You may have noticed that we took a break this fall from regular posting at Bangback. One big reason for this is that in August of 2011, the Pinball team started an endeavor to publish content in our Scout Book format. We are so thrilled to be working with the Scout Book format in this new way, that it is absorbing much of our extra publishing energies at the Pinball HQ.

The first series from our Good Ink imprint was edited by François Vigneault, and it features the following classic authors paired with contemporary illustrators.

Vol. 1 “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, illustrated by François Vigneault
Vol. 2 “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving, illustrated by Bwana Spoons
Vol. 3 “The Jelly-Bean” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, illustrated by Vanessa Davis
Vol. 4 “The Story of an Hour” and Other Stories by Kate Chopin, illustrated by Gemma Correll
Vol. 5 “Eve’s Diary” by Mark Twain, illustrated by Meg Hunt
Vol. 6 “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, illustrated by Aaron Renier
Vol. 7 “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, illustrated by Zack Soto
Vol. 8 “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Tom Neely
Vol. 9 “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, illustrated by Michael Hsiung
Vol. 10 “The Gift of the Magi” and Other Stories by O. Henry, illustrated by Kate Bingaman-Burt

With such a compelling line-up of authors and artists, we knew people might want them all. So, we offered the series as a subscription, and then culminated the effort with a holiday timed release of a super charming box set collection.

The earliest story in the mix is “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving. One of our favorite Portland artists, Bwana Spoons, jumped on the chance to illustrate this iconic American tale. Andrea Raijer helped document by producing this video following Bwana as he creates his original illustrations for the Scout Books edition of Rip Van Winkle, and then tracing the path of those illustrations through the Scout Book production process. Chris Funk assisted with music.

It was such a fun project, we’re already hard at work on the next set! Stay tuned for more pocket-sized reads coming soon from Good Ink.

Literary Embroidery

Brooklyn based illustrator Jillian Tamaki recently created three amazing book covers for Penguin USA. Crafted over the course of two months, the illustrations and lettering were all painstakingly embroidered for the literary classics Black Beauty, Emma, and The Secret Garden.

The results are stunning, and I am very eager to see how the incredible texture, and handmade qualities translate into print. Available for sale in October of 2011, the book covers will be embossed and include full wraparound images with french flaps. Looking forward to updating my library with these amazing editions.

Images courtesy of Jillian Tamaki

TFJ's typographic monograph shines.

Though published in 2009, I didn’t come across Tobias Frere-Jones’ first monograph until this year. In 2006, Frere-Jones became the first American to receive the Gerrit Noordzij prize, presented by the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in honor of his unique contributions to type design, typography and type education. Responsible for almost 50 font designs, Frere-Jones’ irrepressible investigations are heavily influenced by older American typography and signage. This publication documents his different typeface designs and is accompanied by essays, observations and photographs taken from the designer’s archives, all presented in a fittingly well-designed edition.

The limited number of colors utilized to print the bulk of the book complements the design instead of making it feel as though it was printed on a budget. The fold-over inside flaps add rigidity and the 100# paper has minimal show-through. Crisply printed, Frere-Jones’ typefaces are deployed rigorously for both body copy and illustration, the design evocative of Typographical in its stunning use of two-color printing.

The understated nature of Frere-Jones’ type designs are the real highlight, explained in bite-size chunks of text that cut straight to the point. A master of finding the new in the old, Frere-Jones’ types rely on a multivariate base–pulling from history and the nuances of older printing technology as much as contemporary type design tricks and shortcuts. While Archer and Gotham have sublimated quickly into the American design consciousness, his older works are worth perusing:

• Nobel offers up a more sedate, humanist alternative to Futura

• 1994′s Armada would make a suitable alternative to the House Industries visual over-use in America at present

• Frere-Jones’ rough-hewn typeface Pilsner makes an excellent companion to Underware’s Fakir when set in all caps, as they share a number of common attributes- each being a loose interpretation of black letter formal elements applied to Latin bases

• Grand Central stands as a tour de force of interpretation of classical type design

• Garage Gothic offers up a husky, low-contrast display font applicable to a number of different potential situations.

Both as a type reference book and a bit of inspiring reading about a workhorse of a type designer, the Tobias Frere-Jones monograph stands as one of the better collections of graphic design work published this decade: slim, exact, and highly enjoyable.

Bound in one volume: paint, typography, language and humor.

Ray Fenwick is not just an image maker. He has a command for language that places his work on the border between the personal and the universal, creating a bizarre balance of playful irreverence and poignant humor. The man makes smart work, and it looks good too.

A new book called Mascots, forthcoming from Fantagraphics, collects a myriad of bright-colored typography and image work, pulling in original paintings, quick sketches, comics and art.

We haven’t seen it yet, so there will be no talk of what the ink smells like or what the cover stock feels like. However, we can safely assume that print details will be overshadowed by the exuberant content.

Pre-order a copy here, and be sure to watch Ray’s homemade trailer for Mascots.

How will printed objects fit into our material future?

As we monitor the pulse of printed communication, the ever-present question resurfaces: What will happen to our relationship with books, magazines and printed ephemera as digital takes over some aspects of our communication landscape?

A new book slated to be released at the Design Anthropology symposium in Vienna this month seeks to answer that question. Called Design Anthropology, the collection of essays edited by anthropologist and design historian Alison J. Clarke features input from leading thinkers on the shifting topics of material culture and our relationship to objects.

We’ll keep our eye on this publication and eagerly await its arrival in the States. View a spread above. You can pre-order the book from Amazon.de before its release later this month.

Via @johnthackara.

A spread from Design Anthropology, edited by Alison J. Clarke.

The book that everyone uses but no one reads.

Ammon Shea once spent an entire year reading the Oxford English Dictionary, from cover to cover. He recounted the enlightening experience in his book Reading the OED. It’s no surprise, then, that his latest project explores the history of another supposedly mundane reference book–the phone book.

In The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads, Shea delves into a complex history of the yellow beast. This is precisely the kind of scholarship we champion and admire: an exploration of printed matter and the reach it has into our daily lives and our social, political and economic history. Whether you think those people who leave phone books on doorsteps are littering or providing a public service, Shea’s book will set the record straight about the pragmatic use and cultural relevance of the toned newsprint volumes in our collective history.

Shea was recently interviewed on NPR’s weekend edition and spoke on the future of the seemingly obsolete tome:

NPR: Is your book…sort of an obituary for a dying publication?

SHEA: They are not terribly necessary, I think, because most people can find just about anything you would find in the “White Pages” you can find on the Internet. But nobody makes money off of the “White Pages,” they’re not a real industry.

The “Yellow Pages,” however, somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 billion a year in revenue from the advertisements. So there is a good deal of opposition, say, corporate opposition to no longer printing the “Yellow Pages.” And I think the “White Pages” will, in the next few decades, disappear. But I do not think that the “Yellow Pages” are going away any time soon.

NPR: If we don’t need the phone books for phone numbers any more, what else can we do with them?

SHEA: Oh, you can always sit on them.

Image © Flickr user gr8sublime.

Graphic selections from the best of the best.

There’s a book that’s a required addition to our household library each year, it’s The Best American Comics annual which is a part of the Best American series from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. You might think from that description that I’m a comics devotee. I’m not. There’s actually only one kind of comic that I like: the well-vetted. The Best American Comics annual vets better than anyone by bringing in guest editors such as Harvey Pekar, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Charles Burns, and this year’s Neil Gaiman to sift through pamphlets, zines, online comics, and publications of all kinds. The Best American Comics 2010 represents a selection of outstanding work published in North America between September 1, 2008 and August 31, 2009. It presents 25 of the very best examples of the year in comics.

Among this year’s editors’ selections are Ceci N’est Pas Une Comic, a retrospective of the G. W. Bush administration in 24 panels by Peter Kuper…

Michael Cho’s Trinity is a beautiful comic adaptation of the first nuclear weapons testing in the New Mexico desert.

Peter Bagge’s comic is about a friend’s multiple experiences purchasing over the counter Plan B pill…

Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis is one of this year’s selections…

…as well as an excerpt from Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library Volume 19

Tbe Best American Comics 2010
Find the Best American Comics 2010 online at Powell’s Books.

The Chicago Manual of Style's 16th edition, a new handbook for a changing publishing environment.

The word “book” appears 753 times in the recently released 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. The 15th edition, published in 2003, only contains 715 instances of the same word. Michael Erand, who wrote a contrast-and-compare review over on Design Observer, suggests this may be evidence that “as the book wanes, it becomes even more prominent in its absence.”

The Chicago Manual of Style has been a stronghold on the reference bookshelf of writers, students, researchers and editors for years. Add bloggers and online publishers to that list of content creators, because the newest edition addresses a plethora of digital usages and style rules, Erand notes. It would be an understatement to say that a lot has happened in the world of content creation and publishing since 2003. To read more about how the University of Chicago Press addressed shifting technology and new contexts, see Erand’s review.

Image from Bold Type.

A critical and curious history.

This book is a collection of pages and spreads spanning 500 years, reproduced photographically from the collection of the British Library in London, with observations by Alan Bartram.

These observations include:

History

With very few words, Bartram places pieces instantly into context– at one point he explains a section of inferior pieces by introducing us to an entire era of American book design, where the only thing that happened, in a nearly hundred year period, was poor copying of the most lackluster European designs.

He introduces us to designers whose names have become ubiquitous with quality, traditional typefaces we commonly encounter– Firmin and Pierre Didot of France, Giambattisa Bodoni of Italy, and John Baskerville of England. He explains how their work fit within the styles of each region and era, as well as who and what their work went on to influence.

Criticism

Bartram is critical of designers who have gone down in history as creating little short of perfection. William Morris gets the worst treatment, with Bartram consistently pointing out how claustrophobic and often goofy looking Morris’s medieval influenced design really was. Bartram is apologetic for his harsher commentary from the beginning of the introduction, and explains fully how he is observing from a modern designer’s perspective.

He gives a particularly hard time to an American designer from the early 1900s, Bruce Rogers. “This is not serious bookmaking,” (p. 125) he writes about a spread of Rogers’ with uneven leading and a horribly misaligned text block. He goes to town on a bible that Rogers designed in the 1930s, saying  “I find the sizes, spacing, and treatment of all headings, their relationships and hierarchy, perverse and well, brash.” (p. 137)

Perhaps it is simply a byproduct of Bartram’s being an englishman, but his criticism is often cheeky and amusing to read. One enjoyable moment is when he writes, about a design for The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, “Dwiggins seems unskilled in the use of space – rather a handicap for a typographer.” (p. 183)

Curiosity

At times his obervations are intellectually ponderous – asking us what we think, or presenting his opinion with reservations. “It is odd that, for all his originality, Baskerville never thought to group the different elements of his text more logically down the page.” (pg. 79) This approach to scholarship is refreshing. This tone makes the author-voice a likeable one, and encourages the reader to also think, turning the reading into a collaboration rather than a hard copy of a lecture.

The book concludes with a stretch of many title pages by Swiss designer Jan Tschichold with no commentary whatsoever, as if to point out just how exquisite the work is and to say “there is nothing to be said.”

Develop a deeper understanding of how fine book design affects your own reading life, and how fine book design itself developed over time, with 500 Years of Book Design.

John Baskerville's first ever title-page, for Virgil's 'Bucolica, Georgic, et Aeneis' 1757

Giambattista Bodoni's 'Manuale Tipografico,' 1818

James McNeill Whistler (yes, that famous painter): 'The Gentle Art of Making Enemies,' 1890

Giovanni and Alberto Alvise, 'Arte de Ben Morire,' 1478

An original printing of 'The Yellow Book', 1894

I have been interested in The Yellow Book, a legendary late-Victorian literary magazine, since my introduction to the work of Aubrey Beardsley. I found a coffee table book of his illustrations in my childhood home many years ago, and still credit the first hour I spent pouring over its pages as my biggest influence in developing a graphic design style.

Beardsley’s refined lines and balance of space and use of contrast are extraordinary. His work manages to be simultaneously both innovative and classic. The Yellow Book began, as legend has it, during a conversation between Beardsley and Henry Hartland, an American expatriate (who was the magazine’s literary editor) on a foggy New Year’s day in 1894.

The magazine became instantly distinct for its nearly complete separation of literary and visual content. It was also notorious for its association with sinful content, which derive from other associations of the time with racy French novels bearing yellow jackets, and with some lines referencing “yellow books” in Oscar Wilde texts.* Wilde himself was associated with the magazine, largely because he was friendly with Beardsley (who had illustrated his Salomé the year previous to The Yellow Book’s first appearance). Wilde was reportedly seen clutching a yellow book at the time of his infamous arrest. Beardsley served as art editor and designer for The Yellow Book but was dismissed after the fifth issue, for his association with Oscar Wilde. It is widely believed, and I will have to concur, that the quality declined after Beardsley’s departure.

It is safe to say that in the world of lit mag history, The Yellow Book held the place that McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern does today. The simple fact that it was founded a solid 104 years earlier makes it a must-see for lovers of all independent publications. The letterpress pages make the words and pictures notably sharp and vivid. The Yellow Book’s exquisite design and and ground breaking content make it a very significant player in the history of independently published books and magazines.

All 13 volumes of The Yellow Book are available for viewing at archive.org. Many academic and well established public libraries hold complete collections of the originals.

Interior illustration

Cover design for The Yellow Book

*An Ideal Husband and The Picture of Dorian Grey