defrocking your books

it took me until pretty late in life to realise that book covers, by and large, are tacky and more or less useless. using them to keep dust from your books is akin to using neon plastic to preserve your furniture.

there are surprises in store for the adventurous defrocker of a hardback book…gold and silver foil stamping! linen! typography! earthtones! what’s more: since the binding of books has been more or less standardised over the last 3.2 million years, the dan brown bestseller that you bought yesterday will harmonise with your grandmother’s edition of fanny hill when they are both naked together on your bookshelf.

added bonus: you can upcycle your discarded covers into fashionable outerwear!

more unsolicited advice on how to arrange your bookshelf can be found here.

a fruitful idea

i woke up this morning with an idea for the kind of blog that might score me a fat book deal. i made this image for my new site, it’s called pregnant-chicks-on-tv-pretending-they-isn’t-really-pregnant.com and it could make millions.

more here.

arial & helvetica

on friday, i hosted a screening of helvetica for some buddies of mine that didn’t know that there were other typefaces besides times new roman. it turns out, there ARE other typefaces and one of them is helvetica (and another of them is papyrus.)

the documentary does not explore the relationship between helvetica and microsoft’s derivative, arial. so to help ignite the post-viewing dialogue, i made this supplement illustrating the key differences in letterforms. however, in place of any spirited debate, my buddies decided instead to take turns delivering roundhouses to my jaw, saying “a documentary about a font is as interesting as it sounds.” i could not agree more.

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update (9/22/2009): welcome internet-at-large! i am ostrich-feather-tickled that you are finding this chart to be such as gas. should you want to see my other type-related posts, you can give this a gentle click. should you want to see a collection of my favourite posts, you can get dirty with this link. should you want to close this tab and see what else is on the internet (hint: pictures of cats), you can hit cmd + w and be on your way.

oh snap! it’s a consciousness turf battle of metaphysical disses. step back, shawty lest you get caught in the crossfire.

half the fun of hybrid cutlery° is the peculiar names.

UPDATE: (6/15/2009) i now own a splayd of my own and have reviewed it here.

UPDATE: kottke & eatmedaily readers, should you ever be able to pry yourself away from gawking at the splayd, you may enjoy my other chart posts or food posts. you may also get a charge out of a selection of my other dispatches—[disclaimer: it is also very possible that you could find them tremendously boooooring (extra o’s added for emphasis).]

a severe constraint

yesterday, i received a very curious volume from a friend who knows how much i relish (1) well designed books, and (2) texts written under an elected constraint. the book is severance by robert olen butler (2006). the book’s jacket says:

After decapitation, the human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and one-half minutes.

In a heightened state of emotion people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute.

Inspired by the intersection of these two seemingly unrelated concepts, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler has written sixty-two stories, each exactly 240 words in length, capturing the flow of thoughts and feelings that rush through a mind after the head has been severed. The characters are both real and imagined - Medusa (beheaded by Perseus, 2000 B.C.), Anne Boleyn (beheaded at the behest of Henry VIII, 1536), a chicken (beheaded for Sunday dinner in Alabama, 1958), and the author himself (decapitated on the job, 2008). These final thoughts are not a morbid or macabre reflection on death; they are a very distilled way of looking back on life and capturing its essence.

here, the author reads some of his stories on all things considered.

a charming book

in 1941, my grandmother found two, four-leaf clovers on her honeymoon in niagra falls, this launched a 60 year obsession with collecting, preserving and cataloguing them in a little book. a sampling (from top left):

• the 1.5” × 2.5” book is simply labeled, “four-leaf clover book” in my grandmother’s unmistakable scrawl.
• #1: “niagra falls, june 19, 1941.”
• #16: “glenham, 1950.”
• #17: “hawthorne, august 25, 1974.” [there is an unexplained gap between 1950 and 1974 that exactly coincides with my dad being born and graduating graduate school.]
• #25: “july 9, 1985 rossmoor golf course, 13th fairway.”
• #26: “july 19, 1989, raynor found a real one at the park.” [i was so intent on getting into this book that i drew in a clover that i allegedly found a few days earlier]
• #33: august 1993, snowmass village, not exactly a four-leaf clover but we really wanted to find one in colorado. [it is a three-leaf clover with one of the leaves split in two]
• #40: “pennswood village, perimeter walk july 31, 2000.” [this is the final clover in the book and on the final page. my grandmother died a year and a half later]

just as i (and horatio caine) like to examine my own life through the objects that i interact with, so too can this be done with my grandmother’s book. it reveals the places that she lived and vacationed°, her pastimes, friends°, and obsessions. it is every bit an autobiography of her life as an actual biography. there is little doubt that the true subject of the book is not four-leaf clovers—it is my grandmother.

we shall not cease from exploration

the [possibly apocryphal] ad placed by ernest shackleton for his 1914 imperial trans-antarctic expedition. the documentary is not to be missed, especially in these tough economic times.

i made me a rubber stamp that pretty much sums up my feelings on jack kerouac.