Pithy posters for writers

Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner once said, "Civilization begins with distillation," and now you can have that on a poster. It's one of several pithy sayings by authors that have been given visual representation by New York-based artist Evan Robertson.

Robertson has created 15 illustrations to go along with literary quotations. There are novelists, poets, a philosopher, quippers and criticizers. One poster has Molly Bloom's soliloquy from the end of "Ulysses" (spoiler alert!). Here is a selection of quotes:

All truths wait in all things. -- Walt Whitman

That's not writing, that's typing. -- Truman Capote

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form. -- Vladimir Nabokov

Poets are always taking the weather so seriously. -- J.D. Salinger

Have you ever heard the earth breathe? -- Kate Chopin

How embarrassing to be human. -- Kurt Vonnegut

How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. -- Paul Bowles

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. -- Edgar Allan Poe

In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile. --  Hunter S. Thompson

The appropriate response to reality is to go insane. -- Philip K. Dick

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Write drunk. Edit sober. -- Ernest Hemingway

Robertson has done his homework; he describes the literary context of each quote on the sales pages of his Etsy shop, Obvious State. For example, Capote had some specific writing (or was it typing?) in mind: He was criticizing the work of Jack Kerouac. Which gives his quote a little extra edge.

Previously, Robertson also had posters with quotes from Mark Twain and Kerouac, but those aren't currently being offered for sale. These are. The digitally created illustrations are, by turns, witty and elegant. Each poster comes as a 13-by-19-inch giclée print with a white border. They're for sale, unframed, for $24 each.

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Images: Posters created by Evan Robertson. Credit: Obvious State shop on Etsy

Visions of scripturience (say what?)

If you've ever been possessed by a violent desire to write, you may not have been able to put that feeling into words. However, there is a word for it: you were feeling scripturient.

It's one of the rare words that have been gathered and then graphically rendered by the Project Twins, a pair of designers based in Cork City, Ireland. James and Michael Fitzgerald do design work for a number of companies and have created their own projects independently. A-Z of Unusual Words is one of those independent series.

Some of the words, like scripturience, do not appear in abridged dictionaries. But they can be found in the heftier versions, and, of course, the massive standard, the OED.

A sampling from the Project Twins lexicon:

Acersecomic: A person whose hair has never been cut

Biblioclasm: The practice of destroying, often ceremoniously, books or other written material and media

Fanfaronade: Swaggering; empty boasting; blustering manner or behavior; ostentatious display

Noegenesis: Production of knowledge

Pogonotrophy: The act of cultivating, or growing and grooming, a mustache, beard, sideburns or other facial hair

Ultracrepidarian: A person who gives opinions and advice on matters outside of one's knowledge

Vernalagnia: A romantic mood brought on by spring

Zugzwang: A position in which any decision or move will result in problems.

The words alone are charming, and the graphic images created by the Project Twins even more so. Originally displayed in 2011 at the MadArt Gallery Dublin during DesignWeek, limited edition prints from the A-Z of Unusual Words are now for sale on the Project Twins website for about $250 each. Hat tip to Design Taxi for the link.

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Image: The poster for "scripturient" by the Project Twins. Credit: The Project Twins

 

It's Taschen's bargain warehouse sale

Art book publisher Taschen launched its semi-regular warehouse sale today, marking books down by 50% to 75%. The online sale continues through June 24; its stores, like the one in Beverly Hills, will also be offering bargains.

The warehouse sale includes discontinued titles, books that are "slightly dented" and "retired review copies." That means they're in limited supply, and this might be the last chance to get a book you've been keeping in your sights. One of the first to sell out is the "Big Penis Book 3D" -- but maybe that's for the best. Who knows who'd put their hands on it?

Taschen's warehouse is full of photo books, books that showcase art, even books about type -- "Bondoni" is a reprint of the 1818 typeface masterwork by the offical printer for the Duke of Parma, Giambattista Bodoni. There are many books about classic art and contemporary design. There are more than a few sexy books. There are books with photos of exotic locations, wild animals, movies, living spaces abroad, robots and Marilyn Monroe.

Taschen is the company of Benedikt Taschen, whose eclectic tastes govern its offerings. "He will stand behind every book that he publishes, no matter what," the Wall Street Journal wrote in 2011, "a directional choice that has not only defined the Cologne-born publisher as a seminal maverick in the world of books, but also as a rebellious risk-taker."

"Most books look so ... dispassionately done; they are disposable from the beginning," Taschen told the Journal. "Their books are not designed to become significant objects, so most books have no identity, no soul. I'm not saying all, but the vast majority [of publishing houses], with a few exceptions, have lost their profile and personality. It doesn't look like they have spent a lot of care and love."

Taschen publishes about 100 books a year; about 125 titles are part of the warehouse sale.

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Book designer Chip Kidd at TED [video]

Book designer Chip Kidd spoke at the main 2012 TED conference; his speech was posted online Wednesday. "Ladies and gentlemen, I have devoted the past 25 years to designing books," he says when he gets to the substance of his talk. Above him a slide reads, "Yes, BOOKS. You know, the bound volumes with ink on paper. You cannot turn them off with a switch. Tell your kids."

He brings that irreverence -- and interactivity -- to his talk, which highlights what a print book can do.

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The Dave Eggers shower curtain

The Thing, the quarterly that issues objects that are art-ish or connected to literature, will publish a short story shower curtain by Dave Eggers later this month. It is The Thing Issue 16. Previous issues of The Thing include a cutting board seared with a short story by Starlee Kine, a Miranda July window shade, and a pair of glasses to go with Jonathan Lethem's novel "Chronic City" -- all of which have sold out.

Eggers' books include "Zeitoun," "What is the What," and "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." He is the founding editor of the website, magazine and publishing house McSweeney's, also known for creating interesting editions for print. And he founded the nonprofit 826, which has literacy centers in eight cities, including Los Angeles.

The shower curtain is a short story monologue by the shower curtain to Eggers, or to the bather, or, because it faces out, to someone brushing her teeth. It costs $65.

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Photos: The Dave Eggers shower curtain and its packaging. Credit: The Thing

A different kind of cut-up storytelling: Beatrice Coron [Video]

Beatrice Coron looks at pieces of paper and sees stories inside -- which she gets at, wielding scissors, like a sculptor. Sometimes she sees those stories in Tyvek, which is less likely to dissolve in the rain.

French-born, the self-described rebel was a shepherdess, truck driver, factory worker, cleaning lady and more before deciding to become an artist. In her TED Talk, presented at the March 2011 conference in Long Beach, she describes her work and her process.

"People told me 'you're making artist books,' " she says. She has now created dozens. "To me, they're fascinating objects to narrate a story." Her work has also appeared as public art, as fashion and as fine art in Washington's National Gallery of Art, MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty.

William S. Burroughs popularized literary cut-up storytelling with his groundbreaking 1959 novel "Naked Lunch." Following in the playful tradition of the Dadaists decades earlier, Burroughs took to his completed typed pages with scissors, rearranging the fragmentary results into new paragraphs and sentences.

Like the Dadists, Coron has a sense of play: She loves puns and oddities of language. "At one point, I had to do the whole nine yards. It's actually a papercut that's nine yards long," she says. "In life, and in papercutting, everything is connected. One story leads to another."

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Happy 105th birthday, Eva Zeisel

Reaching the amazing age of 105 is an incredible accomplishment, but that's not all Eva Zeisel has done. An immigrant to the U.S. after World War II, she became a noted ceramist. Chronicle Books released a photo book of Zeisel's work as part of a series featuring designers Ingo Maurer and George Nelson.

But -- as they say -- wait, there's more. Living the high life in Berlin in 1932, Zeisel traveled to Russia, where a visit turned into a five-year stay. The last 16 months she was imprisoned, accused of plotting to kill Stalin and often being thrown into  solitary confinement. For many years, Zeisel kept mum about her time in Russia, fearing reprisals by the KGB, although it is said they in part formed the basis of "Darkness at Noon," written by her friend Arthur Koestler.

The literary journal A Public Space has recently run Zeisel's autobiographical prison memoir. Zeisel's daughter told the magazine, "When a friend read these memoirs, he found them disingenuous. He did not believe that one could write about such a serious situation with so much humor and charm. But that is Eva."

Memories of long ago are not true. They have been gilded by time, the way I remember them now, with love for my youth, sentimentally, of myself—slim and energetic, resistant, sad, alert. I speak of myself as much as of the things that happened to me. None of it is true, but I shall be precise reporting my memories....

It never occurred to me that I could have done something wrong. Not even then did it occur to me that something might happen to me personally. I looked around and saw a woman and the building superintendent. I got up and put on my housecoat, a green-checkered one of wool flannel. Suddenly there were more men in the room. I became quite ill at ease. They looked at my letters and at my photographs. They stopped at two of them. One was an enlarged snapshot of me on a beach with my eyes closed. It looked like a mask of my dead face. The men passed the photograph from one to the other and they smiled, and it scared me. I do not know whether I realized then or later that they thought I would soon be dead.

They also found a picture of a pistol, an enlargement I had made. It had been the fashion at that time to make partial enlargements of things so they looked like something else. Like speaking a word over and over again and changing the meaning of a syllable. At the time I got my camera, which I had bought with my first earnings from the Schramberg factory, I was living with the Leichsenring family. They had a little girl, and I took pictures of her dolls’ heads, heads of broken dolls. I also took a picture of her father’s pistol, a tiny one, with many little bullets laid out in a row, and I enlarged it into a pattern. They took other photographs, too. It must have been interesting for them to see what a foreigner had among her letters and photographs and personal belongings.

I remember feeling life receding from me and myself being set apart. They were not rude. They were extremely polite.

Today, Eva Zeisel turns 105. Her prison memoir is in A Public Space 14, available in bookstores and from the journal's website.

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Photo: Eva Zeisel with an exhibit of her pottery designs in 2005. Credit: Talisman K. Brolin / Associated Press

Designing '1Q84': Chip Kidd on Haruki Murakami's latest

Chip Kidd, one of publishing's best-known designers, created the cover for one of the most anticipated novels of the fall, Haruki Murakami's "1Q84." For those eager to know about the plot, Kidd explains it a little bit -- its setup, at least -- because it directly informed the cover design. A woman moves in two similar but not the same realities; a second moon appears in the sky.

Murakami's book, which publishes next week, posed a physical challenge: it's enormous, 944 pages. In England, it was published in two separate volumes; in Japan, three. Knopf has put it all in one -- with, we hope, very strong binding.

Kidd has been with Knopf for 25 years, but at the beginning of his career he was a prolific freelancer. Rizzoli has published a survey of his design, "Chip Kidd: Book One: Work 1986-2006."

While providing some insights into the novel and its design, Kidd leaves one mystery. There is something about the page numbers that ... well, he doesn't say. And I'm not telling.

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Steve Jobs bio tops Amazon bestseller list

After the death Wednesday of Apple founder and visionary Steve Jobs , his authorized biography became a hot ticket. "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson is Amazon's #1 bestselling book -- and it's not even out yet.

Although Jobs has been written about before, the biography is the first written with his cooperation. Jobs' biographer, Walter Isaacson, had been working with the Apple CEO, his family, friends, colleagues and competitors since at least 2009.

Isaacson has written biographies of genius Albert Einstein ("Einstein: His Life and Universe"), founding father Ben Franklin ("Benjamin Franklin: An American Life") and powerful diplomat Henry Kissinger ("Kissinger: A Biography"). When Simon & Schuster announced that the book was on the way, publisher Jonathan Karp said, "This is the perfect match of subject and author, and it is certain to be a landmark book about one of the world's greatest innovators."

The Steve Jobs biography was originally slated to be published in March 2012, and it was going to be titled "iSteve." The title was changed to the more staid "Steve Jobs," and the publishing date, at one point, moved up to Nov. 21, 2011. This week, it was moved up again, to less than three weeks from now: "Steve Jobs" will be released Oct. 24.

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Photo: Steve Jobs at the new iPad 2 product launch, March 2, 2011. Credit: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press. Book cover: Simon & Schuster

Kate Spade meets Nicole Krauss?

Kate Spade's new fall campaign -- "Understated is Overrated" -- is currently appearing on signs, bus stops, the sides of food carts, shopping bags and more. The advertising features, behind the text, whimsically stacked bars of bright color -- look for pink and tomato-red in Kate Spade shops this season.

When I saw the ad in Los Angeles for the first time, I had a sudden association. The ad I saw was on the side of a bus stop, so it was more book-cover shaped than the one above. What it made me think of, of course, was Nicole Krauss' "Great House." Sure, there are four color bars on Krauss' cover, and the palette is less pink and more yellow-orange. Still, they seem to speak to each other, particularly the color and font of the advertisement's "overrated" and the book cover's "great."

Of course, they're not actually connected, but I like the idea of walking into Kate Spade and buying a lipstick in "Great House" orange-red.

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Photos: (left) Kate Spade wall advertisement in New York City. Credit: KateSpadeNY via Instagram

(right) The cover of Nicole Krauss' "Great House."