coming soon...

I am excited about this new book from Princeton Architectural Press, due out in the UK in November.

Handmade Nation documents today's growing contemporary craft movement, incorporating artists, designers and craftspersons who are inspired by radical politics, the punk movement and DIY aesthetics, as well as traditional handiwork techniques. The book brings together 24 makers from across the US working with a variety of traditional and non-traditional media and methodologies to provide a microcosm of today's crafting community, played out through a range of spaces such as websites, blogs, online stores, galleries, artists studios, independent boutiques and craft fairs. Documentation of makers, their works, their work environments and their processes are accompanied by discussions of how they got started and what motivates them, plus texts by Andrew Wagner of American Craft Magazine, Garth Johnson of Extremecraft.com, Callie Janoff of the Church of Craft, Betsy Greer of Craftivism.com, and Susan Beal, author of Super Crafty.

The people behind Handmade Nation, Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl are both based in Wisconsin. They have a blog, and there is also an accompanying Handmade Nation documentary (you can watch a trailer online on their website) in which director Levine travels to 15 cities to explore the burgeoning 'handmade' community in the US.

The illustrations and lettering for the new book are drawn by Kate Bingaman-Burt of obsessive compulsion fame - I am completely addicted to her wonderful blog, what did you buy today? in which she posts an illustration of something she has purchased each day.

Best of all, if you hop over to the wonderful my love for you is a stampede of horses blog right now and leave a comment, you'll be in with a chance of winning a copy.

in praise of the penguin

‘Good design costs no more than bad design’ - Penguin founder Sir Allen Lane

Now I know that Penguin Books is not a visual arts publisher; however, in any discussion of books, art and design, the famous black and white bird does tend to pop up its cheeky little head.

Most people know the now-legendary story of how publisher Allen Lane, on returning to London from a weekend at the Devon home of Agatha Christie in 1934, having tried unsuccessfully to find something to read at Exeter station, suddenly realised there was a significant gap in the market for good quality but affordable paperback books. It was in fact Lane’s secretary who initially suggested Penguin as a “dignified but flippant” name for the new publishing company: Lane himself, who emphasised the critical importance of cover design from the start, devised an early version of the famous three-panel cover, and the office junior was sent to sketch the penguins at London Zoo for a logotype. Over the years, Penguin’s design was developed and refined under the direction of the German typographer Jan Tschichold during the 1940s and the Italian art director Germano Facetti in the 1960s.

Of course, today, we recognise Penguin as being synonymous with iconic design: Penguin mugs and tote bags can be purchased from the Tate Gallery; a Penguin exhibition was shown at the Design Museum in 2006; and in 2007 the company launched the inaugural Penguin Design Awards dedicated to supporting the very best in emerging book design talent. In recent years, two eminently covetable new books dedicated to the beauty of Penguin books over the years, and if you're anything like me (ie. a geek about books in general, and book design in particular) I imagine you'll find them both very hard to resist:

Penguin by Design: A Cover Story (Allan Lane, 2005) is a comprehensive design history of seventy years of Penguin paperbacks. Author Phil Baines charts the development of Penguin’s distinctive design through an investigation of individual titles, artists and designers as well as typography (got to love that Gill Sans), and the famous Penguin logo itself. Lavishly illustrated, the book reveals not only how Penguin has established its identity through its cover design, but also how it has become a constantly-evolving part of the history of British visual culture, influencing the wider development of graphic design, typography, typesetting and illustration. Filled with intriguing snippets of information (apparently back in the day a Penguin paperback would set you back a mere sixpence - that’s 2.5p - which was then the price of a packet of 10 cigarettes) the book is also strangely evocative: perhaps because of the special place Penguin books (not to mention childhood Puffins) occupy in most of our hearts, flipping through these beautifully designed pages is a uniquely nostalgic and moving experience. You can buy it online here.

Seven Hundred Penguins (Penguin, 2007) makes an intriguing companion volume: a fascinating selection of seven hundred of Penguin’s most important and influential covers, ranging from the publisher’s earliest days to the end of the twentieth century. Selected by Penguin’s staff, the collection brings together everything from well-known design classics to unexpected and quirky treats - perfect coffee-table fodder. Buy it online here.

If you want a taster of the kind of things this book has in store, Joe Kral has a fantastic flickr album of classic Penguin and Pelican covers to enjoy here.






















Perhaps inspired in part by the popularity of these two titles, Penguin have recently published Penguin Celebrations, a selection of 36 of “the best books of their kind to be published in recent years” issued in covers inspired by the original, now iconic three-panel design. As with Penguin books of old, the series takes in fiction (orange), science (blue), mystery & crime (green), travel (pink), biography (blue) and essays (purple) - they are pretty hard to resist, even though they aren’t quite as nice as the originals.

And as if this wasn’t enough, other recent Penguin projects have included My Penguin, a series of classic Penguin titles ranging from Alice in Wonderland through to Crime and Punishment with blank, “design it yourself” covers. Six bands(Razorlight, Goldspot, Dragonette, Johnny Flynn and Mr Hudson & The Library, in case you’re wondering) got the ball rolling by designing their own unique covers, which you can view on the My Penguin website. There is also a gallery of reader’s own cover designs (sadly, submissions are now closed) which you can browse here.

And you've got to love the recently-issued series of classic adventures with Boy's Own-inspired covers designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith. You can check the full set out here on Première de couverture.

Given all this it’s perhaps unsurprising that Penguin books have become a key source of inspiration for artist Harland Miller. His recent monograph International Lonely Guy (Rizzoli, 2007) brings together a series of works inspired by literature, and by Penguin cover designs in particular, together with a series of essays and interviews with the artist by both fans and critics including Jarvis Cocker, Sophie Fiennes, Gordon Burn and Ed Ruscha. Nostalgic, bitter and witty by turns, Miller’s book is a million miles away from the Penguin mugs in the Tate Gallery bookshop, but what remains evident throughout is the artist’s intense interest in language and literature: paintings are rife with play-on-words, puns and textual experimentations combined with reappropriations of cover and author images (Ernest Hemingway, featuring in a painting entitled I'm So Fucking Hard is perhaps especially memorable) in a contemporary riff on Pop art. Buy it online here.

cool penguin collection courtesy of eifon. cute penguin picture by lord biro. both photos licensed under creative commons.

books, art & design online (part 2)

I've been neglecting this blog recently, which I feel very guilty about, especially as it recently got a mention here on The Manchizzle, Manchester's very own "hub of blogging goodness."

However, this is partly because I'm still trying to work out the legality issues around using book cover images and illustrations on a blog. I suspect in the US this would be covered by Fair Use, but I'm not entirely sure of the position here in the UK, and from experience I know that publishers have different policies when it comes to use of images - even if you're just using them to accompany nice things you want to say about their books. Anyway, apologies if things are not looking so pretty around here at the moment while I'm sussing it out.

In the meantime, if you're feeling the need for some book-related visual loveliness, here are some book design sites I've recently discovered that may just fill the gap.

Covers is "dedicated to the appreciation of book cover design", and brings together a very comprehensive selection of book covers of all kinds for debate and heated discussion. It's the brainchild of Fwis, a US design firm based in Brooklyn, NY and Portland, Oregon. (Is it just me, or does it seem like Portland is totally the place to be at the moment? I think I need to go there - check out how cool their Independent Publishing Resource Centre is, for a start!)

The Book Design Review is a well-established book design blog written by Joseph Sullivan. As with Covers, Joseph documents book covers of all kinds, and there's not much here specifically focussed on visual art books or catalogues, but it's an interesting place to read about book design in general.

Similarly, Première de couverture is a blog exploring "the fascinating world of book cover design" authored by Montreal bookseller Thomas, who describes himself as a "curious (in every sense of the word) young man who always judges books by their covers." Thomas mainly posts about paperback fiction covers, and lovely, lovely Penguin books in particular (more on Penguin to follow) and has some great images to browse.

Meanwhile, I'm off to the Liverpool Biennial opening later this week, where I'm sure I'll find lots of inspiration and books to covet, so back soon with more, I promise!