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. . . the people who really run the world, and one of the few groups, along with booksellers and the ACLU, to challenge the Patriot Act's right to spy on what you read and what you buy to read.
From YouTube, courtesy of International Journal of the Book.
And a shout-out to Gretl and Erin, my own hip librarians.
I often feel my own characters are doing this in my head or, just as often, on the page. And that red stuff on the paper? You thought that was ink? Nuh-uh.
Hi, my name is Lee and I'm a, a — I'm so ashamed! — I'm a FONTOHOLIC! Okay? Satisfied? Every time i see a new font I've got to have it, especially the fancier ones. I'm always dreaming about texts I'll set with them, projects I'll design with them and how I'll lay them out. I have a special weakness for dingbats. (One of my favorites is — this is really embarrassing — Cropbats.) So I was really delighted to see the Font City tour by Veer. You can also buy a set of prints, or download the free screensaver or wallpapers. I love that the clouds rain letters!
(Via How Magazine.)
. . . will be right here on September 26th. So send me your nominations by Wednesday September 19th. No restrictions on topics, other than that it should have something to do with feminism in all its many stripes and science fiction/fantasy/spec fic in its many-colored paisleys. Pieces on comics & manga, gaming, anime, and other media are not just welcome, but expected. It would hardly be a carnival without the variety. Posts written between August 13th and September 19th are eligible.
A little note: a while back, I was briefly involved in a plot to get middle school girls interested in science by developing a comic book or manga series with strong, smart, confident and cool sciencey heroines. Though I bowed out of the project, I'd gone pretty far down the road to mapping out one possible permutation and some of the characters are still floating around in my head. I wish they'd been there when I set off for college to major in biology. SF was one of the things that got me interested in doing science and keeps me interested in it. Anybody else have similar experiences? This isn't so much a suggested theme as an excuse to talk about why some of us really like the "hard" science titles as much as fantasy or spec fic, despite the fact that hard SF has always been seen as male territory for both writers and readers. Don't feel constrained by this idea though. If it's got SF/Fantasy/spec fic & feminism somewhere in the mix, send it along.
I don't remember having any pop-up books when I was little, which might explain why I'm love them so much now. As one friend said, it's never too late to have a happy childhood. I wish I had had Robert Sabuda's pop up Alice in Wonderland when I was a kid. I saw a copy of it in Spanish in Barcelona and nearly came home with it. In the end, it wasn't the language that stopped me (I know the story already, after all); I regretfully decided it was too bulky for the luggage. Sabuda's books are definitely kids' books but there are others making engineered books that are so much more than pop-ups.
I like the fact that Carol Barton calls her books Kinetic Books. (Via BookGirl.) Engineered books sounds so hard to do (math is hard, isn't it? [eye-roll]), and "pop-up" isn't always accurate. Barton is the maker of one of my all-time favorite kinetic books, Five Luminous Towers, A Book to be Read in the Dark, which I first saw as part of the National Museum of Women in the Arts The Book as Art exhibit catalog. I love that it lights up, too, and the architectural plans and decoration around it. Carol also has a new blog, The Popular Edge, Pop-Up and Book Art News.
And there's this video by ShitDisco that's been making its way around book and music circles. It's really f-ing clever, both as a book and a music vid.
(Via TJ Bookarts.)
Finally (at least for this post), there's the Stephen King pop up (the stuff of nightmares) done by Alan Dingman illustrator, and Kees Moerbeek, book engineer, who doesn't seem to have a website. (Via The International Journal of the Book).
I have lost or given away or read to death or had rot away a good many books that I'd give my eye teeth to find again. None of them were particularly amazing books, but they meant something to me in my personal history as a reader. I mourned them. Occasionally, I've run across them again in various circumstances and squeed like they were my long-lost best friend, which they were. But this has to be the best reunification tale I've ever read. Keep reading and you'll see why the title is so utterly, utterly appropriate, although it could just as easily be called The Amazing Journey.
This totally beats my two personal tales with a childhood book and with another I bought later that literally (literarily?) fell apart in my hands. Ages ago, when I was twelve or thirteen (and that was ages ago, believe me), I got a book from the library called Season of the Witch, by James Leo Herlihy, which is now out of print. I fell in love with the book and with the New York City of the late 60's/early 70's that Herlihy described. That book is responsible, in part, for where I live now, and my continuing love of Greenwich Village. Sadly, I'd never been able to find my own copy. I grew up in a little town with one bookstore that didn't carry much YA lit and for some reason, it never occurred to me to try to order it. So years went by and I kept looking for it in pretty much every bookstore. No luck.
Eventually, I moved to Brooklyn, sharing a two-flat house with a couple of gay guys, one of whom was as big a reader as I was. Inevitably, we started swapping books by leaving whatever we didn't want anymore on the second floor landing where my entrance and their bedrooms were. And there, one day, was a battered hardcover of Season of the Witch, 25 years after I'd first read it. Needless to say, I ran upstairs with it, shrieking all the way; it's still part of my hardcover collection.
The other experience is not nearly so dramatic, more like a quiet delight. Years ago (this is starting to sound like "once upon a time," isn't it?) when I lived in East Lansing, I ran across a little trade paperback called The Book of Qualities, by J. Ruth Gendler. It's a collection of illustrated flash essays personifying, well, qualities like Worry, Anger, Intelligence, Charm, Forgiveness, Ecstasy, etc. Here's Whimsy:
Whimsy is not afraid to be outrageous but she is basically shy. She has all kinds of books, and she arranges them on the shelves by the color of the cover or how the titles sound next to each other. She was especially pleased to put a book on African dyeing called Into Indigo next to a dark blue book on Jewish mysticism. Her clothes are also kept by color in the closet.
When Whimsy was a little girl, she would stay in the museum with the marble walls talking to the statues after everyone else left. She has trouble keeping her shoelaces tied but in every other way she is as practical as your next door neighbor. Because she is wild people expect her to entertain them. She is not encouraging anyone else to live like her. Remembering how abruptly her brother was locked up for being a troublemaker, she fears people who treat her like a curiosity. Freedom is her lover.
I completely fell in love with this book, and it became something I read over and over again before going to bed. I used the format for writing exercises for myself and my students. I read it so much the spine split and the pages fell out. I glued it together again and taped the cover and kept reading. Finally, the pages turned yellow and started to crumble and there was nothing left to do but recycle it. The copy I had was printed by Shambala Publications, but they never seemed to have it in stock, and finally, I think it went out of print.
Then a month or so ago, I wandered into McNally-Robinson books in Soho and there it was! Turned out the cashier was a fan too and had, like me, bought it for a bunch of people and read her copy to death too. That just doubles the pleasure in a book for me.
So anybody else got any good lost-and-found book stories?
Pascale Baud, one of the new members of the Book Arts Yahoo list I belong to, mentioned a book arts show in Chartres, France, that looks like it was absolutely wonderful. First off, it was called Délires de livres (Delirious About Books, roughly; don't make fun of my bad French). Secondly, it was in a great space, one of the city's medieval buildings. Third, look at these! Woot! Wish I'd been there. Looks like a great show.
Here's Pascale's video of the show, and there's another here.
Well, maybe those couple of photography classes paid off after all, in a small way. I've now got not one, but two photos being used by Schmap!! (Their punctuation.) One for their Markets section of the NYC guide, and one for the Great Outdoors section of their Edinburgh Scotland guide. Here they are in rotation with other folks' work. Click on the photos tab beneath the image if you only see maps.
You can see the rest of my Flickr photos here.
Remember those fabulously ornate prop books I wrote about a little while back? One of the things I said about them was that I wondered what kind of text you'd put in them, beyond a full-bore fantasy novel or a grimoire. Well, I don't think I was far off, and here's the lady to do the job: Mia Leijonstedt. Her books are one-of-a-kind constructions using wood, leather, metal, fur, and natural found objects. Some seem less like books than artifacts.
And what draws me to her work is that she's just as concerned about content as she is about form, though that content is not always in the form of words, it always tells some kind of story, or exudes a sense of mystery waiting to be unlocked or interpreted. A couple of them are in cases with "dolls" though I use the term loosely as they aren't the kind you play with, necessarily. They're more like accessories to the crime. Take a look at Spells of Seduction and you'll see what I mean. This book also offers the solution to what to put inside Tim Baker's prop books. Lovely calligraphy and interesting, uh, content, too.
Leijonstedt's books aren't whimsical, but they draw heavily on myth and archetype for their themes. There's a book of Merlin's lost spells, a shaman scroll filled with Laplander symbols, and a scroll of "fairy tales" written entirely in symbols with accompanying dried poppies to add fragrance. Here's one of my favorites, Under the Ice, which "explores the marks left in nature by the formation and movement of frozen water." This is a palm-leaf book, a structure she seems to like.
Go take a look. There's lots more. (Via BookGirl.)
This is way too good to pass up: paper arts, geekiness, and fandom all in one! In other words, some brilliant Star Wars origami by Phillip West. Although I've never tried it, I'm a huge fan of origami and I'm endlessly amazed by the cleverness of people who do it. One of my favorite bits of business in Blade Runner was Edward James Olmos's character's little origami leavings. They were both clever and ominous at the same time. And talk about ominous, here is the Emperor with his blue lightning, and some of his original work too, which is equally science-fictiony:
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Who needs action figures when you can make your own?
(Via Playgirlz.)
