Posts Tagged ‘publishing’
“I suppose illustration tends to live in the streets, rather than in the hermetically sealed atmosphere of the museum, and consequently it has come to be taken less seriously”*…
But surely, it shouldn’t necessarily be so. Consider Tom Gauld (@tomgauld). He’s probably best known for his work for The New Yorker (e.g.) and The New York Times (e.g.); but he’s also an accomplished cartoonist. Your correspondent’s favorites are his on-going contributions to The Guardian Review (above and below)
… and The New Scientist…
See more of his marvelous work at his site.
* master illustrator Quentin Blake.
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As we visualize it, we might send carefully limned birthday greetings to Richard McClure Scarry; he was born on this date in 1919. A children’s author and illustrator, he published over 300 books with total sales of over 100 million worldwide.
“It isn’t easy, coming up with book titles. A lot of the really good ones are taken. Thin Thighs in 30 Days, for example. Also The Bible.”*…
“What’s in a name?” mused Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet (first published in print in 1597 as An Excellent Conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet). Would he have said the same, one wonders, if he’d been around to hear that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was at one point titled Trimalchio in West Egg; or that for Dracula, Bram Stoker considered The Dead Un-Dead? There is certainly an art to the great title, as demonstrated by the late English humourist Alan Coren, who when choosing a name for a collection of essays in 1975 noticed that the most popular books in Britain at that time were about cats, golf and Nazis. So he called his book Golfing for Cats and slapped a swastika on the front cover.
We also learn that care should be taken to avoid tempting an ironic fate. Bill Hillman, the American author of the 2014 guide Fiesta: How to Survive the Bulls of Pamplona, was gored by the bulls of Pamplona that same year—and again the next year. And in the 2017 British national election, the Conservative politician Gavin Barwell, author of How to Win a Marginal Seat, lost his marginal seat.
The humorous literary award known as the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year has been running since 1978, with past winners including Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality (1986) by Glenn C. Ellenbogen, The Joy of Waterboiling (2018) by Achse Verlag and The Dirt Hole and its Variations by Charles L. Dobbins (2019). But we can go back centuries earlier to find their ancestors…
For example…
An Essay upon Wind, with Curious Anecdotes of Eminent Peteurs (1787) by Charles James Fox
Sun-beams May Be Extracted From Cucumbers, But the Process is Tedious (1799) by David Daggett
How to Cook Husbands (1898) by Elizabeth Strong Worthington
Fishes I Have Known (1905) by Arthur A. Henry Bevan
Does the Earth Rotate? No! (1919) by William Westfield
Thought Transference (Or What?) in Birds (1931) by Edmund Selous
The Boring Sponges Which Attack South Carolina Oysters (1956) by Bears Bluff Laboratories
A Weasel in My Meatsafe (1957) by Phil Drabble
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (1977) edited by Tatsuji Nomura et al.
…
Just a taste of the delights at: “77 Strange, Funny, and Magnificent Book Titles You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.” From @foxtosser.
* Dave Barry
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As we nominate, we might send bright birthday greetings to Greg Sherwood Cohelan; he was born 70 years ago today. An accomplished marketing consultant, he is best known for his decades on the radio and television (as Greg Sherwood) in the San Francisco Bay area.
The son of Don Sherwood, “The World’s Greatest Disc Jockey” (who ruled the Bay Area airwaves in the 1950s and 60s), Greg began his on-air career while in high school as a correspondent for his father, doing a call-in show as he drove across country, “Young Man on the Road”; he followed that with a stint as a morning traffic reporter, flying around in a helicopter doing traffic reports for his dad.
After college he joined KQED, the local public television and radio organization, first as a volunteer, then as an employee. Over the years, he’s become the face of KQED-TV and the voice of KQED radio, hosting interviews, anchoring award-winning documentaries, and especially during pledge periods.
“Call right now, 1 (800) 937-8850.”
“It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds”*…
Sometimes profane, often profound, always wonderfully watercolory…
Visit the amazing aviary at False Knees (@FalseKnees)
* Aesop
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As we have fun with fowl, we might send powerfully-drawn birthday greetings to Jack Kamen; he was born on this date in 1920. An artist and illustrator, he is remembered for his work in books, magazines, comic books, and advertising, especially for his work illustrating crime, horror, humor, suspense and science fiction stories for EC Comics (and for the onscreen artwork he contributed to the 1982 horror anthology film Creepshow, a tribute to EC created by Stephen King and George Romero’s homage to EC).
Kamen had four children, one of whom is the inventor Dean Kamen— whose patent application for the Segway was drawn by his father.
“The best-laid plans”*…
… can be turned to unexpected use:
In an eighteenth century book, Johann Steingruber designed a type set made of architectural drawings. Via our buddies at Boing Boing: “An alphabet made of architectural plans, from 1773.”
* paraphrased from Robert Burns’ poem “To a Mouse”: “the best laid plans of mice and men / Often go awry” (or on the Scots, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley”)
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As we spell it out, we might recall that it was on this date in 1661 that Oliver Cromwell, who had been Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland after leading rebel troops against the Crown in the English Civil War, was exhumed from his crypt in Westminster Abbey, and ritually “executed”; it was the 12th anniversary of the execution of Charles I, whose death warrant Cromwell had signed. Cromwell had died (most likely of blood poisoning following a urinary infection) in 1658. Charles II had returned from exile to become King in a restored monarchy in 1860.
“You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”*…
Edward Brooke-Hitching grew up in a rare book shop, with a rare book dealer for a father. As the author of histories of maps The Phantom Atlas, The Golden Atlas and The Sky Atlas, he has always been “really fascinated by books that are down the back alleys of history.” Ten years ago, he embarked on a project to come up with the “ultimate library.” No first editions of Jane Austen here, though: Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Library collects the most eccentric and extraordinary books from around the world.
“I was asking, if you could put together the ultimate library, ignoring the value or the academic significance of the books, what would be on that shelf if you had a time machine and unlimited budget?” he says.
Following up anecdotes, talking to booksellers and librarians and trawling through auction catalogues, he came across stories like that of the 605-page Qur’an written in the blood of Saddam Hussein. “If that was on a shelf, what could possibly sit next to it?” he asks. “I mentioned it to a bookseller and they told me about a diary that they’d had, from the 19th century, written by a shipwrecked captain who only had old newspaper and penguins to hand. So Fate of the Blenden Hall was written entirely in penguin blood.”
There’s the American civil war soldier who inscribed his journal of the conflict on to the violin he carried. There’s the memoir of a Massachussetts highwayman, James Allen, which he “requested be bound in his own skin after his death, and presented to his one victim who had fought back as a token of his admiration.” Or the diary of the Norwegian resistance fighter Petter Moen, pricked with a pin into squares of toilet paper and left in a ventilation shaft; although Moen was killed in 1944, one of his fellow prisoners returned to Oslo after it was liberated from the Nazis and found the diary. Or the entirely fabricated book An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa: its author George Psalmanazar, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned man with a thick French accent, arrived in London in about 1702 and declared himself to be the first Formosan, or Taiwanese, person to set foot on the European continent. (“Obviously no one had been there and nobody knew what Taiwanese people looked like, and he became the toast of high society,” says Brooke-Hitching.)
The joy for the author in his discoveries – and make no mistake, The Madman’s Library is an utterly joyous journey into the deepest eccentricities of the human mind – was that they “make you realise that, above everything, people have always been funny, been weird, been unquenchably curious in every possible arena”…
The Madman’s Library, the ultimate collection of bizarre books down the ages: “From cut-out confessions to cheese pages: browse the world’s strangest books.”
[TotH to buddy MK]
* Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
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As we get weird, we might recall that it was on this date in 1935 that physicist Erwin Schrödinger published his famous thought experiment– now known as “Schrödinger’s cat“– a paradox that illustrates the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
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