BookLust

I'll Be the Judge of That

I'm down and out with the mother of all colds, so I haven't exactly been in a blogging mood. Or a mood to do much of anything, quite frankly, except hack and cough and bitch and moan and sleep. The favourite part of the day for my husband is when I'm asleep, go figure.

But I did want to mention something wonderful I got to take part in this past Wednesday, even though I was in the height of my coughing frenzy. I was fortunate enough to be asked to be one of the judges for this year's Design a Bookmark Contest, hosted by the Toronto Public Library. What an honour! Every year 16 bookmarks are chosen from hundreds of submissions sent in by kids of ages up to 13 from all over the city. There will be a special awards ceremony in February, where winners will receive 100 of their bookmarks as well as a book prize. Plus all the chosen bookmarks will be printed and distributed throughout all the libraries in the city.

I was really impressed with the quality of the work from all the kids, and sometimes it was quite difficult making the final choices. Fortunately the two judges (wonderful librarians from TPL) and I did not come to blows over some of our differences, and we managed to worked together to make the best choices for everyone. I just pray I didn't infect them with my cold!

Oh, and speaking of judging and kid's creative work, I totally forgot to say who was the winner for the Kids Are Authors contest, which I took part in as a judge last year! The grand prize winner for the Kids Are Authors Competition for 2007-2008 is the book No Kids Allowed! I must say that this story is just hilarious, and it was exactly the kind of stuff I would write when I was a kid, except I probably wouldn't have been as funny as these guys! Big congrats to the Kleefeld School in Kleefeld, Manitoba!

Ok, now I gotta go suck back some more cough drops. Cough. Hack. Snuff.

It's a Steady Job, but He wants to be a Paperback Lounger...

Dig this! 238 paperbacks – everything from Future Shock to Fear of Flying – have come together to create a bona fide 'reading chair'.

The chair was created by artist David Karoff , who has "an abiding interest in recycling. Over the last few years, I'd taken up welding, and then I had the opportunity to take a year off and spend some time indulging my interest in art."

Apparently his mom is a volunteer at the local library, and she squirreled away all these paperbacks from customer donations. Don't worry, the paperbacks were destined for the trash bin, not having been sold at any of the regular fund-raising sales.

It certainly is a vision to behold, but I'm just wondering...would it behold my bountiful butt? Those paperbacks look a tad old and frail...

Many thanks to Zosia for the link!

Book Autopsies

Like, whoa. Check these out. I'm speechless.

The Bountiful Book

Oh. My.

Can you believe this? Yes, it really exists. And it's right here in Toronto!! How did I miss this? Well, probably because it's by the 401 highway, close to Pearson International Airport, not an area of the city that I frequent with any regularity. So what the heck is it? Well, it's part of a new public art exhibition, called Artstage.

The artist of this glorious monument (entitled The Book) is Ilan Sandler, and here's a little bit about his thoughts regarding his sculpture:

The Book is a steel sculpture with two pages torn away from its spine. The spine is perpendicular to the ground, the covers are open, and the pages appear to blow in the wind. From the highway viewers see a book that looks as if it were lifted by the wind and oriented towards a sheet that has already escaped its binding. Because the scale of the book is enlarged, the sculpture becomes anthropomorphized and appears to be performing a choreographed dance with the escaping page...Although most books tend to be read from front to back, The Book's gesture can be absorbed by viewers in an instant as they drive by the installation. However, viewers who have an opportunity to get closer to the site will recognize that the holes in the steel pages form clusters of words. The clustered texts link the letters of the Latin alphabet to its predecessors, which include the Phoenician alphabet that emerged from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Phoenician letters that developed from Egyptian hieroglyphs were used to represent syllabic sounds of Semitic languages dating to approximately 2000 B.C. Carvings of a twenty-two character Phoenician alphabet from 1000 B.C. have been linked to earlier carvings from approximately 1750 B.C. (known as the Wadi el-Hol script) that have been inspired by particular Egyptian hieroglyphs...The steel book is a monument poised between eras in the evolution of thought.

I have got to go see this. This beauty will be around for three years, so I guess I've got time to find a way to get to see it. Anyone wanna drive me there? Heh.

Belly Up to the Book Bar, Folks!

Sure, having your own personal library is pretty cool, but you know what would be really amazing? For all you boozin' book-lovers, I present to you ... a book bar!

Ok, so it's not as visually stunning as Idiom, but this is definitely a situation where function precedes form, don't ya think? And what a function!

You can see more photos of the bar being constructed at the Vestal Design Blog. And just how did this book bar come to be? From the Vestal Blog:

One of our non-Vestal housemates worked at the Stanford library, and his job included the task of throwing away old books, which apparently the other librarians couldn't bear to do. We decided to rescue these books from that awful fate - and what better use for them than a bar from which to entertain our frequent guests?

I'll drink to that!

Thanks to Johnny for the link!

Cheers!!



Lost in Books

Aren't these visually stunning photographs the most amazing arrangement of books you have ever seen?

The photos are thanks to my talented friend Hadas, who is almost finished her visit in her home city, Tel Aviv. The artistic display of books can be found at the Beauty and the Book exhibit in The Isreal Museum.

Beauty and the Book focuses on the visual aspects of books, and suggests reading them as one "reads" a work of art. Like art, books are a mixture of matter and spirit, manual labor, thought, and creativity. They have shape, color, dimensions, substance, and other qualities, and the concept of beauty emerges from the different combinations and interactions of all these qualities.

The installation is entitled Idiom, and was created by the artist Matej Kren.

The tower is constructed from thousands of books, collected from libraries and publishers in the country in which the tower is to be built.

Take some time to explore the Virtual Tour of the exhibit, as well as the exhibit web page. It is a bibliophilic feast for the eyes, heart and soul. How I wish I could see it live!

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Hadas, for sharing these heavenly images! See you soon!

Be It Ever So Humble, There's No Book Like Home

Dig this. A house made out of books, and even the furniture inside made to look like books.

I have died and gone to heaven.

Win One for the Chipper

So did Chip Kidd disappoint at the International Festival of Authors? Heavens, no. The man was in his element. He must be a blast at parties, because this guy loves an audience. He is as diverse, as dynamic as delicious in person as all the many book covers he has designed in his career.

My date for the evening was the adorable cartoon/design chum Johnny, who is just as, if not more delightful than The Chipper, and in fact has a unique talent for attracting the most bizarre of characters in the city of Toronto.

So before the event started, I was telling Johnny about this other book cover design guy that I had heard talk before, a certain Mr. Bill Douglas from The Bang, who is our resident Canadian book design guru. So I'm telling Johnny about how funny this Douglas guy is, and who ends up introducing Chip? Good ol' Billy-boy. It was a book-design love-fest night for me, I tell you.

Chip showed the crowd many covers he had designed in the past couple years, including the ones that the publishers nixed. It was interesting to see how he came to his final choice in some situations (often in a state of desperation, because the publishers would veto so many of his ideas, and he would say to himself, "I'm going to lose this fucking job". Yeah. Right, Chip. They're gonna fire you).

One of the best stories of the night, I think, was when a woman in the audience asked him about the placement of the two L's in Daniel Libeskind's recent memoirs. Apparently Kidd did not enjoy the process of designing this particular cover, mainly because he was forced to use these two specific photographs for the design, and quite frankly, both photos are really stupid and uninspiring. But Chip made it work.

So to answer the woman's question, Chip leaned into the microphone and said in a deep and haunting voice, something like "You clever woman." See for yourself. Apparently neither Libeskind nor the publishers noticed it.

You might be wondering why I drew Chip Kidd quoting the Wicked Witch of the West. That's because was well as being a very talented deisgner, The Chipper can also do really good impressions of said witch, and while reciting psalms, I might add. Who knew?

I asked Kidd to share some of his experiences while designing the book Peanuts: The Art of Charles Schulz. He stopped being a ham for a few mintues, and told a lovely warm story about his experiences working with Schulz's widow and his family, about going into Schulz's studio, and about how much he loved Schulz's work, and how he wished he could have met him.

One of my favourite book-cover designers talking about one of my favourite cartoonists. It don't get much better than that.

Happy Guten-Birthday, Johann!

I really wanted to write this post this morning, but I just didn't have the time, darn it!

So, is June 24, 1400, really the birth date of Johann Gutenberg, the man who started that great revolution in 1450 with the development of the printing press and moveable lead type? Probably not. But that's the date that the people of Mainz, Germany decided upon, mainly because June 24th is the Feast of St. John the Baptist, and Johann is German for John, so what the heck, why not? Besides it's a great day for celebrating, and we have a lot to celebrate when it comes to good ol' Mr. Gutenberg.

Regardless of his motives (let's face it, the guy just really wanted to make a buck, and unfortunately some dude named Fust screwed him royally, so Gutenberg didn't exactly gain a lot financially from this creation), what Gutenberg created has had such a phenomenal impact on our world, it's hard to really grasp it.

We probably take things like books and reading matter for granted, but think about it: there was a time when efficient printing did not exist. Before printing with moveable lead type, books were pain-stakingly written by skilled artists; and only certain types of books were created, and only for the very fortunate limited few who were literate, and could afford such a treasure as a book. We may bitch about the price of a hard cover these days, but trust me, in 1400, a book was bloody expensive.

Gutenberg's printing press was not only the great educator, it was also the great equalizer. Books were cheaper to make, and you could make more of them in a shorter period of time. As more books became accessable to the lower classes, literacy increased. And well, you know the rest. Stuff like the Reformation and Martin Luther and then the Renaissance and so on until present day when we have great things like the internet and blogs.

So take a moment, if not tonight, then tomorrow or some day soon, and think about and read up on this amazing man and his wonderful creation, and how it has influenced our lives in so many ways. For those interested, I recommend the book The Gutenberg Revolution by John Man. It's a great source of information, and a good way to start finding out about this great man in history.

Happy Birthday, Johann, and happy birthday to your printing press, too!

Barbara, My Hero

Here's a link to a great interview with the talented writer, photographer and book designer Barbara Hodgson, via the great site Heavenly Monkey.

So like, if Barbara Hodgson and Chip Kidd were to hook up, what kind of kid would come out of that union?