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Archived posts: Books

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

Cattle Brand

The mark above is a cattle brand, and a particularly fantastic one at that. I first saw it in Per Mollerup’s marvellous book, Marks of Excellence.

Cattle brands have been around since the days when the Egyptian pharaohs were doing their thing, but they really came of age in the late 19th century in the United States, where in 1880 there were almost 40 million head of cattle.

With that many cows wandering around, you need to make sure people know which ones are yours – particularly with rustlers about eager to make off with your livelihood. That was done with brands burnt into the cattle’s hides with hot irons – as Ramon F Adams says in the introduction to Manfred R Wolfenstine’s comprehensive history of cattle branding, The Manual of Brands and Marks, ‘A brand’s something that won’t come off in the wash’. Here’s a plate from that book, showing drawings of one of Wolfenstine’s irons.

All cattle brands are registered with the county or state in a brand book, which records the name, design and placement of each mark. They can be made up of letters, numbers or symbols, and all manner of combinations of each of those. They are read from top to bottom, and from left to right. Branding irons were traditionally made of steel (if made by hand), or copper or stainless steel (if manufactured commercially), and heated over a wood fire. Individual letters and numbers were generally between three and five inches high, and 1 1/2 inches wide.

Various alphabets were designed specifically for branding, including standard, flying, running, hooked, bradded, forked, barbed, dragging, walking, swinging and rocking:

An alphabet that featured letters and figures on their sides, ‘too tired to stand up’, was described as ‘lazy’.

Now that you know that, you should be able to decipher the brand:

The brand is 2 Lazy 2 P, or ‘Too lazy to pee’. I love it for its staggering narrative economy. The idea of someone being too lazy to even take a pee is damn fine in itself (though for them to use that to identify themselves and their cattle is a little bonkers), but to compress the idea into two numbers and a letter is just brilliant; and brilliantly unforgettable.

[This is an extended version of Alistair's Pictoform piece in the latest issue (G191) of Grafik magazine.]

19 July 2011 | No Comments

Much ado about Alfriston

Living in London is generally a huge pleasure – but one of the best ways to make sure that’s the case is to leave regularly – particularly if you leave and head to the country. So this weekend we jumped on an early train and headed south.

Our starting point was Alfriston, a small village between Brighton and Eastbourne. And it turned out to be one of the finest villages we’ve ever been to. That was thanks largely to the presence of Much Ado Books, which is definitely the finest book shop we’ve ever been to.

The bookshop, run by Cate and Nash, is that perfect mix of new and old books, all picked out with real love and attention.

It’s this love and attention that led to the shop winning the Independent Bookshop of the Year award a few years back. And deservedly so. We’ve never wanted to hug a shop before, but we really wanted to hug this one. Just check out their shelf of old design books:

We picked up a gorgeous facsimile edition of the Specimen of Modern Printing Types by Edmund Fry 1828, published by The Printing Historical Society in 1986.

Just fantastic.

After such heady delights, we wandered across the road to Badgers, a frankly terrific teahouse (with a gorgeous garden), were the owner Michael served us up a delicious breakfast of scrambled eggs on wholemeal toast.

Nourished both in body and mind, we were perfectly set up for a wander along part of the beautiful South Downs Way, a trail which follows the chalky ridges that run from Winchester to Eastbourne.

Cut to a few hours later, and we made our way back to Alfriston for a late lunch at The George, which served up quite simply the tastiest Welsh Rarebit we’d ever eaten.

We made our way home tired and happy, aware that while London is great at some things, Alfriston is more than its match.

16 May 2011 | 1 Comment

The Last Werewolf

The Last Werewolf is the fantastic new novel from Glen Duncan, published by Canongate. We picked it up in Foyles the other day, having popped in there for a quick browse. We hadn’t heard of the book before, but a few things made us pick it up and buy it.

First up, we’ve naturally got a bit of an interest in all things monstery, thanks to Hoxton Street Monster Supplies – so the title alone was enough to make us take a look.

Secondly the dust jacket, designed by Peter Mendelsund (check out his Jacket Mechanical blog – lovely stuff), is foil blocked with a diffuser foil, which reflects a spectrum of light, so that grabbed the ‘ooh, look, shiny!’ part of our brain. Similarly, the pages of the book have a gold gilt edge – that’s a sort of metallic covering on the outside edge of the pages, traditionally used to protect the pages of books from dust. That gives the book the feel of being something special – a feeling that stuck with us all the time we read the book, sitting particularly well with the subject matter too – not something you’d ever experience on a Kindle. (Nor, interestingly, would you know that these design elements existed if you just looked at the book on Amazon, given that they only ever show a front cover shot, often created from the design artwork before it’s actually printed, so without any special printing processes.)

Thirdly, the back cover had a quote from Nick Cave:

‘A magnificent novel, beautifully crafted and full of genuine suspense, that tears the thorax out of the horror genre to create something that stands rapturous and majestic and entirely on its own’.

All of that was enough to get us to hand over our cash and start reading. And it’s a fantastic book – partly a philosophical examination of desire, existence and mortality; it’s also a classic horror novel, though it plays on its genre expectations at the same time as embracing them.

Our only quibble in fact is with the typesetting of the book. The book is set in Perpetua by Palimpsest Book Productions, but they’ve used a cut of the font which doesn’t have ligatures:

There’s not really much excuse for that kind of behaviour, and it made us groan every time we stumbled across one.

Ligatures, for those who don’t know, are the combined letterforms that are used where two characters would otherwise butt up against each other uncomfortably, as with the fi in ‘fine’ above and below. Most commonly ligatures are created for the combinations ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl:

The book has its own website, which feels wildly at odds with the design of the book, which is a real shame, and a missed opportunity.

Those are minor gripes though – we loved the book, and highly recommend it.

20 April 2011 | No Comments

Direction – Space!

In June last year, we checked out the Central Saint Martins BA Graphic Design show, and one of the students whose work we noticed was Maria Gruzdeva, particularly her book of photographs from the Yuri Gagarin Russian State Science Research Cosmonauts Training Centre (also known as the Star City).

So it’s great to see that less than a year later, the book Direction – Space! has been published for real by Dewi Lewis Publishing – not bad given that Maria is still studying (doing her MA at LCC). Read more about the project in this Telegraph piece.

11 April 2011 | No Comments

Green Wobbly Things, Dancing

Today sees the launch of the very first Ministry of Stories anthology of writing, ‘Green Wobbly Things, Dancing‘.

The Ministry is a free space for fresh writing by young people, and opened in November last year (read all about it on our blog post); and since then has been running school visits, as well as drop-in sessions after school and on Saturdays. This anthology collects together some of the brilliant work from the kids who attend those sessions, and features stories, poems and comics of every description, all of them fantastically imaginative.

We designed the book, which is printed and bound in-house at the Ministry using a photocopier and wire-binder. The covers are pre-printed in red, leaving space to be customised for each anthology (and they’re also used for notebooks for the school visits). Big thanks to the good folks at Robert Horne for providing all the stock.

2 April 2011 | No Comments

The Beauty of Books

Yesterday we caught up on the first episode of The Beauty of Books, the new four part BBC4 series (screening as part of their Free Your Imagination season about books).

The show focused on two books in particular, the Codex Sinaiticus and the Winchester Bible.

The Codex Sinaiticus is the oldest surviving complete New Testament, created around 350AD; and also one of the earliest surviving bound books: 800 pages of vellum, written in four equal columns of 48 lines. We learnt that it was mainly created by female scribes, using an ink created from Oak galls, which was more acidic than standard carbon inks, and therefore more resistant to rubbing off the page.
The Winchester Bible is a stunningly beautiful illuminated manuscript, created in the 12th Century, which still lives at Winchester Cathedral.

It’s a great show, we’re looking forward to the next three instalments. The next one airs on BBC4 on Monday 14 February at 8.30pm, and looks at Medieval books including the Luttrell Psalter and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

9 February 2011 | 5 Comments

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