In 1939, with the world on the brink and Great Britain on the brinkest, spirits were lifted, if only for stolen moments, by a book that gently satirized automobile drivers.How To Be a Motorist was illustrated by W. Heath Robinson, an extremely talented book illustrator primarily remembered today for his Rube Goldberg-esque designs for bizarre machinery and wacky inventions.“This handy, decorative, valuable, and uncostly volume... is dedicated in admiring sympathy to that badgered but unconquerable little creature, the British motorist, or Fate's football. In England nowadays it is practically impossible to be both law abiding and a car owner; try...
Shakespeare in Kindergarten
This week members of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival will be paying a visit to the kindergarten classes at Our Lady of Lourdes in Louisville, KY.Using "The Tempest" as their guide they will explore the Elizabethan world and family relationships."We're talking about the different family relationships that are in the play. These are things that are accessible even to the kindergartners. They understand family, they understand relations and they understand emotions and we don't have to worry about the text of Shakespeare and the complexity of Shakespeare and all of that sort of thing. That can come much later on,”says Brian...
Love In Bloomsbury: Our Monthly Look at the London Review of Books Personal Ads
Though another page has torn off the calendar and the autumn leaves are falling, love is still in bloom, and, as usual, the personal ads at the London Review of Books are fecund with possibilities for casual or meaningful fecunding and the pursuit of happiness or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Contact info has been deleted to protect the delightfully guilty:My attempts to find a suitable lover in this column would have been far more successful but for the bureaucratic pettifoggery of the LRB advertising department, the dilatory shenanigans of the British postal service, and the rambunctiousness of my gall bladder....
How the Book Looked in Weimar Germany
Frans Maserell's cover design and illustration for the 1930 German edition of Upton Sinclair's A Captain of Industry: Being the Story of a Civilized ManA Journey Round My Skull has a terrific post, BLICKFANG: The Eye-Catching Covers of Weimer Berlin, featuring 25 book cover and related designs.Poster by Alex Keil, 1930The visual bounty comes from the 2005 (and unfortunately out-of-print) book Blickfang: Bucheinbände und Schutzumschläge Berliner Verlage 1919 - 1933 published by Holstein. The book is packed with over 1000 examples, many from the heavyweights of graphic design of the period.Would love to see this one reprinted or in an...
On the Length of Subtitles in Many Old, Rare and Antiquarian Books,
Or, the Custom of Publishers of olde to Load the title page with a Reader’s Digest condensed version of the Contents so complete that when finished perusing one’s need to Read the Actual Book is obviated and further Exploration Unnecessary; title pages as Cliffs Notes, Advertisements, Promotional material, Infomercials, and other forms of Ballyhoo meant to capture the Prospective Reader’s imagination and Cash at a time when there were no attractive Dust Jackets or other means of Merchandising books, and reading a title page with War and Peace longitude was like going to Wallach’s Music City, choosing a new record,...