Sending you a Penguin in a letter

While the other cover for Orwell’s Decline of the English Murder discussed in this post at Zoo in the head is probably superior, I do like the Penguin placement here:

I think they did the same with other Orwells at the same time. For a more contemporary example, currently Penguin have an imprint just for James Bond titles, the logo for which is:

Penguin 007 logo. Pictured on the Pentagram-designed Quantum of Solace hardback.

But there must be other examples like this?

at 14.38 on
30 November 2009

There goes the empire

A fun piece of information visualization: four great empires of the 19th and 20th centuries (British, Spanish, Portugese and French) are represented by coloured dots, the size of the dots representing that empire’s territorial extent. As the empires grow the dots bulge, but as we approach modernity there’s not nearly as much growth as there is dissolution, and the dots blister and then burst as territories achieve independence.

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

It’s attractive and strangely dramatic, if not particularly informative, and I don’t meant that as a terrible criticism. In fact, Pedro M. Cruz, the creator doesn’t consider it either a piece of information visualization or “information art. Either way sounds too pretentious — as the visuals are not very sophisticated or elegant, and the way that the information is treated doesn’t enable the extraction of advanced knowledge.” And I’m sure he’d know better than me.

Still kind of fun though!

(via kottke)

at 09.37 on
27 November 2009

info visualization

Detainee 063

On Monday, Greater Than Or Equal To is starting a new project, called Detainee 063. It is going to republish the interrogation log of Mohammed Al-Qahtani, in real time.

The log covers a fifty-day stretch of Al-Qahtani’s interrogation at Guantanamo Bay (where he was, and still is, being held on suspicion of terrorism) from 23 November 2002 to 11 January 2003. Each entry will appear on the website exactly seven years after it was first recorded.

For the fifty days of the log, Detainee 063 is questioned by teams of interrogators working in shifts, typically for twenty hours a day. Often the log is brutal and unpleasant to read. Often it is almost banal – detailing the quotidian, humdrum schedule by which the interrogators mean to apply unbearable pressure to a person’s will.

Within the first hour on Monday, Detainee 063 will refuse water, a tactic that he will come to repeat often. As the days and weeks go on, sometimes an IV drip will be forcibly administered to ensure that he remains well enough to continue. On one occasion, when he has been handcuffed to his seat to prevent him interfering with the IV, he will bite through the tube running into his body. He will be put in a booth covered with images of 9/11 victims. Images of victims will be taped to his clothes. His head and beard will be shaved and female interrogators will be used to cause him discomfort. He will be made to act as a dog, being taught to stay, come and bark. His hands and feet will swell. His heart rate will slow to 35 bpm.

Detainee 063 is meant as a kind of re-enactment. It will use the internet (as well as the site itself, an RSS feed and a Twitter account will be updated) as a means to dramatize torture as it is practiced but not often talked about: not with techniques used in isolation, but the cumulative effect of mistreatment over a prolonged period. I don’t expect many to read it in its entirety but I hope that following it, even for a few days, that being made aware of the passing of time between entries in the log, will make any visitors to the site more aware of the relentlessness of this interrogation, and of relentlessness as an aspect of torture.

On January 22, 2009, two days after assuming office, Barack Obama issued an executive order that the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay be shut down within a year. By the time the last entry of Al-Qahtani’s interrogation log is published at Detainee 063, that deadline will almost have arrived.

Update, 23 November: Detainee 063 is up and running. I posted an explanation of the project (similar to this post) at the Detainee 063 blog.

at 16.25 on
20 November 2009

Detainee 063
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the site

With nothing but a bed and a clear cut goal

Too Loud a Solitude is a novella by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal about Haňťa, a compactor of waste paper. Haňťa has for 35 years been making bales of paper, crushing everything from bloody, sickly sweet butcher paper to rare and valuable books. The books he reads reverentially; he takes them home and adds them to the two ton stack perilously held over his head as he sleeps; and he uses them to stud his bales of compacted paper, turning the bales into his own works of art.

This section comes as Haňťa visits an old sweetheart:

… Manča showed me around the cottage, from basement to attic, explaining in hushed tones how an angel had come to her and she had obeyed him and taken up with a ditchdigger and spent all her savings on a plot of land in the woods, and the ditchdigger dug the foundation and slept in a tent with her, but then she threw him over for a bricklayer, and the bricklayer made love to her in the tent and put up all the walls, and then Manča took up with a carpenter and he did all the carpentry work and shared her bed, but then she threw threw him over for a plumber, who slept in the same bed as the carpenter but did all the plumbing, only to be replaced by a roofer, who made love to her and laid her roof with concrete tile but was eventually replaced by a mason, who roughcast all her walls and ceilings by day and slept in her bed by night, until she took up with a cabinetmaker, who made all new furniture in return for her bed, and so it was that Manča, with nothing but a bed and a clear cut goal, built herself a house.

at 10.39 on
13 November 2009

books
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reading

Selling Penguin

There’s a post on the Guardian books blog that vigorously decries the putting of old Penguin covers on mugs and deckchairs. The author’s admirably concerned about the negative effects of this rampant commercialism. He’s so concerned that he wastes no time in drawing a clear line between the merchandising of those iconic designs and the collapse of Allen Lane’s noble, egalitarian vision for the publisher he founded.

And when I say ‘he wastes no time’, I mean he neatly saves himself time by not doing it. He just assumes the line exists. Penguin’s classic cover of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is being used to decorate a mug? Why, this way lies an illiterate (if presumably well-hydrated) public with no appreciation of their literary cultural heritage!

Most peculiarly, he is very upset that some notebooks cost more than the Penguin editions of the actual books from which they take their covers.

It’s depressing because the blank books cost more than the latest Penguin editions of the novels. The Invisible Man? £7.99 with annotations and an introduction by Christopher Priest. Wuthering Heights? The Penguin Popular Classic’s yours for £2.50, or for £6.99 have an annotated edition introduced by Brontë scholar (and Booker prize judge) Lucasta Miller. Nineteen Eighty-Four? £8.99, introduced by no less than Thomas Pynchon.

Surely it would be more depressing if the books cost more than the notebooks? Or, if we think back just three paragraphs in his, admittedly, kind of confusing argument, ‘Allen Lane set up Penguin to try to increase the numbers of people able to afford good books’. And now just look at what this new vulgar era of merchandising has wrought! Oh, it seems to have wrought affordable editions of classic books with introductions by the likes of ‘no less than Thomas Pynchon’. And of course the Penguin Popular Classics, housed in a distinctive green series style by no less then David Pearson and yours for no more than £2.50. How depressing.

Take this as a disclaimer: I used to work in the marketing department of Penguin and I still sometimes freelance for them. I’m also a fan of good book cover design. It’s one of the reasons I started this blog, and it’s one of the things that made my time at Penguin a good time. Because they still routinely produce brilliant designs. And the people in the art department are, in my experience, not just talented. They know they work at a publisher with a remarkable design history. And – if you talk to them about what it means to be in charge of preserving and celebrating that heritage, and about trying to do it justice with their own work – they’re also smart, thoughtful and humble.

Mugs and deckchairs might not be as vital a part of commemorating Penguin’s illustrious design past as histories of the designers responsible or collections of old designs. But if we think that awareness of good design has a way of improving new design (this is both my hunch and my own experience as an occasional ersatz designer), it can hardly be a bad thing. And, denunciations of publishers for selling out and ‘flogging’ themselves aside, the suggestion that it somehow impacts on the books themselves I’m going to politely call unfounded. Because it’s fucking stupid.

AT ANY RATE, the guy who wrote that post should look away now. This will only upset him. (But I think it’ll delight other people.)

Penguin have just released Postcards from Penguin. A box of one hundred postcards for £15 (actually it’s £7.80 at Amazon.co.uk or the Book Depository – which is less than 8p a postcard, bargain hounds), with great work from design legends like Romek Marber, Alan Aldridge and Jan Tschichold. There’s a few more photos at my Flickr page.

Things to note: the box itself was designed by Jim Stoddart; there’s been an admirable attention to detail paid, with several different versions of the back of the cards (all charming); and There must be a Pony! is an amazing title for a book with an amazing, eye-searing cover by Aldridge.

Postcards from Penguin | 9780141044668 | at Amazon | at the Book Depository

at 16.02 on
5 November 2009

Penguin
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cover design

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