Cafetaria: book-related brain snacks

Something Up My Sleeve

My sister, after visiting me, pointed out that a lot of spots in Philly are pithily named: a grocery shop named Grocery, a bar named Bar, a flower shop named Orchid. Taking a page out of the succinctness book is... well, Book.

Designed by two bibliophiles in Minnesota, it's a book-like sleeve for digital reading devices. Books blog The Millions queries,

"Do you have an ereader but miss the look and feel of a gorgeous hardcover book? Do you want people to think you’re all about print when in fact you are riding the digital wave?"

I can't say the $89 price tag- handcrafted, 100% wool felt or not- is justifiable, but if I make the iPad/Kindle/Nook plunge I can do so with readerly pride intact, inasmuch as I'll be fooling neighbors with a clever disguise. There's a Twitter feed called CoverSpy that documents New Yorkers' reading material on subways and streets, in parks and bars. Each day, the prowling photo team posts real-time snapshots of such book covers, or else a standard image of a Kindle. With this Book sleeve, we can deceive the pesky CoverSpies and maintain the illusion of loyalty to traditional book publishing.

Another path to deception: the BookBook laptop cover.

The vintage leather-bound case by Twelve South is $79.99, $9.01 in the right budgetary direction but steep nonetheless. It's hand-distressed, akin to the manual labor applied to Book- it seems a lot of trouble is being taken with products like these to generate the artifice that we could accomplish by actually reading books. What a novel idea.

Undercover with book covers

One of the greatest losses in the publishing shift from print to digital is cover art. An image on your screen, if a given eBook even has one, is not any more special than the myriad images on any device: app icons, desktop backgrounds, photos on Flickr, Facebook pictures. It's just a 2D, mechanized visual.

But book jacket design is an art unto itself. There are countless blogs and roundups devoted to cover art, and when the designs are good- they're good. They're clever, heartfelt and, above all, truly artistic. Book covers make the book. Even if a volume is clothed in unadorned cardboard-brown, like some old hardcovers I have, that starkness and adherence to historical publishing holds significance for my reading.

Imagine ideas like these below in palpable form, an integrated part of your reading experience as you crack open and close the book at each reading. Also... they're just cool:

Given the paradigm shift in publishing, the company Out of Print Clothing is preserving cover art in the form of wearable books. From their mission statement:

"Out of Print celebrates the world’s great stories through fashion. Our shirts feature iconic and often out of print book covers. Each shirt is treated to feel soft and worn like a well-read book. How we read is changing as we move further into the digital age. It's unclear what the role of the book cover will be in this new era, but we feel it's more important than ever to reflect on our own individual experiences with great literary art before it's forever changed."

Some examples of their products:



Preservation of original edition covers in a format that physically connects the art to the reader promises to salvage for posterity at least this one aspect of traditional publishing.

Magazine covers, I think, weigh less on my reading experience since on average they're driven as much by marketing as art. Celebrity photograph + catchy headlines + vivid color scheme, in some combination, = sales. Nevertheless, the Swedish company T-Post is getting on board with the wearable text concept, with "the world's first wearable magazine".

According to Folio, each "issue", delivered every six weeks, is a graphic T-shirt with a news story printed on the inside and a graphic artist’s interpretation on the front.

It's weird. But it's artistic, and it's inventive, and along with book cover T-shirts, it may be one of publishing's guardian angels. We'll take what we can get.

Cafetaria: Book-related brain snacks

Rock Paper Scissors

Designer Brian Dettmer creates visual art out of literary art with his intricate paper sculptures. He peels layers away from old books and adds color and image collages, using surgical tools to craft three dimensional compositions. I think Dettmer's work pays homage to the beauty and communicative capacity of books, despite its seemingly destructive usage of them as raw material. In fact, his art depends on bound books' existence, making him an ironic ally of traditional publishing.









Source: http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/7733/brian-dettmer-s-studio.html

Cafetaria: Book-related brain snacks

Bonnier and BERG have teamed up to imagine the magazine of the future in an age when the future is actually today.

From their pitch:

"The concept uses the power of digital media to create a rich and meaningful experience, while maintaining the relaxed and curated features of printed magazines. It has been designed for a world in which interactivity, abundant information and unlimited options could be perceived as intrusive and overwhelming."

The design seems a little Space Agey, but in an intriguing rather than intimidating way. I like the fluidity of navigation, aided by the touchscreen that connects hand to text much as with a print magazine. The Mag+ may seem a far cry from even the most advanced devices in use today, but our predictions on the digitization of media seem to be more often wrong than not.

Cafetaria: Book-related brain snacks

The BookBox™Company

In 1992, thieves broke into a Canadian home and swiped all the jewelry and cash stowed in the underwear drawer. The distraught family, operators of a woodworking business, came to the only logical conclusion: they'd use their adze-wielding skills to hollow out books as secure hiding places.

The BookBox™Company is a family business based in Vancouver. They acquire used books- classic lit to law tomes to cookbooks- from charities, recycling operations and publishers and carve them out to be used as storage devices. Besides the fact that they refer to their raw material, books, as "former waste," their suggestions for what to keep in the BookBoxes are just bizarre. My favorites, besides the cigar above: beanie babies, popcorn, jewels and your cell phone.

I guess one benefit of a project like this is its provision of a handy metaphor for what modern technology is doing to traditional publishing.