IT'S TROPICAL: books

Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Feb 14, 2013

nice books #1

Last weekend, Sophia and I travelled to Glasgow and Edinburgh. We planned nothing
but we always seemed to find the right places at the right time. One of them
was a vintage bookshop in Edinburgh called Southside Books. I discovered this amazing cover series called Penguin Plays from the 1960s–70s (and had to buy the
apricot-green one). There also was a nice book about birds and this beautiful simple cover of a Cézanne catalogue. We talked with the owner about the limitations of language (e.g. why don't we have more definitions for the different kinds of prose or how different cities are although we call all of them cities. I like the way he labelled the different sections in his shop. The whole atmosphere felt like you are entering a specific magic space.

Dec 3, 2012

mono.klub #40 / Robert Montgomery

Last week, mono.kultur newsletter said:

Dear Friends,
since Robert Montgomery came all the way from London to join us for the release
of our shared publication Echoes of Voices in the High Towers a few weeks ago,
it seemed only fair to return the favour and make our way over to the grand isles
to present our book in person to our English friends. So if you happen to be
in London next week, please join us for an evening of conversation with Robert Montgomery and publisher Kai von Rabenau, on the lovely premises of Ti Pi Tin bookstore. We promise to be on our best behaviour and Robert might even be
persuaded to sign copies in the most unexpected ways.  

We look forward to seeing you there,  mono.kultur

I said: YES. I am in London. And I went there and it was good to be there.
It was a familiar talk between publisher and artist and many nice people around them.
What I keep in mind: Robert Montgomery said, that poetry is the genre of literature
of our times. It is short. You can even read a few poems during sitting on the toilet
or standing in the bus. Sometimes people criticize him to be too romantic, his work
to be close to kitsch. He says: I like romantic and I think that we desire it. This is
my language. And a woman in the audience said: Maybe people criticize it because they are afraid of it. Or because they desire it even more. Furthermore, he said that his work speaks the language of life in the big cities: this similar feeling that you
can find in London, New York, Berlin, Madrid, Paris and so on. For me, this life is defined both in being very poetic and having a big lack of poetry as well. So, let's read poems. A good place to start, here in London, is the Poetry Library. A library at lovely Southbank Centre. For poetry only.

"ROBERT MONTGOMERY WORKS IN A POETIC AND MELANCHOLIC POST-SITUATIONIST TRADITION"

Nov 17, 2012

St Bride Library

The World’s foremost printing and graphic arts library

http://www.stbride.org/

new look for books / cover versions project

Go to the library. Chose a book with a bad cover and an interesting content.

Design a new dust jacket for your chosen book. My choice: PAOLO FREIRE

Education for critical consciousness. The original jacket shows fish (on the left).

My new jacket is a simple and striking typographic solution (Helvetica bold).
The changing position of the "O" is a symbol for the head and the change of
consciousness. Printed on sugar plant paper, which is rough and has a nice colour.

Oct 22, 2012

books books bookshops

THE  

LONDON  

BOOKSHOP 

MAP

_______

100 (!)

independent

bookshops

_______

find a printed

version of

the map e.g. at

bookartbookshop

Oct 13, 2012

Reading List #1

THE FORM OF THE BOOK BOOK
Edited by Sarah de Bondt and Fraser Muggeridge
Occational Papers (click here for more nice books)

7 essays about designing books and about embracing your ideas. We spent some time together last weekend (on a trunk of a tree, in a park, in the sun). One of those books, I want to own, after reading it. Small and handy, full of enjoyable content, designed for reading, something you like to hold in your hands.

Some appetizers: /(...) where does the designer draw the line between engagement with content and pure decoration?(p23)/Ideally, all books start with a question. The clearer the question, the more precise the answer, but this is rarely the case. You have to find out, what the question is. (...) As designers we are as responsible for content
as anyone else. (p85)/Design and content need to go hand in hand, like a perfect
dance. (...) /Be clear who you are, what you believe in and do not try to be someone
else. Stick to your ideas. Embrace them. However impulsive or intuitive they might be, they are your treasures. Rely on the inner feeling that what you look for will work, that it will be alright. Use your imagination to make the book that does not exist yet. It could be your best book ever.(p89)