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The Next Chapter

People have been foretelling the death of the book for years now.

Obviously, that’s not going to happen entirely, but more and more of our reading is already taking place on e-readers (Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iPad, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Sony’s Reader, and WH Smith’s Kobo amongst others).

The Kindle is the current king, currently available in the UK just in its monotone e-ink format, but in the US also in its full-colour multimedia Fire version, which is much closer to Apple’s ubiquitous iPad.

These days books are released in a whole stack of different formats. Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro, originally available as a signed and numbered limited edition hardback, is now available as a paperback, as an e-book for all the major formats, and as a multimedia app for the iPhone and iPad, and also as an audio book.

For book designers, whether they work on covers, texts, or on integrated books (words and pictures), the industry is obviously undergoing a metamorphosis. A metamorphosis that brings possibilities as well as peril.

Looking just at book covers, which are designed to lure in readers, they’re no longer primarily experienced physically, but instead as tiny thumbnails on a computer screen or handheld device. Instead of a wealth of sizes, of formats, of textures and of finishes, we just have pixels.

This isn’t a massively new situation – people have been buying books from Amazon for a good few years now. But where previously you would still end up with a physical book in your hands, that’s no longer necessarily the case.

To add insult to injury, in the current incarnation of iBooks on the iPad and iPhone you hardly even get to see covers at full size – they blink past momentarily when you start a book, but that’s about it. You do at least get a full size cover on the Kindle (well, full screen-size that is, which is always the same size no matter what book you’re reading), but on the e-ink version it’s always black and white.

At the same time though, there’s a resurgence in the love of the book as an object, with all the main publishers pumping out high-end versions of their backlists, such as Penguin’s Clothbound Classics. Surely a designer’s playground.

So, what is the next chapter for books?

For what it’s worth, our best guess is that paperbacks will start to disappear, as more and more people buy e-readers (how long is it before a major author releases a best-seller just as an e-book?). Hopefully though the various bits of e-book software will develop so that covers will still be considered a fundamental part of a book. We can also see lavish editions of hardbacks becoming more common; and integrated books perhaps becoming more and more interactive, following the lead of magazines.

But heck, what do we know?

Fortunately, if you’re out in New York, you can go and listen to some folk who might know just a little bit more.

The Next Chapter – The Design and Publishing of the Digital Book is a talk taking place at Parsons on Thursday 26 January. It’s organised by the AIGA NY, and is moderated by Chip Kidd. Should be a good one.

Hopefully they’ll be recording it for those of us who can’t make it…

11 January 2012 | 2 Comments

Books, covered

There’s been a heck of a lot of press this month about book cover design, which is a Very Good Thing. It’s often woefully overlooked in the design industry, let alone in the world at large.

Most of the press comes as a direct result of Julian Barnes namechecking the designer Suzanne Dean (creative director at Random House) in his acceptance speech for the Man Booker Prize, for his book The Sense of an Ending.

Check out this thoughtful piece from Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian, which looks at the growth of the book as object, in the face of the unstoppable march of the e-reader. And then take a look at this piece in the Telegraph about the design process behind the Dean cover; as well as this piece from Nick Duerden in the Independent naming a few of his favourite cover designers. All good stuff.

If you want to go a bit deeper, then make sure you check out Dan Wagstaff’s excellent blog The Casual Optimist, where he’s just published his favourite covers from 2010 and 2011. In the 2011 list, he features Peter Mendelsund’s fantastic series of Kafka covers (top, and below).

Mendelsund, art director at Knopf and Pantheon, is a bit of a god-like genius – we featured his gorgeous Last Werewolf cover back in April. You should definitely take a look at his brilliantly erudite blog, Jacket Mechanical. And if that whets your appetite, then sate it with Debbie Millman’s brilliant Design Matters interview with him. His path to becoming a designer is quite unique, and his thoughts about how a book cover should work are well worth listening to.

Interestingly, he mentions that he’s worried that he might be out of a job within five years, because of the growth of e-readers, and the consequent diminishing of the importance of cover design. Well heck, if he’s gonna be out of a job, there’s not much hope for the rest of us… He also mentions that he himself hasn’t read a physical book in years, as he now reads everything on an iPad; so frankly Mendelsund, you’ve only got yourself to blame.

If that isn’t enough, then check out: designer John Gall’s lovely blog, Spine Out; the Caustic Cover Critic blog, which seems to scoop everyone else on featuring the very latest book cover designs; the Book Cover Archive, which does what it says on the tin, and also has a good set of links to more blogs; and Faceout Books, which features in-depth analysis of individual covers – such as this post about our studio buddy David Pearson’s covers for Penguin’s Great Journeys series.

And if you’re still not done after all that lot, then how about you read an actual book? We can recommend Joe Dunthorne’s lovely Wild Abandon.

14 December 2011 | 7 Comments

The Awfully Bad Guide to Monster Housekeeping

Just under a year ago, the Ministry of Stories, and its fantastical shop front, Hoxton Street Monster Supplies, opened its doors to the world. (You can read all about that on one of our earlier blog posts.)

Since then, they’ve both been doing really rather well.

The Ministry has helped thousands of kids with their writing, whether in group workshops, or with one-to-one mentoring. The kids get help with all kinds of writing – stories, lyrics, journalism, and even soap-opera scripts. They’ve published a book or two already, as well as a newspaper all about Hoxton Street.

The latest fruit of their labours is the fantastic Awfully Bad Guide to Monster Housekeeping. The original guide was rather tragically burnt to a crisp by a dragon called Vera, so the young writers of the Ministry were tasked with writing an entirely new guide, divided into four separate books: The Alphabet, Fashion & Grooming, Food & Recipes, and Home & Recreation.

They were helped out by a ridiculously talented selection of volunteer illustrators (Nadia Shireen, Katie Cleminson, Alexis Deacon, Hannah Shaw and Chris Wormell) and poets (Ross Sutherland, Polarbear, Laura Dockrill, Naomi Woddis, and Charlie Dark).

Each section is full of tips to help monsters manage their daily lives, and the books also feature pages where the readers can add in their own ideas.

The books were brilliantly designed by Ed Cornish, with art direction from We Made This.

The books are being sold individually for £3 each, or as a collection of four for just £10.

And heck, they’d make a rather fantastic Christmas present for any young monsters you might know. (Just saying.) You can pick them up at the Hoxton Street Monster Supplies shop.

2 November 2011 | 1 Comment

Past Present Future

Those clever Diprose boys have been at it again. Not content with producing one of the best cycling magazines around, in the form of The Ride Journal, they’ve just produced this rather lovely book/magazine, Past Present Future, for Condor Cycles.

If you’re familiar with The Ride, it’s a very similar vibe – a collection of essays and photo stories, documenting the history of London bike manufacturer Condor Cycles.

It’s lovely stuff, and it’s really interesting to read the story of the company – far smaller and intimate than we’d previously imagined, and a real family affair.

And boy does it do its job – we came away from reading it totally wanting to buy a new bike…

Past, Present, Future is available from Condor Cycles, Magma, the Design Museum, and Look Mum No Hands.

21 October 2011 | No Comments

Conversations on the Coast

Now this is just lovely. We’ve just taken delivery of a fantastic little book, Conversations on the Coast, which brings together a series of short interviews with artists and craftspeople from around the British Isles.

The book is the work of designer and photographer Nick Hand, who set off in 2009 to travel the coast of the British Isles by bike. Along the way he interviewed and photographed a wealth of local artisans – from flute makers to stone letter carvers, from stickmakers to boat builders. He put the photos and interviews together as soundslides on his site Slowcoast, and this book is a beautifully edited version of those soundslides.

The book arrived wrapped in hand-illustrated tissue paper, with a lovely postcard.

The photography throughout is beautiful, and each of the short interviews is illuminating and touching. As a whole, the book is a wonderful portrait of people doing things they love – not for money, not for fame – but because it makes them happy.

Ace.

29 September 2011 | 3 Comments

Paul Finn on Georges Perec

~ While Alistair is away cycling the length of Great Britain, we’ve invited twenty disgustingly talented people to each write a post for our blog. Today’s post is from the very wonderful graphic designer and design teacher Paul Finn. ~

I am fascinated by the French writer Georges Perec (1936—1982). I first read Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1974) and was hooked. It instantly appealed to my typographic sensibilities; the opening pages are striking, the homage to Lewis Carroll’s Hunting Of The Snark empty ‘Map of the Ocean’ to the exploratory ‘Space’ poem (above) are inspiring.

The first chapter ‘The Page’ is an enquiry into the physicality, function, form, design and legacy of the printed page. The layout is playful, experimenting with the formalities and conventions of the page, from the word to the sentence to the margin to the footnote, akin to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard (1897).

The aesthetic and structure of Perec’s 1968 experimental radio play The Machine suggest this interest in typography, layout and function of the page has always been a part of Perec’s practice.

Reading his magnum opus Life, A User’s Manual (1978) is enchanting through its uniqueness and magnitude. It is an exhaustive investigation into the life and times of the inhabitants, past and present, of 11 Rue Simon–Crubellier, a Parisian apartment block: A rich and dense tapestry of multiple narratives, tales, adventures, puzzles, names, dates, seemly blurring fact and fiction… One source of inspiration for Perec was this illustration by Saul Steinberg, which appeared in his book The Art Of Living (1949), it depicts the multiverse accommodated in an New York apartment block.

Whilst reading you become aware of certain elements and devices which suggest  something hiding underneath, a structure, puzzle or game that the reader has unknowingly entered in with the author. It is a fascinating and alluring read.

One intriguing chapter is ominously titled ‘The Fifty-First Chapter’. It is the middle chapter. Perec lists 179 peculiar sentences; some refer to earlier events, some to the future. On closer examination I realised that each sentence contains 60 characters (including spaces), and the pages incorporate two diagonals of aligned ‘g’s, though they are not specifically referred to:

Here I’ve used a red diagonal rule to highlight the aligned ‘g’s:

A friend of mine bought me a copy of David Bellos’ comprehensive Perec biography Georges Perec: A Life in Words(1993), which details in depth the writing process, constraints and methods that Perec employed to write ‘Life, A Users Manual’. The layers of construction further add to the mind blowing achievement of writing such a book. This website exposes all the mind bending constraints Perec used.

One constraint was Perec constructed the novel based on the Knight’s Tour within a chessboard: “The knight is placed on the empty board and, moving according to the rules of chess, must visit each square exactly once”. He divided the apartment block into a 10 X 10 grid and followed the Knights Tours from character to character, room to room, chapter to chapter.

With every novel or piece of writing produced by Perec I cannot help but revere the mind behind it. A Void is a 300 page novel written without the letter ‘e’, working in both it’s native French, and the English translation by Gilbert Adair.

Through Perec’s writing I have discovered the wonders of the Oulipo, the creative processes of imposed parameters, and it has ignited a desire to live in the 17th arrondissement in Paris…

 

~ Alistair is raising money for Cancer Research UK during his ride – please wander over to his Just Giving page and donate a little cash. ~

13 September 2011 | 1 Comment

Angharad Lewis on On Reading

~ While Alistair is away cycling the length of Great Britain, we’ve invited twenty disgustingly talented people to each write a post for our blog. Today’s post is from one of our neighbours, the lovely Angharad Lewis, co-editor of Grafik Magazine, and partner at the rather fine Woodbridge & Rees. ~

Solitary, absorbing, transporting… reading is therapy, escape and meditation. One of my favourite photographers, André Kertész, knew the special pleasures of reading, and captured images of engrossed readers throughout his life. His book On Reading is a collection of the images he made of readers all around the world between 1915 and 1970.

Readers seek out solitary moments amidst the bustle of parks or backstage at theatres; they escape on rooftops and balconies to read; they snatch moments with discarded papers in the street. Kertész also captures the materiality of books themselves — stacked floor-to-ceiling in corners of rooms, lining the walls of libraries in neat, solid regiments, or crammed every which way into boxes on a book seller’s stall.

The digital silkiness of an iPad or ersatz leather binding of a kindle present a new and homogenised experience of reading that is alien to Kertész’s world — books with their sharp edges rounded off for convenience and smooth handling; no messy piles of papers and books required. What Kertész captured in On Reading was once universal and timeless but now looks suddenly and sadly archaic. But I prefer his images of readers to those in the iPad and Kindle ads.

 

~ Alistair is raising money for Cancer Research UK during his ride – please wander over to his Just Giving page and donate a little cash. ~

10 September 2011 | No Comments

Catherine Dixon on José Luiz Benicio da Fonseca

~ While Alistair is away cycling the length of Great Britain, we’ve invited twenty disgustingly talented people to each write a post for our blog. Today’s post is from the very lovely Catherine Dixon: a graphic designer, writer, and teacher, who’s currently working in Brazil. ~

The Brazilian illustrator José Luiz Benicio da Fonseca, or simply Benicio, would be speaking in Rio while I was there. All I knew was his reputation, a career spanning some 60 years, and a sense of the fond regard that many I was working with in the design community in Brazil held him in. So I thought that I should probably go.

Talks from the ‘old guys’ can be great – insightful, funny (charm being one of the most underrated essential skills of the graphic designer) and generous. And so it was on this occasion. Not that Benicio is just filling in his retirement days remininiscing. Now 75 years old he is still working, and so the evening was as much grounded in discussion of present illustration practice as that of the past.

He is a ‘pro’. And he is also prolific. His working output includes some 300 film posters, countless magazine covers, illustrations for books across the market from adult to children’s books and from fiction to non-fiction, along with a great many advertising campaigns and even architectural illustration.

Though the scope of his commissioned work is diverse it is rendered with an incredible consistency due to his unswerving fidelity to the use of gouache. The rich projections of jewel-coloured pieces of artwork showed time and again his old-school mastery of the medium. Clues to the age of the illustrations lay only in the context of use, the shifting fashions of magazine cover layout or the inclusion of digital accessories on the models.

Here’s the title page from Foi Expulso – it’s not often that the cover designer’s name is set at the same type size as the author!

His most famous works are undoubtedly his illustrated pin-ups. From the 1960s he worked for twenty years for the publisher Monterrey on covers for their ‘pocket books’ – cheap populist fiction titles featuring cowboy heroes, detectives, crime, sex and spies. For them alone he created almost 3000 covers, at times producing up to 22 covers a month in addition to other client work. He described how at a stretch he could produce 4 covers a day, albeit simple ones. This is in part due to his method of drawing from the huge visual library of photography he has built up, stock poses and so on that he can refer to and very quickly begin to build the image needed to match the title synopsis. Though he was careful to articulate the role of ‘design’ in this illustration process, showing how he would edit back from his references and then elaborate on them in order to tell a very particular story.

Of these titles the most outstanding are generally acknowledged as those for collection ZZ7 featuring perhaps his most iconic character Brigitte Montfort. This work is in many ways deeply unfashionable, though the audience for the talk spanned the generations with many young design students and enthusiasts in the mix. The work is also about as politically incorrect as it gets – poor Brigitte often being in want of some clothes. Yet the audience and discussion afterwards reflected the strength of popularity of Benicio’s work to a female audience too.

And I find I am also won over. Their irrelevance to me as potential reading material and trashy associations had previously rendered the graphic design of these books invisible. To hear Benicio speak was then something of a visual wake-up call. His jobbing professionalism, the strength of the visual story-telling, the drama (or melodrama) of the covers, the exquisite technique were actually all quite stunning. Get me to a second-hand bookshop in Rio now!

[Benicio was speaking as part of Ciclo Mandacaru de Oficinas de Ilustração at Caixa Cultural Rio de Janeiro – a week of workshops and talks about illustration. Photographs courtesy of Ana Paula Mendes.]

 

~ Alistair is raising money for Cancer Research UK during his ride – please wander over to his Just Giving page and donate a little cash. ~

1 September 2011 | No Comments

Nick Hornby on cover design

~ While Alistair is away cycling the length of Great Britain, we’ve invited twenty disgustingly talented people to each write a post for our blog. To kick things off, today’s post is from the brilliant Nick Hornby, the award-winning author of Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About a Boy; Nick is also one of the founders of the Ministry of Stories. ~

A book doesn’t have a cover, not any more. It has, over the course of its life in print, lots of covers. High Fidelity, my first novel, has recently been rejacketed for the sixth or seventh time: a tattooist called Russ Abbott has produced this rather lovely image for a special edition (part of the Penguin Ink series).

Backlists are re-launched every few years, in an attempt to push books off the dreaded A-Z shelves, where they don’t sell, and back on to the tables at the front of the shops. Paperback covers are frequently different from hardbacks; increasingly the big retailers, Amazon and the supermarkets, have a say in how a book looks before publication, if the book in question has serious commercial prospects. I don’t really know what to say about that, apart from observing that the people who sell books in supermarkets have different tastes from my own. I am at liberty to object to the covers on my novels, if I really hate them, but my publishers would then, I think, be entitled to ask me to take a lower advance, if I care about aesthetics so much. The days of the iconic jacket illustration, the image that forever becomes associated with a much-loved novel, are nearly gone. The stakes are too high now.

My first book, Fever Pitch, was different. It had the same cover for nearly ten years, from its publication in 1992 until I switched publishers at the beginning of the new century. Nobody expected the book to sell in enormous numbers – it was about football (and the conventional wisdom at the time was that football fans didn’t buy books), and it was a memoir, by someone nobody had ever heard of. The great advantage of my obscurity, and the low commercial expectations for the book, was that we, the publishers and I, could choose whatever cover we wanted. We were beholden to no-one, not even anyone at Tesco.

And here’s the thing about that cover for Fever Pitch: it existed, more or less in its finished form, before I’d written the book. I sold Fever Pitch on the basis of an idea and a few pages, and in the end two publishers were interested in it: Gollancz, who ended up with it, and Penguin, my publishers now. One of the reasons that I chose Gollancz is that they had already found this image. They used it for the cover of the offer they made to me, in which they outlined their plans for the book were I to go with them. I loved it; more importantly, I wanted the book I had not yet written to feel like that. Is the boy yelling or crying? Is he lost? Why is he looking in a different direction to everyone else? These questions, it seemed to me, had real metaphorical value. In other words, the jacket photo helped me to shape and focus the content of the book, in an extremely helpful way. It wasn’t as though I would have taken an entirely different direction had I not seen the picture. But that boy helped me to find my own voice, encouraged the book to become its better self.

We never managed to find the photographer, and I still don’t know who the boy is; at a reading in Dublin a few years back, someone told me that it was his cousin, at the open-top bus parade to celebrate Arsenal’s 1971 Double  triumph. I do know that I owe him a drink.

 

~ Alistair is raising money for Cancer Research UK during his ride – please wander over to his Just Giving page and donate a little cash. ~

31 August 2011 | No Comments

Mind Over Matter

Kemistry Gallery is fast becoming London’s best place to see classic graphic design work, and their new show looks set to cement that reputation.

Opening on 25 August, Mind Over Matter celebrates the work of Alan Fletcher, and specifically the 10th anniversary of the publication of The Art of Looking Sideways, his seminal book on graphic design.

The show runs until 1 October.

10 August 2011 | No Comments

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