While we were at the Ephemera Fair (check out our previous post), we also picked up a brilliant Fantastic Four Whitman Big Little Book (No.19 fact fans) from the late 60s, a bizarre little thing that’s a fusion of comic and book, setting single panel captioned images against facing pages of large type text.

In the story, the Fantastic Four are pitted against the evil Dr. Weird in his House of Horrors. The illustrations, and their accompanying captions, are, well, fantastic.

Check them out in our Flickr set. Nuff said.

Not often you get to look up at a clear blue sky in London and see it entirely empty of planes… obviously it's a nightmare for anyone who's supposed to be on a flight, but for the rest of us, well, it's kinda lovely.
 

So we're back from New York City, narrowly scraping in before the cloud of doom. We had a blast out there, and you can check out some shots on Alistair's NYC Flickr set. We've put together a Google Map of most of the places we visited too.

Our highlights were: 

MoMA: a behemoth, but you can't beat its collection of the greatest hits of 20th century art

The New Museum: a great space for contemporary art

The New York Transit Museum: the history of New York's transport system, housed in a disused subway station, with a great collection of signage

The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co: the brilliant front for the inspiring 826 NYC

Hell's Kitchen Flea Market: stylish junk

Printed Matter: all manner of artists and designers books and zines

Freemans: lush dinner down a back alley right by the New Museum

The High Line: a stunning urban park created out of an old elevated train line

Buttermilk Channel: delicious Brooklyn restaurant

Green-wood Cemetery: a vast and peaceful graveyard in Brooklyn

We'd planned to rely on an iPhone for navigation. We loaded up the NYC Subway Map app which was pretty indispensable, and works offline so you can check it while riding the subway; as well as My Maps, which lets you access any Google Maps you create. But, and it's a huge but, the data roaming charges in the US for overseas visitors are just nuts – £6 per meg of data, which you can plough through in moments. It's a massive hindrance, and we found working from a standard guidebook and map the only way to go in the end. 

One of the things we truly loved was that at any restaurant or cafe, they immediately bring you a free bottle of iced tap water as soon as you sit down, which they replenish as much as you like. That's a damn fine idea, and London would do well to follow suit.

Have a nice day y'all.

So, we're lucky enough to be stateside at the moment, for a week of shenanigans and suchlike in New York. So far, the Big Apple is living up to expectations – we've already spotted a guy reading the NY Times on his iPad on the subway, sitting next to a girl with a chihuahua in her handbag, who was in turn next to a guy reading manga comics on his Kindle. 

We're not going to be posting a whole heap while we're here, but we'll be sure to fill you in on our return. In the meantime, Alistair's gonna be posting bits and bobs on his Twitter feed, so check in over there if you're wildly bored.

We made our way across to Spitalfields yesterday, to check out some deeply fine clothes from Old Town Clothing, who specialise in classic British workwear. They're usually based in Norfolk, but every now and then they move their entire shop down to London, so that us city folk can have a browse.

The clothes are made from British cottons, woollens and linens, are made to order (though not made to measure) and all look mighty fine. As they say on their site:

"Simplicity of line, consistency of detail and durability of construction are the main considerations for our designs. We hope that they have a certain longevity of style which is non-specifically of the past, the intention being to appear chronologically neutral."

Lovely stuff.

Well, heck, would you look at that? This weekend marked four years of us wittering on about design and visual culture here on the We Made This blog. 

We just wanted to say a huge thank you to you all for reading and commenting and emailing and sending stuff in. People often ask us why we run the blog, and there's a whole mix of reasons really, but the main thing is that it lets us connect with loads of fascinating people – it's one of those "give, and you shall receive" things. And hey, sharing just feels good.

Reckon we might treat ourselves to some cake this afternoon (we're particularly partial to Konditor & Cook's Lemon Chiffon cake… and the Curly Wurly cake is pretty damn special too).

Nom nom nom.

UPDATE – We figured that since we're getting on a bit, it was time to smarten up, with a nip here and a tuck there, ahead of moving across to a full re-design sometime soon. Now, where's that scalpel…

It's always good getting free stuff*.

Graphic designer Patrick Fry dropped the first three issues of his new project No.Zine through our door the other day, and very lovely they are too. 

No.Zine is an idependent arts zine, released in a series. The first collection, 1 to 3, features a variety of young artists, writers, photographers and illustrators. Each issue is conceptually centred around its issue number.

Pick them up at bookshops and art spaces all round London, or grab them online.

*Wonder if anyone at Phaidon, or Thames & Hudson or Laurence King reads this blog? Or, what the heck, anyone at Apple, Rapha, or Lazarides… not that we're begging. Much.

A quick note – we're in the middle of doing some techy stuff in the back room of the We Made This blog. It's involving some spanners, some wrenches, a lot of grease, and a bit of swearing. So if things aren't looking quite right, they hopefully will do very soon.