The Joy of Books, How to Avoid Huge Ships

Book designs by
Rodrigo Corral, above,
and Chip Kidd, below.

Everyone is tweeting the "Joy of Books" video today and it feels like it should have a place here. A husband/wife team live-animated the shelves/stock at Type Books in Toronto.  The piece showcases the eye-candy quality of a room full of good print. And it is always fun to find a new bookstore. Now I have a bookstore to add to my list of destinations for an indeterminate future visit to Toronto. I hope to make it to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)  some year sooner than later. My entire previous Toronto experience comprises one night passing through, feeling lost after a few days in orderly, showy Montreal; still, we managed to find a great meal in one of Toronto's Chinatowns, and stumbled onto a free Lila Downs concert at the Toronto Harbourfront
Centre. Then we slept in the van.

A congruence of animations, animated books, creative couples, and our old friend book design: Last night I was finally introduced to Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Somehow I missed it while 15 million + others were melting in the face of monumental cuteness. If you're like me and you're late to this party, watch adorable Marcel now!!! Marcel might even be certifiably poetic (in my book): "Guess what I use for a hat? A lentil." The word "lentil" is almost a little, round poem unto itself. And maybe the thing we call "lentil" is too.

Naturally, I looked up the people responsible. "Co-habitating couple" Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp created Marcel together, and on filmmaker Fleischer-Camp's website I noticed he had directed an intro for comedian Patrick Borelli's one-man multimedia show, "You Should Judge a Book By Its Cover." Borelli, a former book designer, critiqued bad book cover design for laughs; he conceived the show for a library audience in 2009 [sic?] and took it to American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) conferences across the country. The intro didn't do much for me (perhaps my expectations were too high coming straight off The Shell) but a cool interview clip from Borelli's show (also directed by D.F.-C.) features author/artist/designers Steven Heller, Rodrigo Corral, and Chip Kidd, and the covers selected and comments from the designers evidence the subjectivity involved in pinning down "bad," let alone "good."

In an A.V. Club interview with Borelli, the much-mocked How to Avoid Huge Ships is singled out to exemplify bad bookdom. I found myself taking issue with this particular skewering. There are so many jokes about this book afloat on the internet that it's difficult to find serious references. I get it. But, I thought, if there's a book about it, maybe avoiding huge ships is actually pretty difficult, once you're in a situation where such action is necessary. And if so, then I certainly want the person responsible for keeping me out of collision with a huge ship to know exactly how to prevent the disaster. The cover design is not that bad. Plebeian. Unsurprising. I've seen worse. Okay, I might even feel attracted to it. (At any rate, I hope that author Captain John W. Trimmer benefited in some way from the maelstrom of fun-poking.)

Borelli suggests that a bad concept makes a book design bad, but the two are so different to my mind, although related in a stimulating way in the best books as objects. I have personally owned some pretty bad books, in terms of content, that were just so great to look at that I got suckered in. And then, who are the concept police? In the Borelli/Heller/Corral/Kidd video linked above, Cooking with Pooh is brought out for discussion; I was glad to hear Heller back the idea that the book, though provoking, of course,  chuckles in the adult demographic, is probably effective in reaching young Pooh-lovers.

At the end of the day, I do love what Borelli brings up in his own interview and the interview with other designers, about picturing all the parties involved in publishing a real stinker okaying the really sucky cover/book design. Just last night we were talking about television ads, the good and the ugly, and the corollary visualization in which I picture a group of decision-makers sitting around a table, agreeing, "Yeah, we'll go with that one." Such as the one that could turn a true Pepper off Dr. Pepper forever.