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.

Twelve Days of Christmas Books: Big Books, Cookbooks

Matt Kish, illustration for page 357 of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, from his book
Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page, October, 2011, Tin House Books.

When I worked at The Bookworks we had a regular customer who came in for big books only. He called in advance and we set aside stacks of larger-than-average books in all categories. Photography, art, cooking. Gardening, exercise, film. Compendiums (big compendiums only). The selected big books were taken abroad for our customer's foreign customers, all of whom were looking for big American books. (If you're in Chicago, Bookworks is a great stop for Christmas shopping—great deals on recently released books in perfect condition,  classics and oddities of all description, a careful selection of books big and small.)

I was just in The Book Table in Oak Park and had to exercise great restraint to keep myself from "picking up" Matt Kish's Moby Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page. This book is now on The A List. What a fantastic, imagination-tickling, satisfying book. This big beauty would be a perfect gift for artists, sure, and for fans of Melville, literature generally, illustration, art, design, process, personal challenges. This book will delight a motley yet sophisticated lot of folks. The trailer from publisher Tin House gives a tasty taste:



Kish's undertaking is the fruit of an ambitious self-generated art prompt, and the proof in the prompt pudding. Prompts are just ideas laid out like scaffolding and this is the kind of project that can niggle a lot of fellow artists/writers toward conceiving some tapping framework to encourage the creative sugar sap to flow. Though not evidencing Kish's fab use of color, the image below is one of my favorite illustration/quote pairings, not in the least because it selects such wonderfully poetic lines to sketch (there are so many cool drawings, so there are lots of favorites):

"But far more terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a ship's jib-boom." -Moby-Dick, Herman Melville. Page 322 Artwork by Matt Kish.

If you're not close to Oak Park's book Table, you can order Kish's leviathan direct from Tin House as well. And check out Kish's website, blog, and Etsy shop for projects, his notes on process, and wonderful art for sale at incredibly low prices. I was reading some of Kish's blog before posting on this and particularly enjoyed his posts on book covers (appearing first on the Tin House blog). Kish's love of vintage mass market fantasy covers comes through in the Moby-Dick illustrations. I love that his Dec. 16 post touts one of the H.P. Lovecraft covers that Annie Heckman included in her contributions to the Chicago Publishes What Makes a Beautiful (and Marketable) Book? forum I wrote on recently (I highlighted two of the other Mountains of Madness covers Heckman showed; Lovecraft obviously inspires visual artists).

I've run the clock down so my 12 Days of Christmas Books posts will serve multiple/overlapping category offerings these days. . . .

Also tempting at The Book Table, India: The Cookbook, the fourteenth cookbook authored by Professor Pushpesh Pant, is an appealingly big book in its own right, packed in a printed, rice-carrier-style bag. With heft and the great design that characterizes publisher Phaidon's catalog, India: The Cookbook covers all of India's diverse cuisine regions and compiles Pant's twenty years of culinary research. (Cookbook, big book, compendium.) The book garnered the award for 'Best Indian Cuisine Cookbook in the World' at the 2011 Gourmand Cookbook Awards.

Pant's newest also shared the NYT's list of the year's best cookbooks with At Home with Madhur Jaffrey. I have a few Indian cookbooks and like to cook Indian somewhat regularly. I've turned to my text-only Madhur Jaffrey's Spice Kitchen: An Introduction to Indian Spices in 50 Simple Recipes nineteen times out of twenty over the course of the last twenty years when cooking Indian; I usually require pics, but this little sampler has me and my other very fine Indian cookbooks sit on the shelf, perfectly clean, virtually unused. I have given Jaffrey's cookbooks as gifts many times. One friend still thanks me for his Jaffrey cookbook eight years later. So, experience tells me that I don't need a new Indian cookbook. Still, India handsomely commands immediate "must-have" status.

Fish in Red Chili Chutney, India: The Cookbook (via http://www.indiawest.com)

The IndiaWest online community Web site features a few recipes from Pant's India; if you're finicky about cookbooks and not drawn in by looks alone you can try one or two dishes before committing. Make a warming winter fish dinner, using Great Lakes whitefish:

Fish in Red Chili Chutney
Origin: Coastal

Preparation time: 25-30 minutes, plus standing time

Cooking time: 15-20 minutes

Serves: 4

Ingredients:

1 lb 10 oz skinless, firm white fish fillets, trimmed

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

salt

For the marinade

1 level teaspoon ground turmeric*

4 cloves garlic, crushed

1 tablespoon lime juice

½ teaspoon sugar

For the red spice paste

6 dried red chilies

1/3 cup dried flake coconut

1 teaspoon malt (white) vinegar

* turmeric is a spice made from the rhizome of the turmeric plant, which is ground to make a bright yellow powder. It has a warm, dry flavour and is found in almost all curries and pickles. It also has antiseptic properties. 

Cooking Instructions:

Mix the turmeric, garlic, lime juice, sugar and a little salt together in a bowl. Put the fish in a large shallow dish and rub the fish with the turmeric mixture, then cover and set aside in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

To make the red spice paste, put the dried red chilies, desiccated coconut and vinegar in a food processor or small blender and process to make a paste, adding a little water only if necessary. 

Heat the oil in a pan over high heat, add the red spice paste and stir-fry lightly for about 1 minute, ensuring the bright red colour is not lost due to browning. Reduce the heat, add the fish with ½ cup water, stir and simmer for 7-8 minutes, or until the fish is cooked.

Twelve Days of Christmas Books: Collectible

Visit Dawsons' Bookshop online for rare books, particularly art, photography, and So-Cal/Western Americana history, and for awesome fine art photography. Seriously cool stuff. If you are not sure what you're looking for, sign up to receive the Dawsons' emails right away and you will receive periodic highlights from the collection for sale (not too many and always intriguing; you'll be glad to find these in your inbox).

There are offerings to suit most wallets. From more humbly fascinating items like Marcia Rittenhouse Wynn's turn-of the century stories set in the Upper Mojave Desert in a first edition (1945) with a gorgeous screenprinted cover (above), to "the post-Provoke masterpiece of Japanese photobooks," Masahisa Fukase's Karasu (Ravens) (below).

Proprietor/curator Michael Dawson also offers museum quality art photographs. Photographers represented range from the iconic, including Ansel Adams, to deserving lesser-knowns. Currently the Web site features the Sanford H. Roth collection; Roth moved from New York to Paris where he fell in with and photographed the culturati who would become lifelong friends, including Colette, Picasso, and Cocteau. Roth went on to photograph film stars in Hollywood and Eurpope, becoming famous for his portraits of James Dean.

Bastille day parade - 1950-55. Sanford H. Roth

Twelve Days of Christmas Books: Photography

Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Black Cañon, Colorado River, From Camp 8, Looking, Above, 1871, Albumen print, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Check out the Art Tattler International Web site for a great preview.

Day one in twelve days of books from my wishlist.

Two gorgeous photography books available in the Art Institute gift shop, good for a destination shopping trip.

Check out the exhibit: Timothy H. O'Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs. Then pick up the book: Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan for any fans of photography generally, history, Western Americana. General book and art lovers should find interest in O'Sullivan's photos too; much of his work finds men (and their essentials and accoutrements for survival and exploration) dwarfed within awesome, overwhelming landscapes, beautiful, certainly, and the images are charged with a current of foreboding. Both the "pure" landscapes and views incorporating the human form similarly suggest stories and spark the imagination.

You can order direct from Yale Univ. Press too.

 
























Richard Misrach is a longtime favorite. Misrach's 2010 book Destroy This Memory looks at post-Katrina New Orleans. Misrach's eye is unique, his technique is dropdead gorgeous (let's just say he is considered responsible for "bringing color photography back"), and his subjects are meat and gristle, so his books are all substantial, worth the investment and deserving permanent shelfspace, as the images bear ongoing examination.

In his Modern Art Notes for the Artinfo blog, Tyler Green describes Misrach's gestalt for his Katrina book: "Misrach’s book focuses not on the totality of the devastation but on one way New Orleanians responded to it. . . . New Orleanians spray-painted messages on their homes, cars and propped-up boards of plywood. The graffiti are warnings, announcements, pleas and even sly jokes shared with neighbors, government, city officials and neighbors. They are among New Orleanians’ first written responses to their hell."

 

According to Green: "Misrach didn’t just make his pictures into a book, he printed them and gifted full sets of prints to five museums that serve as storehouses of our visual record of ourselves and our culture: the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, the MFA Houston, SFMOMA and the New Orleans Museum of Art.  Misrach is also donating the royalties from book sales to the Make it Right Foundation, which is active in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. (Readers may also click here to give to Make it Right.)"

If you're not in Chicago, or you can't make a visit to the Art Insitutitue, Destroy This Memory is offered at a nice sale price via the publisher at: Aperture Foundation (while you're there, if you subscribe to the magazine, at a 50% discount, you get a free copy of Aperture's Masters of Photography series: Paul Strand with your subscription). 

“I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas.”—Richard Misrach 

(If you do make it to the museum, you can always pick up a membership for someone you love, a year's worth of beauty and its effects.)

Fruit of the Temporary Amazon Purchasing Hold

In terms of print, decided to limit myself to buying in bookstores, buying from publishers, and borrowing from the library, for now.

I can get quite a bit of good stuff via inter-library loan. Then, browsing for poetry in the library is not ideal, but it can bear fruit. Found and enjoyed Zach Savich's Annulments. The format and form are nice; the book's small and squarish and the poetry is sparse on the page (I'm thinking of a dwarf conifer garden, with perfect, sometimes funny, sometimes gorgeous little trees and plenty of open space for rocks or mulch in between), such as, set apart: "Car going faster or posts grown closer together. Men pronouncing the names of fish."

I particularly liked "Real Time," the end:  

Reading together is mostly looking up 

The world a more literal place in the morning 

Standing not with a loaf but the flour

Zach Savich, Annulments, UP of Colorado, 2010.

Visual Paradise

"Art is a constant; it's part of you." Dennis Hopper

The Trib's piece on the Art Institute's new Taschen shop-within-a-shop quoted a consultant advising museums in matters of retail, "If you're in the middle of a whole bunch of Taschen books, you're in the middle of a visual paradise."

At Rizzoli in the mid-'90s we maintained dedicated Taschen tables, towering with  juicy, super-saturated tomes. Smart, bold catalog, it's no surprise they're still selling like hotcakes. And the company's got marketing panache to suit.

Mostly, yes, viva! Bookstores, adapt! Then, sigh, the "publishers with high wholesale prices" who didn't make the cut. Certainly some of their books are wonderful too, like endangered species. Even an ugly little biting beast is so important when it's almost gone.

The Seizure of Our Engine

Landed our car in the shop this month; the loan of a car took us to Wisconsin this weekend to get the emissions test taken care of for our fine, lending friend. The trip back took us to Jack's Cozy Cafe in Kenosha and then to Illinois Beach Sate Park. In the nature preserve there, we saw deer, wildflowers, and a bluebird, the second this year. Further south, we stopped at a Salvation Army where I found an old table-mount mitre guide from Minneapolis that I can use to make frames; then we stopped in Evanston to see Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams (more on that later). We had time before the showing and we went to Barnes & Noble where I picked up jubilat, Noon (check out the current cover!), The Southern Review, and Poetry East.
This morning, I looked up a very old friend's old-school bookstore in San Fran's old Mission--Scott Harrison's Abandoned Planet--to see if it was still around. It isn't, but I found a funny little bittersweet video someone made about Scott and his store (closing):



I was friends with Scott when I first started writing poetry. He was a little friendly with Charles Bukowski, who I admired, and I think I remember Scott had had Bukowski in for readings in his store in Santa Monica, The Bluest Eye.
During that era I worked in a Rizzoli bookstore in Pasadena. One morning, a tall jocky-looking guy was prowling the front door really anxiously before we opened. I unlocked at nine and he accosted me, in a slightly alarming way, asking if I was Anna. I said yes and he asked if I liked Bukowski and I said yes, internally cursing a friend who worked at a neighboring bookstore (those were the days—5 top-shelf bookstores in a few blocks radius with a few stragglers in between to boot); I suspected the friend had sent this dude to me. Then the jocky dude started crying, telling me his friend had been killed by a shark the day before, surfing, and that the friend had liked Bukowski, and that he wanted to read one of his poems at the funeral, and could I pick something for him. I'd read about the shark attack in the paper that morning. I sat him on a stool, panicked, and then picked The Man With the Beautiful Eyes, the first Bukowski poem I had read.



Tonight, I looked up Poetry East online to look into their submissions policy. They have a nice vertical reading pane where you can scroll down through poems they have liked to publish. I scrolled down and there was The Bluebird by Bukowski--the poem I used, 15 years ago?, to explain to my Dad how I felt about Bukowski.

The Bluebird
by Charles Bukowski
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?