The Where of Reading : Field-Tested Books

Talk about books and technology. Is the book on life support? The reader? Is information going in? or coming out?

This fantastic screenprint was designed by John Solimine of Spike Press in an edition of 400 for the recent publication of Coudal Partners' Field-Tested Books. It also serves as the cover art.

For over six years now the folks at Coudal have been asking been asking people to send them 300-500 words about a book they read somewhere; a “certain book read in a certain place.”

The Field-Tested Books book contains three years of reviews featuring 143 entries from more than 90 contributors. It sells for $17 with a portion of the proceeds going to First Book, a charity that buys new books for underprivileged kids.

Book available here

Writer's Rooms

The UK Guardian has a great feature on writer's rooms, including those of John Banville, Roald Dahl, Martin Amis, Mark Haddon, Seamus Heaney (pictured), and dozens of others.

The Bookselling Dilemma of the Modern Age

This is the cover of the current issue of The New Yorker. It's called “Read-Handed” and was done by Adrian Tomine.

He is about to open the bookshop, she is about to receive the book she ordered on Amazon. Who feels worse?

It is a spectacular graphic representation of the independent struggle; the struggle that both the independent business owner and the independent-minded consumer face in todays book marketplace.

To get a get a better view of the image, and to see Tomine's other book-themed illustrations click here ("Read-Handed" is the 5th image on the first row).

What Barack is Reading

Barack Obama hits the tarmac in Bozeman, Montana with book in hand.

The marketing folks at W.W. Norton where all over this one. I am not sure the New Times slideshow was finished before they blasted the blogwaves alerting us to this biblio treat.

The book? Fareed Zakaria's new book The Post-American World published by W.W. Norton.

The book begins in pure Barackian fashion -"This is a book not about the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else."

Zakaria is editor of Newsweek International and writes a regular column on foreign affairs for Newsweek. He will also be the host of a new CNN program which will focus on international news.

Photo of Obama by Doug Mills.

Related: previous Book Patrol posts
The Biblio Campaign Trail: The New Road to the White House
What's Your Candidate Reading?
What the Candidates Should Be Reading
The Presidential Book Debate
Which Book Would You Bring to the White House?

Book Bench

This is the book bench. It resides at the center of the editorial offices of the New Yorker magazine.

"On any given day, it overflows with hardcovers and galleys, kindly shipped to us by publishers, plus older tomes that people have cleared out of their toppling shelves...When an e-mail is sent out announcing the arrival of new stacks, it is not unlike a drop of blood entering shark-infested waters. Newcomers to the magazine, shocked by the frenzy, are gently reassured by an editor: “But it’s for books.”

It is also the namesake of a new blog from the New Yorker, The Book Bench : Loose Leafs from the New Yorker Books Department

Photo by Samuel Ritt

Thanks to Books, Inq. for the lead

Thou Shall Not

Old Chained Bible

From Memorials of Old Hampshire Edited by Rev. G. E. Jeans, M.A., F.S.A., London, Bemrose and Sons, 1906.

Under the bible lies The Knight Hospitaller’s Tomb. Bible dates from 1620 and both reside at North Baddesley Church.


via From Old Books

Hand em Over

"Hand Over Those Two Books"
"When I Read These Three Novels I'll be Able to Conquer the World!"

The cover of issue #23 of From Beyond the Unknown.

The Sci-fi comic ran for 25 issues from October 1969 to December 1973.

See all 25 covers here

Thanks to Bookish Monkey for the lead

Pop-Up Books Meet Photoshop

Last week the folks at Something Awful invited their forum members "to make some fancy new pop-up books based on a variety of topics, from video games and movies to art and being a jerk."

Link to the 7 page gallery

Children's Book Week

Children looking through window of Magnolia Branch Library, Seattle in 1943

Since 1919 the week before Thanksgiving has been designated Children's Book Week. It is the longest running literacy event in the country.

Beside all the hoopla and events planned across the country Children's Book Week has always been a showcase for poster art.

Jessie Wilcox Smith did the first poster back in 1919. It was titled More Books in the Home and it was so successful that they used it for five years in a row!

Here is a link to a list of the poster artists and themes since 1919.

Words Divide, Images Unite: A Visual Language Celebration

We are a couple of weeks away from Utrecht Manifest's 2nd Biennale for Social Design and one of the main events is an exhibit titled Lovely Language: Words Divide, Images Unite honoring two of the titans of visual language, Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz. These two pre-Tuftian kings of envisioning information created their own language of textless pictograms as a way of conveying quantitative information with social consequences. They called them Isotypes.

"It was an organized attempt to use graphical design for the purpose of achieving changes in society, primarily through visual education of the masses, and especially by presenting basic socio-economic facts in a readily comprehensible form."
-from the bio of Neurath contained in the link above

This Isotype is called The Changing Home and begs for a updated version. Click image to enlarge and enjoy


and here is a little gov't 101

They designed more than 4,000 of them.


This is the image being used to promote the exhibit. Corporate Alphabet, done in 2005 by the Dutch designers Arnoud van den Heuvel and Koert van Mensvoort.

Talk about social consequence! Capitalism has permeated our civilization to the point of corrupting the alphabet. Many of the venues that produce and supply both the textual and visual information we receive have been hijacked.


Typopoly! would be the board game and no one can get out of jail free.



The Isotype Institute is the place for Isotype graphics
From Hieroglyphs to Isotypes is an important source document

The Desire to Read

Never dies

Images via con valor

FUEL That's Good for the Planet

FUEL is the London design firm of Damon Murray & Stephen Sorrell.

In 2005 they launched FUEL publishing and their latest title brings to print a selection of amazing images from the noteworthy blog BibliOdyssey. The book is titled BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images From The Internet

"BibliOdyssey’s mission has been to search the dustier corners of the internet and retrieve these materials for our enjoyment. Thanks to the efforts of this singular weblog, a myriad of long-forgotten imagery has now resurfaced. Each of these fascinating images is accompanied by a commentary from PK, author and curator of BibliOdyssey, and a link to the source website."

Book Patrol puts it on the: Top Shelf.

One for the Cookbook Hall of Shame

Cooking With Pooh: Yummy Tummy Cookie Cutter Treats. Published by Mouse Works in 1995. Target audience: Ages 4-8

Yikes. Imagine this in the hands of a young reader who takes the title literally!

How did this one get past the editors?



Thanks to A Wandering Eye for the lead

Taliban Sexuality

Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak struck visual gold when he came across these photos at a photo studio in downtown Kandahar after the fall of the Taliban. Photographing any living entity was banned under the strict Islamic code of the Taliban yet there is a long history, whether for identification purposes or for pleasure, of the Taliban being photographed.

"Kandahar, a city of Pashtuns noted for their gaiety, so to speak, where Mullah Omar had made his final headquarters, has traditions of men in high-heeled sandals, with make-up of kohl and painted nails like sultry silent-movie stars. They liked to have their pictures taken and, because the Taliban most certainly needed passports, their vanities were accommodated in the hole-in-
the-wall photo shops that exist in downtown Kandahar."

In 2003 Trolley Books in London published a collection of these photos unearthed by Dworzak.


Slate magazine has a 7 + minute video tour through the images that appear in the book including commentary by Dworzak





Thanks to Slog for the lead

The Book Arch of Romainmôtier

After the yearly bookfair held in Romainmôtier, a small quiet Swiss town near the border with France, artist Jan Reymond takes the remaining books and creates an installation. Reymond says he wanted to give the unsold books "a last life" before they got thrown away.

The bookfair is held at the town church, a classic Romanesque structure that dates back to the 5th century. It is in one of these perfect Romanesque arches that house Reymond's installation. For Reymond the arch represents "spiritual power."

This year the arch became home to a book framed doorway with books suspended from the top of the arch in a rain-like fashion. Reymond also placed books in the surrounding windows and trees The books are hung closed under the arch and are open in the windows and trees. Reymond says that this years installation symbolizes more the identity of books than the power of books, "they are open like birds who want to escape or to be free. Furthermore,the installation symbolizes the forest, the protection from it and the protection from books can be associated, both of them surround you and make you feel comfortable and safe."

In his 2005 installation Reymond mirrored the arch by building his own Romanesque book arch supported by a pillar of books. You get a great sense of the both the power and the grace of the book and how the book can be used for rigid, utilitarian purposes but also how subversive and messy books can be to the powers that be.


In 2006 Reymond packed the arch with books creating a bunker type appearance yet there remained a small window allowing one to see through to the other side. A powerful representation of how books can be for some a dogmatic shield from the outside world and for others a window to the possibilities that exist outside.


I can't wait to see what Reymond has in store for us next year.

Almost Naked

And the award for best use of a novel goes to this guy.

His name is Mark Estes and it was his response to an assignment where he had to come up with a "Representation of a book title.

This definitely expands the meaning of book covers.

I can see an outbreak on the horizon of people taking photos with their books as coverings much like that viral YouTube thread from last year of people showing off their books to music.

Bookshop Nightmare!

A Bookseller's Prayer

Please God don't make me go in here.
I promise to take care of all my books
and be as nice as possible to all my customers.

I promise to treat each book and each customer as
a special gift from you.
Please God don't make me go in there.




Flickr set from mistermajik2000


Thanks to Library Stuff for the lead

Books To Be Desired: Penelope Umbrico's Private Residence

How many unsolicited home improvement magazines arrive in your mailbox?

I would guess these companies have figured out how many one home should receive to maintain the cultural desire needed for them to succeed; just enough to keep you thinking that your lacking something or in need of something.

In Private Residence Umbirico re-photographs selected details of the images contained in these magazines to explore the "fictional narratives found in the images of idealized rooms," she is interested in "how corporations construct publicly accessible “private” spaces in media - and how this works to produce desire, and the illusion of control, agency and individuality."

Her preferred image detail is the book. She extracts the book detail from these idealized rooms and transforms them into a collage of vacancy. There are no readers in this world, there is no transmission of knowledge. Our beloved books are merely props and pedestals. They are all dressed up yet utterly alone, no one to engage, no one to play with.

Now that should kill your desire.

When you visit her website Umbrico has another related piece worth a look. All Catalogs (A-Z) is "a text piece that is comprised of the names of all the available mail-order catalogs listed on the internet." There were over 15,000 of them in 2002 when the piece was done.

Also, in the same vain as Private Residence is her Suns From Flickr piece which resulted from the 541,795 pictures of sunsets that came back when searching for the word “sunset” on Flickr.

Censored Book

Censored Book
Barton Lidice Benes
26.7 x 20.3 12.7
1974
Book Tied in Rope, nailed, gessoed and painted

"I was once on a train to Philadelphia reading a biography of Nixon, and I started scratching it out as I read it, and by the time I got to Philadelphia I had scratched the whole book out. After that I started nailing books shut and tying them up."

The piece appeared in the 1990 traveling exhibition Book Arts in the USA curated by Richard Minsky.

Thanks to Deeplinking and his post Book Art All-Stars

Book Prayer

Worshipers at Jimbocho, Tokyo's book district, home to over 100 bookshops.


Image 1 courtesy perke
Image 2 courtesy aptronym