Imagine this:It is the late sixties and your in New York. The world around you is a changing, the chimes of freedom are a ringing. Peace, Love and lots of mind altering chemicals are in the air. You head over to Broadway to catch a show. You choose the wildly popular musical Fantasticks. As the official website for the production states "Before the mud of Woodstock there were the love songs of the Fantasticks". You find your seat start reading the program and then you see this!“Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather on...
Reading Recycled: Time to Print Green
There is a quiet green storm brewing in the book world. A storm that has been a long time coming, long overdue and when it hits will change the face of publishing forever.The Independent has a brief take on the push by authors and some publishers to print their books on recycled paper.The lowlight:-"pulp and paper mills produce ... some of the most toxic substances on Earth" wrote poet and green activist Mandy Haggith in an article published in Mslexia magazine.Think of the smell of some of the new books you opened recently.A few highlights:-The Canadian editions of all the...
O.J. Comes Clean – I Didn’t Write It
In my previous post regarding the "If I Did It" fiasco I talked about how O.J didn't even write the book and that there are probably some 400,000 copies that were printed before the books cancellation which pretty much guarantees that there will be plenty of copies floating around sooner or later.Well, what do you know, Newsweek has somehow come up with a copy of the book and has a feature article focusing on one of the chapters.The book was "obtained from an anonymous source".In a telephone interview yesterday O.J. says that the chapter of "If I Did It" in...
Pin-Up Typography and Who Makes the Best Letters
The Epica Award is Europe's leading creative award. The 2006 Gold winner in the Publications category was Taylor Lane for "Studio Pin-Ups", a typographical conquering of the pin-up calendar.Here is Miss Bembo:As you can imagine in this day and age it was controversial, though it really has much more to do with creativity than controversy, and it was good for business creating a 25% increase in turnover from existing and new clients.and over at Typophile.com there is an ongoing discussion to come up with a list of the 20 most important type designers of all time. Guaranteed interesting thread.Why not...
The Meltdown of Big Media
Tremendous post by Eddie A. Tejeda over at The Institute for the Future of the Book on the end of media industries.The gist:We will soon be in the midst of a culture whose tastes will not be dictated by media corporations. The giants are all shrinking. Their purse strings have been clipped by the new technologies that have put the power of production and distribution in almost every home.From Richard Parsons, the CEO of Time Warner, via Siva Vaidhyanathan's book "The Anarchist in the Library", comes this corporate slur:This is a very profound moment historically. This isn't just about a...