Graphics.com is offering an excerpt of Charlotte Rivers’s Book-Art: Innovation in Design, a review of new and interesting book design. Highlights include a book whose entire print run (750 copies) was buried and then dug up before being sold.

From Book-Art, via Graphics.com:

Buried features a collection of photos by Stephen Gill that were buried by the photographer, near where they were taken. [Designer Melanie] Mues used this as her inspiration for the design of the book, and buried each copy before retrieving and presenting them in a clean, blind-embossed slipcase. The result is that each book has different degrees of smudging and deterioration on the cover.

The rest of the featured designs are less radical, but still excellent examples of a designer engaging with and enhancing a book’s text. Conventional book design is all very well, but sometimes a book just needs an ear growing out of its spine (see further down on the linked page).

A British architecture firm, Levitate Architects, has come up with a novel way for apartment-dwellers to accommodate their too-large book collections. In a genius stroke, they have created a combo bookshelf/staircase, which you can see for yourself here.

How is it that no one has thought to do this before? And where can we get one made?

Remember that project in which classic novellas were packaged to look like cigarette cases? Well, they may have pulled it off a little too well. As The Guardian reports:

The books, released as Tales to Take Your Breath Away at the start of the cigarette ban in pubs and restaurants last July, were well received by the design press and have made popular Christmas presents. But now the publishers are having to inhale deeply themselves as British American Tobacco (BAT) claims that one of the packs, containing Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Undefeated, resembles its own Lucky Strike pack. Claiming that such an association could seriously damage the health of the brand, BAT is trying to have the works pulped.

Photography on book covers has become so common that most of us don’t even think about the connection between the image being used and the purpose it’s being used for. Not so for Karl Baden, an artist and photographer living in New York. Baden is in the process of compiling and annotating a huge collection of book covers that use photos, the whole thing part of an online archive at Covering Photography:

The idea for “Covering Photography” first occurred to me in 2002. I had fallen into the habit of haunting secondhand bookstores, spending hours searching, mostly without success, for classic photography books I couldn’t afford when I was younger, and are now as rare as hen’s teeth.

While prowling the stacks, I began to notice familiar images from the History of Photography on the covers of novels, textbooks and volumes of poetry; books whose nominal subject matter didn’t necessarily have a literal correspondence with the often iconic photographs that graced their jackets.

[…]

During it’s transformation from photograph to book cover, the original image is often cropped, colored, reversed or otherwise altered to fit the aesthetic intent of the designer or the more practical concerns of the publisher. In some cases the image has been re-staged by another photographer, or even copied into another medium. All this manipulation prompts the question: How is a photograph, initially conceived as an independent aesthetic object, re-used as a visual cipher for a book’s subject, or as an attention-getting sales device; i.e., how does a shift in context affect a photograph’s meaning?

There is no simple answer to this question.

All of this is heady stuff, though sometimes the question of a photo’s cover context is a very simple one, as in the case of, say, Pamela Anderson’s novel Star Struck. (Link not entirely safe for work. Or children. Or adults with a fear of silicone.)

Remember how bookbinders and retailers used to advertise their services by posting company labels on the inside covers of books? No? Well a fellow named Greg Kindall, who runs a website called Sevenroads.org, certainly does, and he’s assembled a fantastic virtual museum of book trade labels, which you can see for yourself here.

It’s kind of shocking, when you see them all laid out in front of you, how much care and effort went into the design of some of these things. Does the book trade even have the time and/or money and/or inclination create stuff like this now?

We particularly love the label from the Book Stall in Battle Creek, Michigan, with the little roosters…

The proverb about not judging books by their covers is put to the lie time and again in stores, where the poor old covers have only a few seconds to grab the potential reader’s eye. Many authors are keenly aware of that, which leads them to micromanage the designs for their books.

The blogosphere has produced two good examples of authorial interest in covers lately. Shameless magazine’s Stacey May Fowles is publishing her novel Be Good with Tightrope Books this fall, and she’s asking Shameless blog readers to vote on her two cover choices here. (Quillblog joins the current majority of comments in voting for the clean, spare, and stunning version one, hopefully an easy winner over the cluttered second option.)

In the not-clean-and-spare department, Managing Humans author Michael Lopp blogs here about his own cover design experience. When the first proposals showed up, he, uh, wasn’t thrilled.

Right. So, the book. 10 months of constant pessimism [about his book]. This is why when the first batch of covers for the book showed up, I thought, “Okay, good. I knew they’d be awful.”

Worst Case Scenario

Here. Play along at home.

Not complete disasters, but clearly cliché. I mean, c’mon — cheese? Didn’t we move our cheese around back in 1998?

So Lopp asked a friend, artist Kevin Cornell, to come up with artwork for a new cover. The final product, which the author loved, is a little fussy for Quillblog’s taste – but you, dear reader, can judge the cover (and the book) for yourself.

Chip Kidd, probably the only designer of book covers that most people have even heard of, is interviewed in Esquire magazine about some of the tricks of his trade. The books that Kidd works on very often become massive bestsellers, though he admits that’s only partly thanks to him. “I cannot make you buy a book, but I can try to help make you pick it up,” he tells the interviewer.

Kidd gives some background on three recent titles he has covered – House of Meetings by Martin Amis, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and The Terrorist by John Updike.

Maybe it’s just us, but the Updike and Amis covers look kind of bland and even ugly, which is odd, given Kidd’s reputation for pizzazz. The Road’s all-black cover is pretty cool, though. It’s like, how much more black could this cover be? And the answer is none … none more black.

In a cute stunt, Penguin U.K. has asked musicians to design new covers for six of its classic titles. As The Guardian reports, Beck took on the French novel Le Grand Meaulnes, Johnny Borrell of the band Razorlight did The Great Gatsby, and Ryan Adams did Dracula. Adams tells The Guardian he

used oil paints to create “a weird outline or silhouette juxtaposed with the idea of the castle - you know, Dracula’s headquarters, his hang.”

You can see all six musician-designed covers here. In Quillblog’s opinion, a couple are actually pretty cool, including Beck’s and Adams’, while others, like Borrell’s Gatsby cover, should remind the Penguin brass why they have real designers on the payroll.

Also being hyped is a reader-designed cover for Aesop’s Fables. A reader-designed cover? That’s right, this whole rock-star-cover thing is promoting an even cuter stunt: Penguin recently released a bunch of classic titles with blank front covers, encouraging viewers to design their own. The gallery of reader submissions is here.

Winner of this week’s clever design sweepstakes comes to us from Britain. It’s this’s TankBooks project, in which several classic novellas and stories are being released in cigarette-style packages. (Thanks to the design site Veer for the link.) The titles include Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, all “packaged in flip-top cartons with silver foil wrapping and sealed in cellophane.”

TankBooks pay homage to this monumentally successful piece of packaging design by employing it in the service of great literature. Cigarette packs are iconic objects, familiar, tried and tested, and over time Tankbooks will become iconic objects in their own right.

As noted by Torontoist earlier this week in a post about Douglas Coupland’s latest art project, Penguin founder Allen Lane initially wanted his firm’s now-famous paperback line to be sold next to cigarettes.

GalleyCat is spreading the word (from Canadian bookseller Thomas of Première de couverture) about some really gorgeous design work that has been done for a Vintage Classics relaunch by Random House UK, with striking modern covers gracing a slightly odd selection of “classic” works. Here Trainspotting and Ripley’s Game are standing side-by-side with The Odyssey and The Rape of the Lock. Go figure.

Anyway, the covers are pretty. And, according to the bloggers, we in Canada will have access to them, while our American cousins won’t. We’ll also get special bundles such as Tom Jones plus The Rachel Papers and Middlemarch with Possession.

Heather Smith has posted a witty piece on Bookslut about the recent vogue for deluxe, multi-volume, hardcover collections of old comic strips, which she traces back to Fantagraphics and its Seth-designed Peanuts volumes. As Smith concedes, many of these collections are quite lovely and are enormously appealing to adult collectors, but she wonders what will become of the children who first encounter these old strips in such reputable formats.

Pardon me while I get out my corncob pipe and reminisce here, but in my day, comics were cheap. Skinny paperbacks like Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, and Family Circle were four for a dollar at ubiquitous used bookshops. […] What would it be like, as a kid, to first encounter comics in a format that suggests that comics are actually important? […] The tide of comics as something endlessly disposable is receding before our very eyes, and as we look ahead, the future looks suspiciously like a fluttering mountain range of sewn bindings and velveteen ribbon bookmarks. So how is this strange thing called “dignity” conveyed? Does a velveteen bookmark a classic make? Are we ready for the deluxe leatherette edition of Beetle Bailey?

After expounding further on the topic, Smith takes a closer look at the relative value of several recent collections, including the aforementioned Peanuts volumes, Hank Ketchum’s Complete Dennis the Menace 1951-1954, The Complete Far Side 1980-1994, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, and Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven.

Talk about reader interactivity. Biblioasis will publish John Metcalf’s latest memoir, Shut Up He Explained, this fall. And a reader of the Windsor publisher’s blog has designed the book’s cover.

It all began when Biblioasis posted some of its own early designs on its blog and asked for reader feedback. One reader, Brenda Schmidt, went one better and up and designed a cover herself, and Biblioasis owner Dan Wells liked it so much that he’s decided to go with it.

The total cost? Wells says Schmidt asked for only $8 and a one-year subscription to the Biblioasis-owned literary journal Canadian Notes & Queries.

Inspired by a recent documentary called Helvetica, about the now-ubiquitous 50-year-old font, Slate asked a bunch of prominent authors to tell them what fonts they compose in, and why. Not one of the authors named Helvetica, which is not surprising, considering how crappy it looks on a typical PC. What is surprising is that one of the crappiest of all fonts – Courier – got plenty of love, with five of the 10 author respondents naming it or one of its variations as their favorite.

Author Andrew Vacchs supplies a fairly convincing argument for Courier, though:

I write everything in Courier 12, because I write for publication, not pleasure. Since I cannot control the font the (eventual) publisher selects, what do I care how it looks on my screen? Courier 12 is the Type-O blood of fonts—works just as good for a N.Y. Times op-ed as a screenplay or a short story.

Judging by the full array of author comments, it appears that writing with Courier is like writing in an empty white room with no windows: all that’s left is you and the words. Still, do writers really need to act like monks in an abbey? Why not try some Big Caslon once in awhile, with a sprinkling of Zapf Dingbats?

On boingboing.net, designer Larry Knox breaks down the process of creating a cover for The Iliad, which he did right in his own living room. Knox fashioned a spear out of clay and a wooden dowel rod and took pictures of himself in warrior poses.

A link at the bottom of the article lets you see the photo shoot and separates the other pictures he used to compile the final cover.

(To read more about book design, be sure to check out Q&Q’s special report in our April issue, on stands now.)

Design Edge Canada reports that with the opening of a new main branch building, the North Vancouver District Public Library has revealed a new logo. The blue logo is meant to represent the library’s various collections. “Matt Warburton of Emdoubleyu Design in Vancouver created the new circular logo with its three book-shaped panels. In addition to books, the panels can also represent a line of monitors, CDs or video tapes, which are also available at the library.”

The logo is currently being used on new library cards.

The National Post reports that Canadian romance giant Harlequin is having a hard time finding suitable cover models. So much so that they’re holding a public audition in Toronto this weekend – and spindly, sallow professional models need not apply. Post reporter Ian Munroe writes that the firm is sick of “modelling agencies that supply them with thin, boyish-looking camera fodder,” and wants a more macho look. “It’s become a huge problem for us,” says Harlequin designer Deborah Peterson.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, this thin and boyish-looking Quillblogite must go pump some weights.

The April 2007 issue of Quill & Quire will appear in stores and in subscribers’ mailboxes over the next week or so. It includes a profile of Toronto novelist Cordelia Strube, a Special Report on Book Design, the Kids’ Announcements (listing all Canadian children’s books to be published this spring), and more. Plus our feature on Simon & Schuster Canada’s plans to boost their presence in the Canadian market.

Learn more about the issue after the jump, and go here for subscription information.

(more…)

Rather than provide free advertising by wearing clothing from corporations that can easily afford to buy marketing campaigns, why not encourage literacy by wearing what you read?

The website Literary Rags produces literary themed t-shirts from the works of dramatists, poets, novelists, and philosophers. Each shirt has a portrait of the artist (though not necessarily as a young man) on the front and a quotation printed on the back. Arthur Miller, Anton Chekhov, Emily Dickinson, Matsuo Basho, William S. Burroughs, Toni Morrison, David Hume, and Søren Kierkegaard are only a few of the writers who get the T-shirt treatment. The intro page for the site also includes audio readings of Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Langston Hughes, and Dylan Thomas.

An Edmonton poetry house, Rubicon Press, is also using clothing to support their poets. To learn how, check out Q&Q’s Special Report on the Prairies in our March issue – in stores now.

GalleyCat points out that Betty, Veronica, and the rest of the Archie comics gang (who they’ve dubbed “the world’s oldest teenagers”) are getting a makeover. Just in appearance, though — it’s not like they’re doing a “Reggie kicks smack” storyline or anything.

Of course, as happens whenever someone tinkers with an established classic, fans are grumbling. Aside from the expected if-it’s-not-what-I’ve-come-to-expect-from-it-then-it-must-be-terrible line of reproach, others are raising concerns about body image: “‘Archie seemingly has a normal everyday physique, while B&V look like twigs that could snap in two,’ says one commenter. ‘I realize that comic books aren’t known for their realistic anatomy, but comics like this specifically designed to court younger, and female, readers really should take care to not indoctrinate such a double standard.’”

Although the new Betty and Veronica appear to have extremely pronounced collarbones, were their old versions really ever any different? And what’s so realistic in a strip with a main character who wears a crown and never opens his eyes?

Related links:
Check out the new Betty and Veronica here

Today, the New York Times profiles Ben Schott, British collector of miscellany and author of the soon-to-be-published Schott’s Almanac 2007. Although the almanac includes information both trivial and significant about the past year, Schott makes a distinction between the sort of facts he collects and mere garden variety trivia:

“I hate trivia,” he said, “and I’ve never been interested in trivia books. Trivia is competitive; it’s ‘I know this and you don’t.’ I think what I’m doing is more inclusive. It’s more about sharing information. So it’s not so much about, say, who won the Super Bowl in such and such a year as what’s engraved on the Super Bowl trophy. Trivia books are written by people who are obsessed, and I wouldn’t want to read any of them.”

The only thing Schott could be accused of being obsessed with is classic book design: “Mr. Schott does all the typesetting himself and tries to make every paragraph end flush right.” He also tells the Times, “There’s real metaphorical joy in juxtaposition. I think it’s quite funny to talk about Paris Hilton, for example, in the same typeface that Ben Franklin might have used.”

Related links:
Click here for the Times profile

Oh, textbooks. How we who no longer have occasion to flip through your dynamically designed pages miss your tables and graphs, your colour-coded sidebars.

Seriously.

It turns out though, that engaging design wasn’t always a part of textbook production. It wasn’t until Tom Suzuki, an art director and graphic designer in the U.S., “turned the [textbook design] process on its head” in the 1970s that the design of a textbook first began to relate to its content.

New York Times writer Stephen Heller’s obituary of Suzuki, who died on Sept. 3, features a discussion of Suzuki’s “mold-breaking” innovations in “a genre long strait-jacketed by outdated formats.”

Who knew discussions of textbook design could be so compelling?

Related links:
Read the full story here

Lionel Shriver, the author of the novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, is apparently publishing a new novel soon — and she isn’t too thrilled with the cover design process. In an arts column for The Guardian, Shriver writes: “Maybe 13 really is unlucky — since that’s the number of cover designs for my new novel that my publisher has already run through, and not one of them works.” Shriver is strangely fixated on the idea that her cover must bear an original illustration — no stock photography for her — and she seems a little fuzzy on the distinction between designer and illustrator, expressing bafflement that her publisher’s designers haven’t simply sat down and whipped off some drawings themselves.

As if to illustrate how much subjective personal preferences play into this kind of thing, Shriver points approvingly to the cover of one of her earlier books: “My first novel used Henri Rousseau’s The Dream, into which the heads of my characters were carefully hand-painted, in the same style, peeking through the foliage.” Which serves as an always-welcome reminder that one person’s kitsch-alarm igniter is another’s clever vision.

Not to worry, though — in the end, Shriver sat down with pencil crayons and did the job herself. “I drew my own damn book cover — luminous, one-of-a-kind, and, like one of Tolstoy’s real beauties, not quite perfect. We’ll see if my publisher bites.” Quillblog would love to eavesdrop on that meeting.

Weirdly, in the same column Shriver abruptly switches gears to take on — drumroll please — the aesthetic bankruptcy of free jazz. No word yet on whether she’s presented Ornette Coleman with a few tips on how to play the sax.

Related links:
Click here for the Lionel Shriver column

A few months ago, Douglas Coupland popped up in the news when it was reported that he was planning to incorporate “the world’s biggest toboggan run” into the plans for a park that he and an architect were designing for Concord CityPlace, a downtown Toronto development. Well, now that the plans are a bit closer to fruition, it seems that the massive toboggan run is a no-go. Susan Kirwin of the National Post writes: “There will definitely be a place for tobogganing, Mr. [Alan] Vihant [vice-president of development for CityPlace] said, though Mr. Coupland’s earlier vision of ‘the world’s biggest toboggan run’ might not happen.” Instead, the primary feature of the new eight-acre park will be a one-mile running track devoted to the memory of Terry Fox.

Related links:
Click here for the National Post article

Michael Cho is a Toronto cartoonist whose work will have a familiar look to folks who shop at Pages Books & Magazines — Cho has designed the occasional display for the Queen Street store’s main window. Most recently, Cho put together a tableau that was up in January to promote his own children’s book Media Madness (Kids Can Press) and Brian McLachlan’s graphic novel No Dead Time (Oni Press).

In a photo essay on his blog, Cho outlines the entire process of creating the display, from brainstorming to thumbnail sketches to creating a scale model to making some late revisions. (”It turns out the actual display area is quite a bit shorter than the window area. Hence, I needed to revise the display to add more room to both sides,” he explains.)

Related links:
Click here for Michael Cho’s blog entry on designing the Pages window display

There’s been a lot of book-biz chatter about the chick-lit genre in the past few years, but in a column on the Book Standard site, Jessa Crispin takes on a male analogue: “the emo boy novel.”

Writes Crispin: “It’s making an entire generation of men’s writing look bad. I suppose it may be fair, as we women have to fight through the jungle of chick lit every day to publish our novels. But I’m begging for publishers to at least ghettoize emo-boy lit, maybe with color coordination and a design trick like our own high-heels-and-feet covers, before I have to start disregarding every book written by a man between the ages of 20 and 35.”

And how can you can tell you’re reading emo-boy lit? “Just open up to any random page and see if you can find a reference to any band mentioned on Pitchforkmedia.com in the last two years. Better yet, just look at the epigraph. If it’s from Death Cab for Cutie, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Bright Eyes or any other band of any kind, it’s an emo boy at work. Still not sure? Flip back to the author photo. Look like the underweight guy in high school who only talked to the girls and wrote out lyrics in his notebook during gym? Does he have perfectly ungroomed stubble? Emo boy.”

Mind you, the argument might be a bit stronger if Crispin actually identified more than a single novel (Andy Greenwald’s Miss Misery, published by Simon & Schuster) in this “ubiquitous” trend.

Related links:
Click here for Jessa Crispin’s Book Standard column

The current issue of Fast Company magazine reports the story of Berrett-Koehler, a press with an innovative approach to publishing. Based in San Francisco, the 13-year-old publishing house operates on the principle of collaboration. In addition to full-time in-house editors, BK’s managing editor, Jeevan Sivasubramaniam, employs a small team of freelance readers guaranteed to hold differing views of a book, each of whom writes a report. Also, the author’s input on design and marketing is encouraged via an interactive blog. “For each new book, editors and designers will come up with several titles and cover options, posting them online. Authors love the result — a buffet of distinct type fonts, rejiggered subtitles, and contrasting color schemes that evolve as new comments are posted. To help inform authors’ marketing decisions, everyone at BK — from the senior editors to sales managers to, literally, Kathy in accounting — is invited to share his or her suggestions on the blog and elsewhere.”

BK has also hosted author retreats and conferences “where … writers come together to share ideas, suggest speaking opportunities, and offer advice and contacts for book tours,” as well as “a marketing workshop, where some 60 authors and key outsiders, such as booksellers, shared experiences.” The company is also known to cede to the requests of its authors, granting one permission to publish his book for free online and another his choice of three copy editors.

Although BK’s co-operative strategy lengthens the process of publishing books, the apparent results of BK’s approach may serve as evidence for the benefits of collaboration. Attracting to its roster such writers as David Korten and the author of the bestselling One Minute Manager series, BK saw a growth in revenue of 25% last year, to $7-million US, and is projected to grow another 50% in 2005, according to Fast Company’s Lucas Conley. Conley adds that the average BK author sells some 15,000 copies, 27% more than the American industry average.

Thanks to BookNinja.com for the link.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from Fast Company

A recent article on the New York Times website affords readers a glimpse into the home of American book-design icon Chip Kidd. Bought on the cheap in what was once known as Hell’s Kitchen in New York, Kidd’s apartment is endowed with a panoramic view that could almost evoke Batman’s Gotham City. Nicknamed the Bat Cave, Kidd’s home is dubbed so not only for its view but also for its contents: walls lined with original comic book art and shelves housing some of the 500 pieces of Batman memorabilia owned by Kidd.

Kidd has been quoted as saying that collections are manifestations of identities. What happens, then, when a man who won’t grow up falls for a staunch classicist, a man who owns a harpsichord, copious numbers of books, and framed letters from Lincoln, Proust, and Verdi? The owner of the harp and Kidd’s longtime partner is Yale professor and poet J.D. McClatchey. “The trouble with falling in love when you are a certain age is … [that] you trail an accumulation of tastes and objects that, when they are different from your beloved’s, have to be accommodated,” he tells the Times “It’s like a third person in the marriage.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times

Renowned for its support of emerging writers, one of America’s most prestigious literary journals, The Paris Review, has undergone a facelift. Under the new command of Philip Gourevitch, a non-fiction author and writer for The New Yorker, the Review’s offices have moved, perhaps symbolically, from cramped, dingy quarters in an apartment building once owned by the magazine’s founder and longtime editor, George Plimpton, to a brighter, more spacious location. The move heralds a series of other changes — in distribution, format, design, and masthead — that amount to an entirely new vibe that Sheelah Kolhatkar of the New York Observer describes as “practically corporate.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from the New York Observer

The Diviners — not the CanLit classic about Morag and her coming of age, but the upcoming novel by Rick Moody — is already getting a cover makeover. The cover that was used on advance galleys of the book, showing a victorious Conan the Barbarian-type, is being reworked. The original image is being downplayed, and is now depicted as being shown in a crowded movie theatre. As reported in The New York Times, publisher Little, Brown realized at BookExpo America in June that there were problems with its original choice. “I realized we were making a mistake,” Little, Brown’s Michael Pietsch tells the Times. “I saw a lot of people, particularly women, just turn away from the cover.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times

Drawn & Quarterly has already issued a press release calling it “perhaps the most seminal piece of journalism ever devoted to graphic novels.” It’s a cover story in the most recent New York Times Magazine that’s designed as a novice’s guide to the form. The writer of the piece, former Sunday book review editor Chip McGrath, talks about why graphic novels are hot and what their strengths are, and highlights the key practitioners in the form, including Canadians (and D&Q stablemates) Seth and Chester Brown. Both Seth and Brown are featured in a group photo that accompanies the piece, and Brown designed the cover for the issue. (Oh, and Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Dan Clowes, among others, are also highlighted in the story.)

Related links:
Chip McGrath’s NYT Magazine cover story on graphic novels