Rewarding Book Designs

The Packard automobile and the sleek passenger cars of the Santa Fe Railway were obsessions of Merle Armitage when he was a boy growing up on a ranch in Kansas, and he collected all the advertising "literature" (as it was called) about them he could find. Years later, having become a celebrated avant-garde designer of books -- and sometimes author or editor too, as with this one, a memorial to his friend George Gershwin which we have in the Central Library basement in a republished facsimile -- he told an interviewer that his boyhood collection of advertisements for those two splendid combinations of aesthetics and utility had been his University.

I love this story for how it associates book design with leather seats, purring carburetors, streamlining, speed and a lounge car called the Pleasure Dome.

I’m going to say something a little heretical here. If I order in a book I want to read, sight unseen, and its design is annoying or its cover boring, even if the story turns out to be good it’s not going to completely dispel my sense of disappointment. But if the book is beautiful and the story turns out to be not so great, I don't feel let down. I might read just a few chapters and turn it back in, but I feel as though the whole thing was worth it, all told.

It was a real treat on July 22 when I got to attend the 2010 PANZ (Publishers Association of New Zealand) Book Design Awards Ceremony at the Auckland Art Gallery lounge. There were many people there I am a fan of, and many trays of fantastic canapes passing and repassing.

The Harpercollins Award for Best Cover had us all holding our breath as the presenters talked about the desirability of creating a cover which makes you want to open the book. The winner was Rachael King’s Magpie Hall, designed by Sarah Laing who photographed her own forearm for the cover photo. On either side of me people nodded at it up there on the giant screen and concurred that it was definitely enticing them to get their noses into the book.

Not me. For me the image is too bloodless, too amputated, too creepy. Actually (maybe this was the intent?), it reminds me of one of my least favourite, also creepy, Renaissance paintings, Mantegna's Dead Christ.

 The book I wanted to see win was called A Beautiful Game. The cover is a photo of a white soccerball in extreme close-up – when it first flashed on the screen I didn’t grasp the dimension and thought the stitching was some kind of magnified gene sequence. Now I know it’s a soccer ball and I can’t get over how alluring, not to say erotic, its roundness and puckers are. I can’t believe that the PANZ programme didn’t mention it. Or maybe the final line did: "This handsome hardback's subtle and appealing cover challenges our assumptions of what a sports book ought to look like." The book design and the image research were by Carolyn Lewis, and the production and origination by PQ Blackwell.

Keely O’Shannessy was chosen as the Awa Press Young Designer of the Year, deservedly so. Some books of hers you may have seen around are Martin Edmond’s Zone of the Marvellous, Alison Wong’s As the Earth Turns Silver, and Mirabile Dictu, the fantastic collection of poems Michele Leggott wrote during her Poet Laureateship which also won the Hachette New Zealand Award for best non-illustrated book later in the evening, all from Auckland University Press, and Ned & Katina by Patricia Grace, from Penguin.

O'Shannessy's work is remarkable for how much her book designs differ among themselves, and how carefully she has thought each one through. She takes the book seriously and takes us, the readers, seriously as well, disdaining the easy emotional grab. This might be what Merle Armitage meant when he said good book design should have 'integrity'.

The awards were judged by Graham Beattie, Peter Gilderdale and Sharon Grace. Here is a link to the article on the PANZ website where you can see the other nominated works and read more about the rewarded designers.






Book cover from the 1950s which I found on the Book worship website. I think it makes me more afraid than curious about what's inside the book.

Season of lists and mellow fruitfulness

The season of lists and mellow fruitfulness is once again upon us. Appropriately, I’m on the waiting list for a book about lists. It’s Umberto Eco’s just-published “The infinity of lists” (U.S. title; in the U.K. it's “The vertigo of lists”, same as the original Italian, what didn't the Americans like about 'vertigo'?), inspired by an exhibition he curated at the Louvre about lists in the history of art and literature.

I’ve always been fond of Umberto Eco although, and partly because, I have never been able to understand what his field of study, semiotics, is actually about -- and this despite having had a friend who studied with him at Bologna. But I appreciate that he genuinely believes in it and how he is never pompous, even when people call him one of the world's greatest scholars or “a modern-day Diderot”, as his publisher Rizzoli is doing now in the blurb for his book:

Eco is a modern-day Diderot, and here he examines the Western mind’s predilection for list-making and the encyclopedic. His central thesis is that in Western culture a passion for accumulation is recurring: lists of saints, catalogues of plants, collections of art. This impulse has recurred through the ages from music to literature to art. Eco refers to this obsession itself as a "giddiness of lists" but shows how in the right hands it can be a "poetics of catalogues".

What Umberto Eco himself says is “We like lists because we don’t want to die.” You can read the interview where he says this on Der Spiegel online and see also what he has to say about Homer’s lists of ships in the Iliad, Da Ponte counting Don Giovanni’s lovers (2,063) and how to describe a platypus. Is it true he has 30,000 books? He thinks it's around 50,000, but he has never made a list of them.

I like lists myself, but I have a hard time with top tens, especially with something as subjective as literary taste. Here are a couple of top 100’s instead:

100 notable books of the year from The NY Times

The 100 best books of the decade from The Times

And for something a bit more unusual:

“Unknown books of decade”  -- a list of overlooked titles from The Guardian


“Best forgotten books" –  'Writers pick their favorites” from the LA Times

and if you only look at one of the links on this page, it has to be this one.

Joseph Sullivan’s stupendous My Favorite Book Covers of 2009 on his website Book Design Review.