According to Greg Kindall at Seven Roads: Anyone who handles old books will have come across these small and sometimes beautiful labels pasted discreetly (more or less) into the endpapers. Booksellers, binders, printers, publishers, importers, and distributors of books used to advertise in this way their part in bringing the book to market.
National Poetry Month Poster, 2013 Design: Jessica Helfand and Jessica Svendsen, Winterhouse (via National Poetry Month Poster: OBlog: Design Observer)
April is National Poetry Month. Enjoy the official poster, co-designed by friend of S.O. Jessica Helfand
Your Dreams My Nightmares Episode 029. An interview with Jennifer Heuer. Music by Possimiste via freemusicarchive.org
You can download the episode here or subscribe to the show via iTunes.
Some interesting discussion of book-jacket design in this episode of a consistently good podcast about illustration/design.
Jessica Hische has brought her typographical expertise to an alphabet of Penguin Classics. Imprint has the full story.
They look great, don’t they? The first six go on sale at the end of November.
I’m basically drooling all over my keyboard; these are gorgeous. I wonder who will be in the next set? I hope H is Homer. Any guesses?
“56 Broken Kindle Screens” is a print on demand paperback that consists of found photos depicting broken Kindle screens.
The book takes as its starting point the peculiar aesthetic of broken E Ink displays and serves as an examination into the reading device’s materiality.
As the screens break, they become collages composed of different pages, cover illustrations and interface elements.
(via 56 Broken Kindle Screens: book and video - Boing Boing)
Today, we are pleased to announce that the 50 Books/50 Covers design competition is being hosted by Design Observer. In partnership with AIGA and Designers & Books, Design Observer is hosting this competition for the best book designs for entire books and book covers published during calendar year 2011.
In addition to a long list of advisory nominators, nominations are open to the public. Please make your nomination here.
…Complete information and guildelines are here.
Historical 50 Books / 50 Covers collections from 1995-2010 are viewable in the AIGA Design Archives.
More at: OBlog: Design Observer
One last batch of design details, courtesy of Jacob Covey. See the full Flickr set here.
—> Come to our Launch event at The Strand, NYC, July 10, 2012: With Luc Sante, Ben Greenman, Shelley Jackson, Matthew Sharpe, Mimi Lipson, Jason Grote, Annie Nocenti, Joshua Glenn, and Rob Walker. Details here.
Significant Objects (ed. by Joshua Glenn & Rob Walker) - video preview (by fantagraphics)
This is awesome! The thing speaks for itself, you might say.
Props again to designer Jacob Covey and the crew at Fantagraphics. (More about that later).
Now will you come to our debut at The Strand?
Stories, things, and other matters relevant to the book and literary/economic online experiment, Significant Objects.
Significant Objects, a literary and anthropological experiment whose first two phases ran from July 2009 through October 2010, demonstrated that the effect of narrative on any given object’s subjective value can be measured objectively.
The project auctioned off thrift-store objects via eBay; for item descriptions, short stories purpose-written by over 200 contributing writers, including Meg Cabot, William Gibson, Ben Greenman, Sheila Heti, Neil LaBute, Jonathan Lethem, Tom McCarthy, Lydia Millet, Jenny Offill, Bruce Sterling, Scarlett Thomas, and Colson Whitehead, were substituted.
The objects, purchased for $1.25 apiece on average, sold for nearly $8,000.00 in total. (Proceeds were distributed to the contributors, and to nonprofit creative writing organizations.)
Most recently, a book collection of some of our finest stories has been published by Fantagraphics.
