ben. Effing. Marcus.

Prepare to have your world rocked, people.

The book of the year.

Read it, so that I can finally have someone to talk to about it.

Read it and report back.

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Stained

2011-05-20T16:52:00.079-04:00

There's a nice mention, on the wonderful Wemadethis blog, of the jacket for Glen Duncan's new book, The Last Werewolf. (Coming mid-July from Knopf)

These are their snaps of the British version of our jacket- which, as you can see, has gold edges. Ker-POW!

Our version of the same book, here in the colonies, has deep red edges, which, frankly, looks freaking neat against the black of the jacket. Can't wait to see these babies in stores stateside.

Soon, my precious- soon.

This was not the world's cheapest book for a trade publisher like ourselves to produce.

It deserves noting that an argument I've been trying to forward for years- that high production values should be a defining aspect of hardcover books- is finally getting some traction in the halls of publishing. At least with the people I work with. At least, recently. At least, a little itsy bit.

Getting folks to agree to shelling out for the refracting foil and the staining here wasn't easy- but it was an argument that was eventually won.

I understand this new-found openness (if not willingness) to spending on production as the result of a generalized fear of the cannibalizing power of the e-book. We welcome e-books here— we just don't want them gobbling up our hardcover sales. Adding to our hardcover sales, yes. Cannibalizing, no.

Len Riggio asserted in his keynote speech to the AAP, in reference to the ebook market, that rising tides raise all boats (actually, if i'm remembering correctly- I can't find the transcript- he said "rising tides expand all markets." Tides expand markets? Oof.) and, yes, at first, they will- but eventually the hardcover is going to have to justify its existence to consumers.

And what better way to convince a customer to shell out their cash on an actual, material, corporeal book, than to actually produce it well. (Sorry Caleb- no sewn bindings yet.) As it turns out, in this particular instance, the extra bling is really helping to get stores on board. I'm hoping consumers will follow.

Will this title become a case-study for how, when a little money is spent, it will, on occasion, return to one re-doubled? Sometimes you gotta spend to make- right? RIGHT? Time will tell.

But- in order for this little fable of mine to have a happy ending, you must all go out and buy this book. Each and every one of you. If you don't, I'll eat you. So go now- don't delay.

Come for the foil, stay for the rip-snorting drama, sex, gore, humor, sex, startlingly good writing, sex, and sex.

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(Because I write these blog posts hastily they often take odd twists and turns- I actually meant to talk here about Glen's book itself, and about the "genre" question- but I just got carried away on production values...

The Last Werewolf is a really wonderful book...and it is a werewolf book. Glen writes gorgeous sentences and is a virtuoso story-teller... and this book is a book about werewolves. Good book: Werewolf book. Werewolf book:good book. I would say that The Last Werewolf "transcends the genre" but I am tired of hearing people say that certain books "transcend the genre" as if genre was a handicap to be overcome. Does anyone ever utter this phrase in reference to literary fiction? As in "Jeepers, that Franzen fellow really transcends the genre!" Nope. And why would the horror genre (or Sci Fi or Fantasy...) be any less likely a place to encounter good prose than the arcadian slopes of Mount Lit-fic? I read my fill of "high" fiction every year, and boy do the tropes and conventions endemic to literary fiction produce their share of bad writing. I think that there are simply lazy habits writers develop unique to each category- habits more easily forgiven by that genre's main readership. A poorly constructed sentence may get a pass in Fantasy, but a go-nowhere plot is a-ok for the Booker crowd.

Ultimately, I think "genre" is, at best, a blunt marketing tool, and at worst, a way that certain people have of saying "badly written" in code. I vote to abolish. Here's China Miéville* on this topic and others over at the Guardian.)

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*Digression to the digression- does anyone in literature nowadays construct fictional worlds better than China Miéville? He's just so goddam good at it. Sometimes it feels like his stories kinda fizzle out under the weight of these brilliant constructs...but boy is he good at building alternate but plausible realities.

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While I'm at it- I just noticed, now that this post is up, that there is a certain similarity between the Kissinger in the post below, and and the Duncan above...can you spot it? Why, it's the wonderfully refreshing lack of cover copy! In both cases: author, title. Boom. No "A novel," no subtitle, no "Acclaimed Architect of the Bombing of Cambodia!" No, god help us, cover quote..... The trust the editors and publishers of these titles exhibit is praiseworthy. They are not underestimating the intelligence of their readership- and therefore the books come across as confident- bold and important. Right? This is how to achieve that elusive "big book look" we are always asked to provide- refrain from copy clutter.

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Less, More, Whatevs

2011-05-04T12:31:00.011-04:00

Now on my short list for best jacket of the year (despite my feelings about the author)

This, from the always amazing Mr. Darren Haggar:

It's just so good. And, for a variety of reasons, so much more difficult to pull off than one would think...

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And Another...

2011-05-04T11:00:00.001-04:00

Another triumph this year in deceptively simple typographic solutions, this one (I believe...) from Herr Evan Gaffney:

Bravo Sir.

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Mendel in the Mittel

2011-04-21T11:19:00.035-04:00

The News from Central Europe:

Poland: I am judging a Polish book design competition hosted by none other than image-master Will Schofield of 50Watts (formerly Journey Round My Skull).

This should be really fun. "Design the Polish edition of your favorite book." And why wouldn't you? The more I see of Polish book covers, the more I think every book I work on or read should look like one. And the prizes are awesome. Also participating, the editors of the incredible book 1000 Polish Book Covers which is a must have for serious book designers. If you can't afford to buy it: try to win it.

Czech Republic: An interview I participated in, touching on Czech literature and design. (NB I've been trying to find convenient ways to insinuate my guinea pig Dwayne into various interviews and this is the first time I've been wholly successful (thanks to Ludvik Vaculik). Have a look:

“I suppose selling a film is in some ways like selling a monumental, and ultimately catastrophic agrarian reform”

Hungary: An article on yours truly in which, well, um, in which, er, the uh...well I have no idea what it says. But I defy you to find an article on book design containing more diacritical marks per square inch.

Thanks to Akos Polgardi, Michael Stein, and "Wieslaw" Shofield for asking me to take part in their fine projects.

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Cookie Enabled

2011-04-09T12:12:00.043-04:00

Mario Hugo? Right? Amazing designer. Man oh MAN.

Jonathan Zawada? Anybody? Damn.

Triboro? Well, OBVIOUSLY.

Carin Goldberg? Personal hero of mine.

Ilovedust? Duh.

Abby Clawson Low? Amen.

SAHRE? Siggi EGGERSTON?

SHOE? Heads of STATE?

VICTORE?

David flippin' PEARSON?

JonwhateverpantonechipcolorheisGRAY!?

Yomar Augusto?!?? Meesters, Barcelona, Troxler, Staehle, Schuurman, Letman...HOLY CHRIST!!!

I'm having a moment here. I need air.

....

Now, why, you may be asking yourselves, am I having this design-inspired cardiac episode? Funny you should ask...

My good pal Cardon Webb and I are curating a poster show and auction at the Type Director's Club, to benefit their scholarship fund.

We are calling the show:

POSTERS OF FORTUNE

and I beg you all to:

go to the site,

go to the show, hear the speeches, and most importantly, OPEN YOUR WALLETS AND BID ON THIS WORLD-HISTORICALLY GREAT WORK BY FIRMAMENT-DWELLING SUPER-BEINGS in order to benefit the TDC.

And just to wet your collective whistle:

Go. Now. And spend freely. It's for a great cause.

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Comments

2011-03-24T16:10:00.008-04:00

Some of you have noticed that I have disabled the commenting option on the blog. This was done for no other reason than the fact that I haven't the time to respond to all the intelligent, thoughtful, passionate posts that people have been writing and, frankly, I felt bad about it.

Suffice it to say that I am still reachable, through a myriad of other channels.

Thank you for caring,

Mendy out.

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TMI

2011-02-10T16:01:00.026-05:00

". . . We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors . . ."

Read. This. Book.

Seriously. I'll take you to the bookstore myself if I have to.

The Information, by James Gleick

(Don't be fooled by the amazon-ified, simplified "jacket" online. The above is what will arrive in your mailbox if you order it— unless you download it for an e-reader, in which case you get what you deserve.)

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Kafka

2011-01-24T16:13:00.119-05:00

Whenever I'm asked (and I'm asked with some frequency) which authors I'd most like to design jackets for, I always say Kafka (I mention others too, but Kafka is usually the first to spring to my mind).

There's just something about Kafka- and this something is so very hard to pin down...

After all, what is it that makes Kafka, Kafka? The economy; the dark humor; the teasing inscrutability; the brilliance of the thought-experiments; the hieratic and esoteric flavor of the constructions; the disorienting cadence of the prose; the impeccable, internal, magical logic that drives the mechanical toy theaters of his work; the much discussed Jewishness (as if this was easy to parse); the "concrete abstractions" (in the words of Zadie Smith).... I suppose what some find most relevant and compelling in Kafka is his ability to inspire in them that paradoxical feeling that great literature always aspires to arouse in readers—the feeling of the universality of their own alienation. Kafka is the ne plus ultra of alienation- alienation being arguably the defining emotional condition of the 20th century.

Maybe loving Kafka means no more than admiring his downright peculiarity...he is just so anomalous and extraordinary a writer, so particular in his assets, so without precursor (despite what Borges would have us believe). Me, well, as the saying goes: I love that he makes me laugh. But I will get to humor later.

I had been periodically thinking about a Kafka redesign, but actually began work on the project in earnest when I officially took over the art directing duties over at Pantheon a month ago or so (I'm still the associate art director at Knopf, and, some other new things as well...busy times).

Schocken, which is part of Pantheon Books, has a long and storied relationship with Kafka.

Salman Schocken acquired the world rights to Kafka's works from no less than Max Brod himself in the thirties. Schocken (being a Jewish press, publishing books exclusively for, and by Jews) was exempted from the aryanization of the more generalized German presses, and thus was the first publisher to achieve wide scale distribution of Kafka in Germany. Later, during the war, Schocken published Kafka in its new home in Palestine (in Hebrew), and subsequently, when Schocken opened shop in New York in 1940, Kafka's works were put out in English translation in addition to the German editions Schocken was still publishing.

As it turns out, some of the Kafka rights had been sold in the intervening years, and Schocken was put in the position of having to reacquire them. Writes Pantheon managing editor and Schocken Editorial Director Altie Karper when asked if Kafka was on Pantheon's first list seventy years ago:
"Interestingly enough, no, because Salman Schocken had licensed the rights to The Trial to none other than Alfred A. Knopf* back in the mid-1930s, when Schocken was still in Berlin and could not have imagined that he would wind up publishing books in English in America. It took him (Salman Schocken) quite some time to wrest the English-language rights back from Alfred when he arrived here and started publishing in 1945.

(There is a) hysterically funny series of interoffice memos between then-Schocken-editor Hannah Arendt and publisher Salman Schocken, wherein Arendt flatly states that if Schocken wants those Kafka rights back from Alfred he'd going to have to jolly well get on the phone and speak to The Great Man himself, because Alfred considers her too low down on the totem pole to discuss the matter with her, and refuses to reply to her letters or return her phone calls."

Ms. Karper tells me she has in her possession the document, signed by Hannah Arendt, that gives Schocken the rights back "for a nominal amount of money." Needless to say, I am excited to see this document- and, as an aside, I hope to redesign the Hannah Arendt backlist as well some day.

* * * * *

"Though during his lifetime he could not make a decent living, he will now keep generations of intellectuals both gainfully employed and well-fed"

—Hannah Arendt

The design:

So, as you can see, I've gone with eyes here (not the first or last time I will use an eye as a device on a jacket-book covers are, after all, faces, both literally and figuratively, of the books they wrap). I find eyes, taken in the singular, create intimacy, and in the plural instill paranoia. This seemed a good combo for Kafka- who is so very adept at the portrayal of the individual, as well as the portrayal of the persecution of the individual.

I also opted for color. It needs saying that Kafka's books are, among other things, funny, sentimental, and in their own way, yea-saying. I am so weary of the serious Kafka, the pessimist Kafka. Kafkaesque has become synonymous with the machinations of anonymous bureaucracy- but, of course, Kafka was a satirist (ironist, exaggerator) of the bureaucratic, and not an organ of it. Because of this mischaracterization, Kafka's books have a tendency to be jacketed in either black, or in some combination of colors I associate with socialist realism, constructivism, or fascism- i.e. black, beige and red. Part of the purpose of this project for me, was to let some of the sunlight back in. In any case, hopefully these colors, though bright, are not without tension.

The typography. The script is an amalgam of Kafka's own hand, and a wonderfully versatile typeface called "Mister K" (based on Kafka's own hand) by Julia Sysmäläine who works at Edenspiekermann in Berlin.

These editions will begin coming out in June and July- they are all paperbacks, with maybe a couple in hardcover as well- time will tell. I'm hoping we can do a box set for them after they all come out (which is already designed- and which has the complete parable "Before the Law" printed on the inside.)

As a final side note- as you can tell from looking at one of the spines from these new editions, there's a new Schocken logo (as well as a bunch of new Pantheon logos- more on these tk) This one springing directly out of this Kafka project:

Well, I hope you enjoy these- there are more updates, with more new book jackets, coming to the blog soon (I know, I keep promising- it's just that I have NO TIME!)

*Pantheon and Schocken are now imprints of Alfred A Knopf (which is a subsidiary of Random house, which is owned by Bertelsmann, which brings us, by commodius vicus of recirculation, back to German publishing and the Jews, but more on that some other day.)

Postscript!

Here's an interesting piece of ephemera, also involving Schocken, Hannah Arendt, and Kafka- this is the letter in which Arendt has Mr. Schocken personally take on the "Kafka Kerfuffle" (as I am now calling it) because, once again, the person in question (Kurt Wolff!) doesn't want to do business with her, a mere editor (and one suspects, a mere woman as well). In this case, the dealings are with New Directions for the rights to, I believe, Amerika (remember Alvin Lustig's cover?)

.......

Cutting

2011-01-10T15:26:00.003-05:00

John Gall. Collage. Check it.

.......

Martello

2010-12-29T12:41:00.008-05:00

I always thought that one Mr. Stephen Dedalus lived in Martello Tower. What I didn't know is that he lived in a Martello Tower.

Here's a neat article on Martello Towers in The Gaurdian.

And: I want one please.

(The first comment, "this place is a fully functioning babe lair," was clearly written by Buck Mulligan)
.......

Happy Holidays

2010-12-23T12:24:00.001-05:00

.......

"I think 'gone' may be overstating it..."

2010-12-19T12:00:00.008-05:00

CBS does a segment on book cover design (of all things).

Catch it here

My favorite moment is when Erin Moriarty asks me if, with the advent of the e-reader, "everything is going to change" and I reply "Yes..."

There is a whole lot in that elipsis.

.......

the new whowhatnow?

2010-12-04T13:02:00.006-05:00

The New Yorker runs an interview
on the design of the new
Jo Nesbø jacket.

In other news, I'll be posting a
mess of new work soon,
I promise

(it's been a while, or so I'm told)
.......

TDC

2010-11-19T20:42:00.001-05:00

Thank you TDC for hosting the talk last night— It was an honor and a blast!
.......

The Fractalist

2010-10-25T11:48:00.006-04:00

I was reminded, when the great Benoit Mandelbrot died last week, that Pantheon was waiting on delivery of his memoir- which I had been called in to work on. I'm still hoping that the manuscript, in whatever stage of completion it was in at his death, will be published. Mandelbrot was an amazing figure whose story, one hopes, would be of interest to many. I imagine it will pop up on a forthcoming list. Here's the final jacket we will use.
.......

Work Surface

2010-10-20T12:48:00.008-04:00

Stuff in my office.

There are, incidentally, some people
(more interesting than me)
on this site who are worth peeking at.

Like:

Alex Ross
John Baldessari
and the always winning
Coralie Bickford Smith

.......

Free Sally

2010-10-12T10:35:00.002-04:00

.......

Seeking Approval

2010-09-23T21:30:00.005-04:00

A new article in PRINT Magazine by me and my pal Peter Terzian, featuring comments from many wonderful designers. Great photos by Shopsin and Fulford.
.......

Post Meridiem Prime Minister Production Manager Prime Meridian Parliamentary Motion

2010-09-09T14:05:00.003-04:00

.......

Larssonia

2010-08-30T11:24:00.007-04:00

Deluxe Box set. Cloth, foil, maps, endpapers, you name it. On sale Thanksgivingish. Excuse the lame scans.
.......

Micro Monde

2010-08-22T14:31:00.005-04:00

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Geräusch

2010-08-20T09:53:00.007-04:00

Arsenal/Liverpool.

I can't help but see (nautical) signal flags. But what do they signal?

As a pertinent side note- Jonathan Dee reviews Tom McCarthy's "C" in Harper's and gets it just right.
.......

Obrist

2010-08-20T09:47:00.008-04:00

Courtesy of (just another instance of me regurgitating great stuff from)

But Does It Float
.......

The Kepes's (Kepesek? Kepesci?)

2010-08-15T23:54:00.006-04:00

(see below) images courtesy of this fella.
.......

Breuer's Kepes House

2010-08-14T16:11:00.036-04:00

Maybe you recall last summer's vacation blog post from the Chermayeff house? Well the same friends who were staying chez Chermayeff, have, this year, been inhabiting the house Marcel Breuer built for Gyorgy Kepes. This is a feat of summer house one-ups-manship that can only end with them, next year, renting Le Corbusier's Cabanon. Who knew the Bauhaus were such a presence in Cape Cod? "Not I" (he types while buying lobster rolls at the Gropius Clam Shack).

In any case- their summer houses are my gain. Many first editions inside, and me, with only my crappy camera phone:

Designed by Paul Rand, for whom Breuer also designed a cape house (though evidently, according to my hosts, there was friction betwixt architect and designer- surprise surprise). This Eliade reminded me of this other Rand jacket:

And this one, by Kepes himself:

And this one here:

which if I flatter myself reminds me of something I once did for Herbert Muschamps- though mine is exactly one gazillion times worse. Glad I hadn't seen it earlier or I would've sulked. Just like I'm sulking now.

A spot of Matisse?

And this here, which is so much lovelier in person than in this photo (designer unknown):

And an inscription to Kepes from Jonas Salk

"Dear Gyorgy, design is all well and good, but, as you may know, I CURED POLIO BITCHES!"

Only kidding:

and another remnant of the original owner:

and I leave you with this:

A copy-less flap. This is just how I feel on vacation: like a copy-less flap.

See you all in a bit,

PM

.......

2010-07-26T09:45:00.008-04:00

Some items found in rural Connecticut this weekend . . .

A Paul Rand:

An Alvin Lustig (and super weird one at that- boy is that satyr looming in at right uncharacteristic):

A Philip Grushkin (remember when Arthur Koestler was a hero?):

and this edition of THE COCKTAIL PARTY which was only of interest for what it contained...
This bitchy headline is priceless:
And the original Playbill:
.......

Sundries

2010-07-17T16:11:00.044-04:00

FIRST OFF:
What do the great rapper, political activist, and graphic designer M.I.A. and I have in common? Nothing! But NPR's The Record sees the matter differently:
SECONDLY:

The Wall Street Journal picks 5 of the 50 comps I did for Dragon Tattoo in order to illustrate how hopeless I am as a designer.

Ps. Before this article ran, I had had no idea that our Sales Department disliked the final printed cover. Curious. This illustrates some principle or other, though I'm neither able nor inclined to tease out what that principle is.

FINALLY:

Two things I've read this weekend, Wittgenstein's Culture and Value, and Wyatt Mason's wonderful David Foster Wallace piece in the NYRB have further crystalized my thinking on The ways in which design is not art.

Mason, in discussing the philosophical underpinnings of DFW's writing, highlights a passage from The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall 1988) in which Wallace issued a cultural critique of television:

"[TV] strives not to change or enlighten or broaden or reorient—not even necessarily to entertain—but merely and always to engage, to appeal to...Television's greatest appeal is that it be engaging without being at all demanding."

Later that day I came across this in the Wittgenstein:

"Taste makes things acceptable." Der geschmack macht annehmbar.
"Taste can be charming, but not gripping." Geschmack kann entzücken, aber nicht ergreifen.

Due to many factors (the mechanisms of the approval process; design's fundamentally commercial aspects...) when one examines the field of design, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that good design must be, above all, likeable.

Design is too intimately entangled with matters of taste (to use Wittgenstein's word) to be demanding enough to be Art. I have to say that in my years in the field, I've yet to be made to cry by a work of design. I've yet to be forced to view the world differently due to a work of design. I've yet to be really, truly gripped by a work of design. I know it's deeply self-defeating to say this, yet, the best design has only ever evoked in me the feeling of "that's cool." A nice feeling, sure. But...

(and you could say that the failure of receptivity is mine, but this doesn't feel true. And neither is it a form of snobbery—for instance, Television has evoked these feelings in me.)

I realize that the two fields (art and design) are spectra, not discrete, and the line separating them is blurry, graduated. And so delineating the distinctions can be more a matter of saying what one field cannot accomplish, rather than defining what either field is (almost like Maimonides' negative theology). I would imagine that there are anomalies of design that raise themselves above the lower atmospheres of likability; and I'd love to hear what you think they are, as I've encountered few if any. The examples that come to mind fail at being good design in order to succeed as art.

The truth is, I'd be happy (for somewhat obvious reasons) to have my mind changed on the matter. I've done a fair amount of reading of classical aesthetics, but none in the field of design aesthetics. Any recommendations are welcome. Til then, I'm fairly content to view design as a field that fosters contentment. It certainly fosters my own.

Mendy out

.......

Mike Lemanski

2010-06-18T11:22:00.004-04:00

Some very nice work here.

via Cardon Webb
.......

Fifty

2010-06-18T09:08:00.005-04:00

The 50/50 is up. Congrats to the winners.
.......

Regrets

2010-06-07T11:38:00.004-04:00

Found this old rejected comp in a pile.
Two soldiers go on a mission up in the mountains. Oh well.

Update- because you asked...the final:

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Paris

2010-05-25T13:06:00.003-04:00

Last week, in Paris- Mes petits trucs philosophiques.

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Print

2010-05-25T11:00:00.012-04:00

A nice mention in the new issue of PRINT of our
Black Jacketing competition and winner Abrian Curington...
Also in this edition is Jacket Mechanical friend and co-conspirator
Peter Terzian's interview with the always-inspiring Maira Kalman.

And, that Swedish novelist guy, Stieg something or other, seems to be getting a bit of attention, doesn't he? I'd scan the jacket for the new one (see below) but the scanner doesn't react well to nuclear-powered shininess.
I love that the Millenium Trilogy now appears to have been written by
Sir Francis Bacon.

.......

Some New

2010-05-24T16:45:00.033-04:00

Some stuff I designed lying around on my desk- forthcoming, or printed. There's a lot more, but I'm feeling too lazy to scan it all.

.......

Infinite Jest Jacketing

2010-05-17T11:48:00.090-04:00

Poor David Foster Wallace. The sad story just continues to get, well, more sad.

I just finished reading ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF. The book is a transcription of a five-day-long interview given by DFW just after the publication of his landscape-altering novel INFINITE JEST. The interview was for a Rolling Stone profile, though it ended up shelved...until now that is.

Despite the fact that I constantly wanted to chuck the book out the window, I bravely, stupidly, (complicitly) read it all the way through.

It is clear from this "biography in five days" that DFW was deeply uncomfortable with all the attention his recent literary stardom had drawn (as if we didn't already know this) and yet here he is, trotted out posthumously to further the career of others. What makes this act of grave-robbery especially galling (even more so than the fact that the interview's publication is being presented on some level as a public service- as if), is that the book consists mostly of offhand, sophomoric, hot air- exactly the sort of hot air that that would have been so embarrassing to the punishingly self-critical DFW. A lot of what is said in these interviews is just crap. Total, late-night, navel-gazing crap. And, of course it is- just because the man was a great writer doesn't mean his every utterance was meaningful . For want of a better word: duh.

There are very few truly insightful or probing ideas in the whole book (and, full disclosure, i am A HUGE fan of DFW- which makes all this much, much worse). There's just enough good material to justify a, er, blog post, perhaps. The only salient info we glean, is what most fans of Foster Wallace's already knew: that this man was not comfortable in his own skin. That he struggled with the basic facts of existence. That he over-thought his public persona. That he lacked ease. That he was painfully sensitive. And that he was just too innocent, too trusting, or too new-fame-addled to realize that this book/transcript would become part of the permanent historical record. A shame really. But now that we are in full-on hagiography mode, I guess we should expect more from the publishing industry along these lines.

ANYWAY...

The matter of the book jacket for INFINITE JEST (a jacket that I loved back in the day, back before I was a book designer, and still love) arises about halfway through the transcript. The jacketing issue is addressed in a couple of sentences. But of course, my ears pricked up.

DFW: "Oh, I had a number of—there's a great photo of Fritz Lang directing METROPOLIS. Do you know this one? Where he's standing there, and there are about a thousand shaven-headed men in kind of rows and phalanxes, and he's standing there with a megaphone? It would have been...Michael (Pietsch, DFW's editor at Little, Brown) said it was too busy and too like conceptual, it required too much brain work on the part of the audience...."

Now, (and i think we can file this, again, under the heading "Because the man was a great writer doesn't mean he was a great: designer/conversationalist/ humanitarian/etc.") DFW, if he had had his druthers, would have put an image of Fritz Lang, on set, onto the cover of his book- and he would have been very wrong to do so.

It's a great image, no doubt (and I can't seem to find it online or I'd post it). Though personally I prefer this METROPOLIS shot:

His image of choice would not have worked on the jacket for his book- and not because that particular image would have required too much "brain work", but because it would have required too little (being so specific), and would have been misleading both from a textual point of view, as well as from a commercial one (it would have signaled non-fiction: a history of cinema perhaps).

Book jacket design should concern itself with, in my estimation, equal parts enticement ("Come buy this book") and exegesis ("This is what this book is about, more or less.") A good cover doesn't let one category trump the other. A good cover should not resort to cliché in order to accomplish either. But the real key here, in both categories (enticement and exegesis) is the designer's ability to work the sweet-spot between giving-away-the-farm, and deliberate obfuscation.

Book jackets that tell you too much, suck. Book jackets that try to change the subject also suck, and are furthermore, too easy. There may have been a way for DFW's METROPOLIS image to work (an insanely creative cropping perhaps, or some kind of collage), but, frankly, the picture in question would have been both obfuscating (I mean, i get the parallels with the IJ text, but does that image truly encapsulate what DFW thought his book was about?) and would have been too easy in its reference to film, and brave new worlds. (Not to mention the associations that METROPOLIS, a masterpiece in its own rights, has accreted- associations that would have muddied the waters when glommed onto IJ.)

Now, a perfectly blue sky... A sky that only an advertiser could have dreamed up- a sky that could have been subsidized...A sky that stands in for satisfaction, but a satisfaction that is almost sinister in its perfection...(and, of course, HUGE type, because, well, that's just what's called for)...I think that was a very elegant solution. It tells you something very important, but leaves everything to the imagination. Thank God for Michael Pietsch.

Among the lessons learned here: writers, even writers of authentic genius, by virtue of their proximity to the text, are not better suited to choose jacket art; in fact, they are worse off for lack of perspective; and, more importantly...

...Please: enough with the "Saint Dave". We should be evolved enough as a culture not to mistake the man for the artist.

.......

ps. The hardcover jacket (shown at top) was the work of the excellent Steve Snider

Voyna i mir i Voyna i mir i Voyna i mir

2010-05-12T11:09:00.025-04:00

Coupla fun things.

First off- thanks to The New Yorker for their kind mention of my very own Jacket Mechanical. You've added a veneer of respectability where none is deserved.

........

Secondly, a very nice, intrepid fellow named Jerry Parra is working his way through War & Peace, and documenting his progress online. Like a man obsessed, he is also taking snapshots of our P&V Knopf edition in situ...

(Boo! Digital edition!)

........

Thirdly, the AIGA judging has wrapped up, and permit me to mention two things:

A. That there are a full FIFTY books and FIFTY covers (because so many of you asked)

B. Sadly, (in an effort to unburden my conscience) that there was much incredible work that did NOT get in, due to a variety of factors which are too complicated to explain here, but suffice it to say I'm very sorry to those designers whose work deserved inclusion and did not receive it- chances are, it is not because of your piece's lack of merit, but rather, in many cases, the result of the vagaries of juries, and judging in general. I mention this because, as the only NY based judge, I will be fielding (and have already fielded) the majority of the "why wasn't my piece included" queries.

........

AND FINALLY...

To the few, the sad, the shut-in, the far-flung book designers who missed last weeks AIGA BritishInvasionapalooza...

Boy oh boy. These "blokes," Jamie Keenan, and Jon Gray, sure can design.

And drink, apparently. It was something special.

Best,

Mendy
.......

Template

2010-05-07T16:19:00.017-04:00

I was curious to see how many recent Knopf titles could have been published using my "Sayonara Mr. Fatty" design. The results are in, and: it's all of em!

Update- it even works for non-Knopf titles!

Further Update...

of course this one:

and: make your own!

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Unsolicited

2010-05-07T15:20:00.007-04:00

er, thanks?
.......

Appropriation

2010-04-23T15:26:00.023-04:00

("Crime" by Gardar Eide Einarsson, seen with "Punishment," below)

Mark Melnick sent me this image of artist Gardar Eide Einarsson's new gallery show at Team Gallery, which includes "his" new (2010) paintings "Crime" and "Punishment." They are, to put it succinctly, enlargements of the cover I made for the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of "Crime and Punishment" for Vintage Books.

The artist's statement begins as follows: "Reproduction as theft, and authorship as failed claim are the central conceits in this exhibition by Gardar Eide Einarsson. His concurrent fascinations with criminality and appropriation come together in an installation that appears to mark the jettisoning of his overt approach to political subject matter in favor of a formalist’s engagement with the legacy of modernism. Using the history of abstraction and pop as a readymade, Einarsson here distills a poetics of disruption, shifting between drippy hard edge abstraction, graphic renderings from mainstream sources, and the occasional deployment of the ben-day dot. In preparation for this exhibition, Einarsson selected a number of images from the public domain that were of cursory interest to him: a book cover, the design on a napkin, a chain link fence, a section of the confederate flag..." it goes on. (And on).

The fun part is, my design is not, in fact, IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN! Hilarious!

Randomhouse owns the rights to any reproduction "in book form," and I own the rights to every other reproduction.

I have to say, the illegality of the situation, in some very real way, makes Mr. Einarsson's idea of "reproduction as theft" less toothless and bloviating as a rallying cry.

I don't feel particularly upset, though the word "cursory" in the statement above reveals something very distasteful about the artist's and/or gallery's attitude. Was it a "cursory" interest that led Einarson to reproduce this cover of mine? It seems more likely that he actually, dare i say, liked the design? Otherwise he could have stolen from much less interesting sources.

For what it is worth, I feel like we all TAKE OURSELVES WAY TOO SERIOUSLY as designers. And don't get me started on artists. I would actually enjoy seeing this show.

It's not the first time this design (from, garsh, i guess I did it in 2000-2001) has been re-purposed, and I genuinely hope it's not the last.

In any case maybe I'll venture down to the show and see how my own homage to suprematism looks, malevich-like, actually painted.

....

Prophets

2010-04-23T11:42:00.005-04:00

"Why brilliant...designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors is one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central."

From the great English historian Eric Hobsbawm's AGE OF EXTREMES

.......

My hero

2010-04-20T10:52:00.010-04:00

Not this guy, but Tom McCarthy.

An interview about his book, and his jacket,

involving the both of us,

moderated by the incomparable Dan Wagstaff.

.......

F. Scott Fitzpattern

2010-04-19T22:43:00.001-04:00

Coming soon, from Penguin UK, evidently

via This Isn't Happiness
.......

Djurens värld

2010-04-19T22:40:00.005-04:00

Love these.

via Martin Klasch

.......

Unboxing

2010-04-13T08:50:00.007-04:00

For Innova records

Tank Books

2010-04-10T20:33:00.009-04:00

The Death of Ivan Ilych- it's toasted.™
.......

Graphic design is not interesting

2010-04-09T19:32:00.007-04:00

Or is it?

via It's Nice That
.......

How to make your ebook more like a book

2010-03-28T12:52:00.006-04:00

Next they'll be printing your ebook on paper. With ink.

(I'm loving the Your Text Here model.

Howsabout: Simulacra and Simulation?)
.......

Blanciak

2010-03-28T12:35:00.005-04:00

1001 Building Forms
.......

Pantheon

2010-03-21T13:02:00.009-04:00

Some lovely things some nice folks did for me at Pantheon:

Mr. Chris Brand

Monsieur John Gall

Herr Evan Gaffney

Monsignor Keenan

More to come....
.......

C

2010-03-13T18:15:00.010-05:00

"We want angles, arcs and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content, geometry is everything."

Coming in September.
.......

Psychoangelo

2010-03-13T18:06:00.000-05:00

Speaking of angles, arcs and intervals:
.......

I'll Take One of Everything

2010-03-13T17:14:00.004-05:00

Counter-Print

.......

To whom it may concern...

2010-03-13T16:45:00.002-05:00

It is my belief that...

(Though the website/pdf is quite beautifully designed)

............

illo

2010-03-13T16:02:00.001-05:00

For NY Magazine
.......

parasites

2010-02-23T13:41:00.005-05:00

"... Designers have their own private agendas, ambitions, anxieties, compulsions, and references that they attempt to implement. Those agendas may mesh with the content at hand ... or may be grafted onto content and live on parasitically. Personal Vision is the designer's value-added; it's an indexical presence ... so resilient it can survive in any context ... "

From the introduction to the new 2x4 catalog.

As a side-note, I just discovered, in an obvious manner, that amazon.com sells actual two-by-fours.

.......

Gracq

2010-02-10T13:05:00.007-05:00

This old ND cover is so cool it makes me wanna puke. Found by AJRMS.

BTW- when people ask me why I don't post more often, why my commitment to blogging is less than fervent, my answer is partially- due to blogs like A Journey Round My Skull, which is so thoroughly entertaining, that frankly, I'd rather be reading it than posting myself.

.......

Too young

2010-02-03T11:21:00.003-05:00

Nick Dewar has passed away at 37. So sad.

.......

Re-bloggerama

2010-01-09T11:24:00.003-05:00

I seem to be in throes of a re-blogging spasm. But just look at what THE CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC has found. New, lovely, Cormac McCarthy's from Picador UK- by, who else? Mr. David Pearson. Yes please.

.......

Modern Masters

2010-01-07T23:19:00.015-05:00

We have all seen quite enough of the British 60's paperbacks with the Helvetica and with the illustrations, and with the type left-justified at the top of the book...and we've seen quite enough of their imitators as well, the contemporary movies, tv shows and video games re-packaged as old penguins...

but...

I, for one, hadn't yet seen these, and they are very cool. (and the Helvetica here is rounded, innit)

I can't for the life of me parse their meaning. Or whether there is a system of some kind at work. Does it matter if there isn't? Probably not. I love them anyway. The downside of using abstraction in design is that it's a hedge against betraying one's ignorance of the text being designed. The benefit is that one doesn't constrain the book's meaning by tying it to a specificity. I am, on the whole, pretty tired of abstraction in book design- but these are the progenitors; and they are courageously bold, brazen and bright.

(Thanks to Karen Horton, who saw these on Acejet.)

The Fontana Modern Masters Series. Art by Oliver Bevan, design by John Constable. Eye magazine article here. The inevitable painted homages here.

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Objects (or: the museum as heterotopia)

2009-12-21T14:46:00.050-05:00

Several weeks ago I was asked to re-tool the type treatment on the old US edition cover of The Archeology of Knowledge by the great philosopher, sociologist, and géneálogiste Michel Foucault.

When it comes to getting me to take on a project, I think the editors here know how easy it is to set the hook (especially when it comes to titles by hoary old giants of the lit-crit and philosophy curricula of my youth.)

"Just change the old designer's type so it's more readable." sez they. (The old edition is actually quite lovely- though the word "Michel" is nested, illegibly, inside of the word "Foucault").

"ok- but, can I redesign the whole cover instead?" sez I. (like I don't have enough to do)

"Sure," sez they.

"Just one Foucault?" sez I.

"Well...." sez they....

Long story short: here are some of the forthcoming Foucaults (the first mechanicals have gone out- so: coming to stores soon-ish).

Some of my references here are less obvious than others (for instance, The Archeology of Knowledge is Foucault's seminal work on the speech act- hence the megaphone.) But even the designs that seem upon first glance to be crude puns have some textual referent. (And I know: "I, Pierre" should be a pruning hook, instead of an axe- but the axe just looked cooler. If only it was Best Made.)

In all the volumes, the idea of having an interplay between the extreme specificity of the objects and Foucault's broad principles was enticing to me- or, to use the expression most (justifiably) detested by my esteemed colleague Barbara DeWilde: I enjoyed "exploring the intersection" of the specific and the general. So- borrowing from Orhan Pamuk: an imaginary museum of objects (Museums were of specific interest to Foucault, and, if you wanna know his thoughts on the matter- go out and buy The Order of Things.)

Etc.

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Amazon

2009-11-24T09:12:00.004-05:00

In which our hero fields some questions from the Death Star...

(actually, they were really quite nice)

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(LDEF)

2009-11-13T11:10:00.004-05:00

And what are these beautiful things?

...

Via The Nonist
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