POP FEMINIST PERBLOG

all over you

(cover by Rein van Looij)

prchtshrk:

KAFKA’S KAPTAIN AMERIKA

This is Alvin Lustig (obviously everyone knew that right??)

matthewedwards:

amoebalanding:

hive modular shelving unit

GIMME

Like, LISTEN, PEOPLE WITH LOTS OF MONEY TO SPEND ON BOOKSHELVES:

You see how those books are all stacked? It’s because it’s difficult to stack books upright on shelves that have rounded corners like that.

Do you know what happens to books that are stacked like that?

YOUR SPINES ARE SUFFERING. HAVE SOME DECENCY. IT’S NOT WORTH IT AND IT DOESN’T LOOK THAT COOL.

zincfingers:

phredology:

intellectualvalentinesday:

Albert Camus: Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

“My greatest act of revolt against this meaningless world is the happiness I feel because of you.”

this is everything

this is my valentine to humanity

I’m terribly bored by these intellectual valentines, mostly because the selection of thinkers is like totally dull and k-mart and white dude. Of, I think, 33 thinkers, I spotted only three women and one nonwhite person—bell hooks, quelle surprise. And anyway, who the fuck cares about Camus? Carl Sagan, really?

What I do care about, though, is Leo Lionni’s paperback designs. I care so much about them that I have found myself with a lot of books by and about Albert Camus.

I have all of these.

#pedestrians talking about book covers and sounding like assholes #this must be how real graphic designers and typographers felt when helvetica became a thing #god shut the fuck up

catladysoul:

nevver:

First Covers

i have all of them. fuck yeah. +_+

The Atlantic can’t cite any cover designers? That’s pretty weird, I can name a few of them off the top of my head—the marks on Naked Lunch were done by Burroughs himself but I don’t know if the typographer was ever credited, that edition of Gravity’s Rainbow was by Marc Getter, that Tropic of Cancer is by Maurice J. Kahan, that edition of Ulysses is by Ernst Reichl and that’s like common fucking knowledge.

God, most of those don’t even have publication info! What the fuck? Why do people have jobs?? Also, ugh, some of those had jackets once? SERIOUSLY WHY DO YOU HAVE JOBS. YOU ARE NOT TUMBLR, YOU ARE THE ATLANTIC.

Ugh, I would do anything.

Cover design by Joe Del Gaudio, 1968.

This book is so elegantly dull.  It’s dry in that way that environmental histories are, that 1960s labor histories are, where you don’t realize that they’re rich and awesome until after twenty pages of miserable miserable descriptions of soil and valleys where you’re drooling in the margins and you read a passage about steamed buns, sweet cakes, keta, corn dumplings, millet sorghum noodles, Shangtang cotton shoes, crumbling packed walls and soil soil soil and you wake up a little and realize that it’s perfect.  Bless these white men, all of them from Cornell, Oxford, Columbia, Chicago (Hinton, Thompson, Terkel, Foners—Phillip, Eric, Jack) all of them with their Steinbeck adolescences and dads that may or may not have been working class or alcoholic but were very much patriarchs.  All of their motherfucking sweeping landscapes and their weighing, wet dullness and their prefaces which are either full of exclamations—marked, otherwise—or of how they remember those Shansi Riverbeds and let me reconstruct just how vividly.

All of you, gloriously boring and soaringly inspirational white Marxist reconstructionist men of sixties trade paperback histories, where would you be without Vintage books?  Or still-enthusiastic white male history majors about to apply to the PhD programs where you either still teach, or where you died and left your names?  The kinds of college students who still like Steinbeck?

I just think it is all very endearing.

I’ve almost bought this anthology a million times at Curious, but it’s $5 or $6 dollars and it’s frankly a weaker example of this Kuhlman era.  More specifically, though, I’m a little uncomfortable with the early-sixties Evergreen fetishization of “eastern” lit and philosophy inasmuch as it benefited a marketing of breakout works by, say, Beckett and Burroughs.  Especially in conjunction with the Kuhlman early-sixties “primitive” aesthetic, an aesthetic which wasn’t so problematic when it was just on Ionesco plays and not, you know, “LOOK AT THESE BROWN PEOPLE.”  All of which isn’t to discount the postive influences that Barney Rosset & Evergreen had on the publication of nonwestern writers in the United States postmodern scene.  They were willing to publish a lot of contemporary Japanese authors in the American market for the first time, including Kenzaburo Oe and quite a few others.  I’m just saying.  It’s all too problematic to pay five whole dollars.

PS, you should read Julian Montague’s Daily Book Graphics project regularly, if you don’t already.  In some ways we have divergent tastes (I, for example, can never get so into the I’m A Professional Graphic Designer aesthetic to collect so, much, Pelican), but I feel like a glimpse into his blog is a glimpse into a very intimate part of me that I talk to very few people about. 

He also designed the exhibition called Secondary Occupants, Collected & Observed which is a great, hyper-insidery practical joke about the convergence of metascience and graphic design in 1970s paperbacks.  It’s clever as hell.

They had this at Curious and I went back to buy it because my life has become one big girl gang but then I saw it was $35 so I just bought $18 in poetry books and Arnheim’s Visual Thinking and Alvin Lustig covers and Elaine Lustig covers instead.