Escapism for Amateurs

As a huge fan of Sarah Nicholls' work, I was delighted when the latest in her series of free informational pamphlets arrived in the post recently. Escapism for Amateurs (pictured above and below) is an oblique homage to Houdini that follows in the wake of other useful publications such as A Guide to Leisure Activities for Introverts and There are Dangers to Being an R&B Heartthrob. I look forward to practising its precepts, including such valuable lessons as 'no performer should attempt to bite off a red hot iron unless he has a good set of teeth'. Quite. 

Nicholls is a Brooklyn-based visual artist who 'makes pictures with language, books with pictures, prints with type, and animations with words.' If you follow the links above, you'll find a selection of images demonstrating the vibrant colours and dynamic typography characteristic of Nicholls' work, not to mention its wry sense of humour.

Book Artists Aloft

As the summer drew to a close, book artists Mette-Sofie D. Ambeck (Ambeck Design) and Mike Nicholson (Ensixteen Editions) visited me in Oxford. How would I entertain the two travellers, one fresh from the flatlands of Jutland, and the other, a vertigo-suffering Londoner?

We went as high as it's possible to go in this city of spires, climbing up the tower of the University Church of St. Mary. I hoped the candy-cane pillars, the gargoyles and the crumbling finials might interest Ambeck, whose latest book (pictured above) is a celebration of the stone-carvings found among the curious, shadowed pathways and tombs of Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, North London. Ambeck has worked with Tom Sowden in the studio at Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol to replicate her photo-archive through laser cutting. In this process, the laser sears into the paper fibres, creating a ghostly image that is not only the perfect technique to represent the crumbling, eroded gravestones but also evoking mortality itself.

The clouds lowered as we climbed - on the east side of the tower our faces were stung with rain - from the west we saw patches of sunshine break through thunderous skies to illuminate the cornfields on the far side of the city. Pressed in against the ancient walls as other sightseers passed us on the balcony, we noticed an abundance of graffiti left by earlier climbers.

Deciphering the amateur carvings in the Tower's winding stairwell, the descent was giddying. The image below, from the cover of Mike Nicholson's new edition Glass Half-Full/Glass-Half Empty, was penned many days before our climb, but it captures the sense of disorientation we felt on returning to the cobbled ground, and to the present moment. 

Readers are encouraged to visit the Small Publishers Fair in London on 16th and 17th November, to take a closer look at both Ambeck's and Nicholson's books.

That was then

Derby Day

A busy summer drew to a close with a day off in Derby. These photographs show a selection of works currently on show in The Visual Poetry of 1001 Objects, an exhibition of wood, bone, glass and stone, at Derby Museum until January 2014. 

Spectacles

Australian daggers

The Spade Bone of Ye Wonderful Dun Cow

(whale bone pub sign)

Alphabet crib book

Skulls of Little Tern and Redwing

It is more blessed to give than to receive 

- Eric Gill

It is better to Prosecute than to Beg 

- Derby Council

Sweet Pages

I’m ashamed to say that I have neglected to feature any edible book design in this blog to date. However, I have just discovered The Book of Decorative Cakes by Gwyneth Cole, a trade recipe book which nevertheless has royal icing typography and decoration on the front cover that any bookbinder would be proud of. I’m posting these pictures here for my friend Katherine Hyde, not only cake decorator and sculptor at betty bakery in New York – but also a paper connoisseur.

The quality of Cole’s cover art is not deceptive: there’s invention in all the cakes featured within, but I’m particularly seduced by a charming bookish mise en abyme on the last page. It tells the reader how to replicate, in icing sugar, the very page they are holding in their hands.

A close-up, below, shows the detailed sugar work, and a further reproduction of the same page spread: 

The Book of Decorative Cakes by Gwyneth Cole was published by Ebury Press in 1984. At the time of posting, there’s a second-hand copy available on Biblio. The others seem to have vanished into infinity…

Guest Post: Andrew Lee on Asparagus

I was in South Cornwall recently. This little gem of a shop serves the local communities of Par, Tywardreath and St Blazey. (My friend Eve will laugh if she reads this, but I was never sure where I was in this conurbation!) I went in asking where the Post Office was and bought some sweet williams and fat asparagus. Although I never went back for any of the tempting produce advertised here, maybe next time?

 

Andrew Lee

Andrew Lee is an artist whose work has featured previously on these pages. And there's more on his website.

Doverodde Diary: Day 21 - For The Dogs

Herring Heaven

I've been writing about the collections in The Herring Era Museum - Síldarminjasafnið - in Siglufjörður, Iceland. One of my chosen highlights is their collection of food tins dating back to the 1960s, when the fishing industry was booming in the region and exporting herring all over the world. 

So here's a chart of my top ten herring tins: 

The town where ducks never go hungry

So farewell Abingdon, my home for the winter. With the arrival of spring I'm packing up my kit bag and hitting the road again. But I'll miss this town, where there's always someone feeding the ducks:


and the doors are amazing:


even if they must be kept shut:


There are ancient almshouses with equally ancient residents who have indulged in some extraordinarily morbid but beautiful grafitti:


I think most of the aged poor have disproved the author of Ecclesiastes:


Some of the almshouses are named in honour of their benefactors:


With names like this, it is no surprise to read (on Wikipedia) that one of Abingdon's more famous residents is Gerald Charles Dickens, the great-grandson of the novelist. Finally, here's more on the great Mr Twitty, in the fine stonecutting that he deserves:


Now I aspire to be one of Twitty's 'honeft and induftrious poor' in order that one day I may be maintained in 'Meate Drinke and Apparrel and all other Neceffaryes of Life' in Abingdon, with enough crumbs left over to feed the ducks.

Found Poem No. 9: As Thow Art

AS THOW ART

SO WAS I

AS I AM

SO SHALT THOW BEE

Found by Dick Morgan

in St Eadburgha's Church, Broadway, Hereford and Worcester,

and kindly contributed by him.

St Eadburgha was the great granddaughter of King Alfred the Great.

Eadburgha achieved sainthood quite effortlessly: as a child

she was offered the choice of jewels or a Bible.

She chose the Bible and dedicated her life to the service of God.

More Other Mother!

If today's literary periodicals were to take on flesh and attend a cocktail party, McSweeney's would be the guest who turned up late, having just performed a gig, still wearing stage costume, drunk and a little sweaty but unabashed. It would offend the host, tell hilarious anecdotes, stick canapés in its pockets and abscond with someone else's partner. The older journals, wearing uniformly crumpled suits, would turn from their intellectual sparring over warm chardonnay to eye the departing maverick enviously.

In the decade since its inception McSweeney's quarterly has proved that an experimental literary journal can be an uproarious success and has raised the benchmark for publishing design. As it approaches its 30th issue, Tate Publishing has released a celebratory volume: Art of McSweeney's. That this volume about an illustrated literary journal (and its associated publishing ventures) is published by Tate is yet another indication that the art of the book is moving from the library into the art gallery.

I've travelled around Britain with Art of McSweeney's in my suitcase for the last three weeks, and can testify that it is very heavy indeed. The cumbersome nature of books is one of the few sensible reasons given for using e-readers, but Dave Eggers, the novelist and McSweeney's founder, rejects 'rumblings about the dire future of the book'. He reasons that a work of fiction takes three or more years to write, and so it is only fair to spend a little time on the production of the book itself, indeed to produce a real book. In the case of McSweeney's publications, this volume included, every minute and every milligram is worthwhile.

Eggers boasts that 'McSweeney's is a small company dedicated to these physical books that purportedly have no future'. In order to 'keep people mindful of the pleasures of the book-as-object' inspiration is drawn from fine book designs of the past. The McSweeney's look is a modernist collage of styles: 1890s boys' school stories; pulp fiction covers of the 1970s; letterpress circus posters; and cigar boxes. Yet their graphic excitement is far from being blinkered by nostalgia; it extends to such everyday objects as rubber bands, hotel bibles and plain-text emails (an early four-page email manifesto from Eggers mooting a 'journal [...]not a "zine"' is reproduced here).

The journal's name arose from 'The Real Timothy McSweeney', an eccentric who believed himself related to Eggers' mother, and from whom 'long, tortured and increasingly incomprehensible letters' fell onto on the family doormat thoughout Eggers' childhood. The letters offered the young Eggers 'the possibility of a long-obscured and very dark secret.'

There has not yet been an issue of McSweeney's bound in a doormat, but almost every other process has been conscripted in an infectious playfulness with the book form. After the typographic austerity of the earliest cover designs, McSweeney's began to explore colour printing and parodies of traditional binding structures. The production process is fetishized and the designer's secret tricks laid bare: 'Foil Stamp … $0.22/French Flaps … $0.29/Die Cut (Special Shape) … $0.36'. It's no surprise that authors such as David Byrne testify that 'it was the design that lured me into the McSweeney's world.'

Before long, art began to take over the journal, with a whole issue devoted to visual themes (including a feature on the poet Robert Lowell's marginal doodles). The innovative short fiction that was McSweeney's trademark met its match in irreverent illustration. The young editors' enthusiastic folly is reminiscent of the Victorian boys' school stories they so admire: a whiff of derring-do hovers over anecdotes of book-launches in Manhattan dim sum restaurants; and that most mundane of publishing duties, a trip to the printer, becomes an adventure to Iceland in a snow storm. (McSweeney's used Oddi Printing in Iceland, before the dollar "did a tremendous belly flop". While the editors are effusive in praise of Oddi, the latter's director,Bjössi Vídisson says, more cautiously, "McSweeney Issue 7 is without doubt the most memorable book I have printed. This is the issue with the rubber band, the loose booklets, and the wraparound hardcover piece.")

For the present volume, the McSweeney's team have restrained themselves from punching holes in the millboard covers, binding it in fake fur, or inserting cds with songs composed in their honour by rock stars. Limited to merely making every page spread a delight, they have risen to the challenge. But they have been allowed one little joke: since much of this book's interior deals with cover designs, the fiction element of the journal is introduced onto the cover, a dust-wrapper which unfolds to form a poster on which short stories perform typographic acrobatics. The book is well illustrated with artwork and page spreads from the journal; captions promise curiosities such as an 'Excerpt of a short story written and designed in the style of a comic book without pictures' or 'A short story by Adrienne Miller that invites the reader to cut its pages along the dotted lines to reveal new narratives'. For the mathematically-inclined, a pie chart summarizes the contents of each issue according to the categories 'Fiction', 'Art' and the mysterious 'Other'. Needless to say, there's an awful lot of 'Other'.

Borrowed Bookshelves: 4

Colin Campbell, Art Historian, Northumberland.

Above many shelves of scholarly works on Rembrandt, I found some light relief in the form of a six-volume 1877 edition of Robert Burns' works. Monday marks the 251st anniversary of Burns’ birth, and I'll be reciting his paean to ‘Scotch Drink’ over a haggis:

Food fills the wame, and keeps us leevin;
Tho’ life’s a gift no worth receiving,
When heavy-dragg’d wi’ pine and grieving;
But oiled by thee,
The wheels o’ life gae down-hill, scrievin,
Wi’ rattlin glee.

For those who prefer books to booze, here are some lines found scribbled in a musty volume of Shakespeare in the library of Burns' friend Cunningham:

Through and through th'inspir'd leaves,
Ye maggots, make your windings,
But O respect his lordship's taste
And spare the golden bindings.

Borrowed Bookshelves: 3

Emily Brett, Writer and Visual Artist, Hackney, London.

I found these much-loved Ladybird books lurking amongst Brett’s eclectic collection of literary and theological texts. Brett says, in testimony to the Ladybirds’ durability, “I loved the books’ feel: firm, droppable, difficult to rip the pages because the cover was so hard; and I loved the picture of the Ladybird in the top right corner.” She adds, “From the look of its legs I suspected that Ladybirds could crawl everywhere and everywhere they crawled there was a book about what they'd seen…”

The slim volumes are mostly educational; they alerted the young Brett to important concerns such as woodwork, pond life and pirates. Yet far and away her favourite was the story of Joan of Arc who saw visions of God in the sunlit fields. For a small girl who could still barely read, part of the appeal for Brett were the illustrations of the pious yet sassy saint-to-be and her surroundings. “The pictures of cows, bowls of soup, wooden tables, stone masonry, the church and battles, tell their own narrative, leading Joan from her village to her higher purpose. I remember particularly a picture of her holding up and dedicating her sword to a statue of the Virgin Mary. It seemed terribly noble and, in a way, glamorous. I realised there was much more to life than met the eye. I also loved the endpapers, with dark grey drawings and captions of important things, such as 'Crossbow-men', 'Joan in her armour', 'A Knight', etc.

“Joan’s story is so exciting. She's so brave and has such sensibility. On the cover there’s a picture of her riding a white horse in battle, in her glinting armour, cape flowing against the blue sky. It symbolised life as an adventure and a crusade... In summer there were lots of Ladybirds in the garden on a plant with tiny purple flowers and I liked counting their spots and calling them Joan.”

Borrowed Bookshelves: 2

Frances and Nicolas McDowall, proprietors of the Old Stile Press, have a complete set of the Chiswick Press Shakespeare in their library, minus a copy of The Tempest which found its way to my bedroom: 'All that is solid melts into air'.

Borrowed Bookshelves: 1

On the last day of the year I watched all my books disappear into a shiny bunker at the Big Yellow Self Storage Company (more on these generous supporters of my work in the Arctic in a later post). I thought I'd fill the void left by my own library with an occasional feature on bookshelves encountered during my travels.

Never one for Dewey Decimal order, I'm fascinated by the odd systems of domestic bookshelving, with all their shambles and synchronicities. First off, an uncharacteristically lowbrow corner of the collection belonging to scientists Mark Walton and Carinne Piekema in Oxford.

Gangland Caff

Black plastic sign boards were once a common sight across London, and last summer I featured a decrepit specimen advertising electrical wares by the seaside. Perhaps it had retired from a life of crime in the metropolis.

In typographic terms, these signs are inherently sinister. The design draws on the white-on-black aesthetics of the chalkboard, but with none of the latter's grace. It combines a brutal typeface with a technology that, while initially promising freedom of choice, in fact constrains any graphic invention. Tiny holes in the surface of the board clamp onto plastic letter-shafts, insisting on perfect rectilinear presentation, while no other design elements need be followed. The board is the epitome of the upright and the ugly, as self-righteous and unimaginative as the Cockney cafe proprietor.

Sign boards are a quirk of display technology, an evolutionary anomaly like the vicious star-nosed mole of the Pacific North West, a creature neither of the land nor of the sea, with its alien and disturbing snout. These strange inventions have preserved their form unchanged while new and flashier ways of marketing – LED strips, florescent stars, digital displays – passed them by.

Like its more majestic relative, the cinema hoarding, the sign board has always suffered from a paucity of alphabetic material. The board’s owner must endure the fact that, even from the outset, there are never enough letters provided. And so words are misspelt to begin with, dollars used to represent pounds, letters to represent numbers – and vice versa. Then comes the inevitable decline in standards, first a spattering of chip fat, and then growing chaos as letters go missing in action, sucked up the hoover along with baked beans, beard trimmings or dead mice; falling from the board and down the back of a leatherette sofa as the plastic pegs bend and break.

In this deadpan version, Gangland Caff, the artist Andrew Lee encapsulates the poignant role of the sign board as both a welcome and a warning. Lee's 'Slap-Up Menu' offers a selection of unpalatable snacks that combine Cockney rhyming slang with the great greasy spoon tradition. Make mine a knuckle sandwich and a ginger beer.

Gangland Caff / menu board / 46x62cms / 2007