Is there a story in California City?

Not far from Edwards Air Force Base lies California City. In 1958, a developer envisioned it as the state's next big metropolis behind Los Angeles and San Francisco, bought thousands of acres and laid out a grid of streets in the desert. Now, the place is home to just about 10,000 -- several zeroes shy of the hoped-for population -- and an automobile test track. But the streets remain.

Geoff Manaugh of the smart design/architecture/planning site BLDGBLOG wonders if there's something more there.

I can see an amazing article being written about this place for GOOD magazine —"California and its Utopias," say—or The New Yorker, or, for that matter, Atlas Obscura. The large-scale spatial remnants of an economic downturn, decades in advance of today's recession.

The L.A. Times has found some stories in California City: environmentalist concerns over the racetrack, which threatened tortoises and squirrels. A place in the desert where 1,000 people gather on the 13th of each month to wait for a vision of the Virgin Mary, said to appear in the sky.

And in 1999, we read about some of the plans that went awry in California City: Early on, with no phones, the few residents communicated by CB radio. An herb farm lost its crops to rabbits and a sandstorm. A hydroponic tomato-growing enterprise was a front for marijuana growers. "It's been a scam town," then-Mayor Larry Adams said.

But as for the complete story of the city that didn't happen in California City? There may be more left to tell.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Satellite image of California City via Google Maps

Pop-up books in the news

The man behind the modern pop-up book, Waldo "Wally" Hunt, has died. Hunt, a Los Angeles advertising executive, sold his company and traveled to New York, where he became disenchanted. He was charmed by a pop-up book imported from Czechoslovakia. "I knew I'd found the magic key," he told the L.A. Times in 2002. "No one was doing pop-ups in this country." Hunt's first pop-up company was so successful that Hallmark purchased it. Then Hunt returned west and started another company -- making pop-up books, of course.

"He was such an important publisher of pop-up books who really advanced them technically. The pop-up designers who worked for him were amazing creative engineers," Cynthia Burlingham, director of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum, told the L.A. Times.

Hunt was also a collector; many of the 300 works in a 2002 exhibit "Pop Up! 500 Years of Movable Books" at the Los Angeles Central Library were from his collection. He passed away at 88 on Nov. 6.

Meanwhile, the website Hilobrow, which has just undergone a snazzy design upgrade, celebrates pop-up books as underutilized subjects of book trailers. The site has posted a series of examples -- including some that are mediocre and lousy -- that includes a few real charmers. One winner -- for "ABC3D," a design favorite of 2008 -- is after the jump.

A cornucopia of book covers

The blog The Book Cover Archive has come up with a short, short list of its top 10 book covers of the aughts, with another 10 runners-up. There are special mentions for a handful of designers, but really, a group of 10  covers -- even 20 -- is not nearly enough.

This set has a heavy helping of covers that work as trompe d'oeil -- 2008's favorite, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," has a cover that appears to be the spines of a bunch of other books lined up in a neat row. But those lose some of their charm when reproduced digitally (it's hard to tell the difference between a clever cover made up of a picture of spines of books and a simple picture of the spines of books). And on balance, the top choices seem to be on the somber side, like a mix tape recorded on a gloomy day.

So there's good reason to go exploring the Book Cover Archive's archive. There are close to 1,200 covers on (cyber) display, sortable by publisher, designer, title. The archive is created with some serendipity -- generally, book covers are added around their publication date, but some are late additions.

But the sorting isn't the point so much as the gazing. Because the archive only includes those covers that merit appreciation, every one is worth a second look -- and displayed in arrays of 70 or more, they're a book lover's eye candy.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Book covers for "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth" by Chris Ware and Penguin's 70th anniversary reissue of John Steinbeck's "The Murder."

A gallery of uber-modern bookcases

A parade of modern bookcases in this photogallery looks fantastic. They gleam, they interlock, they're clean inspired and even sometimes silly. But I'm not entirely sure they'll be all that good at holding books.

The shelves above, called Opus Incertum by Sean Yoo, tilt and slant in wonderful shapes, only a few of which would hold books properly. Maybe you could stack big art books on their sides in the big slanty hexagon, but it doesn't seem like the best way to store them. What's more, these bookcases are made of something called expanded polypropylene, which can be used indoors or outdoors. Fun orange outdoor shelves are great -- but keeping books on the patio, not so much.

Maybe they're not meant for books so much at all. Maybe odd-shaped artworks and ephemera, maybe dangling pieces and soft pillows belong in them. Maybe bookshelves aren't just for books anymore.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Opus Incertum by Sean Yoo, $495 per unit. Credit: www.functions.cc

Where the wild things are furry

In June, I heard about a version of "Wild Things" by Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze with a fur cover, but I didn't quite believe it. As you can see: believe it.

"Wild Things" is a 300-page book for 9- to 12-year-old readers, an expanded version of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" picture book. It's coming out in October, timed, of course, to coincide with the release of the "Where the Wild Things Are" movie, directed by Jonze and scripted by Jonze and Eggers.

"I've never seen a movie that looked or felt like this," Sendak said at Comic-Con, "and it's his personal 'this.' And he's not afraid of himself. He's a real artist that lets it come through the work. So he's touched me very much. He has touched me very much."

Who knows if that also applies to the tactile book above. I don't know -- it looks, um, matted. And kind of creepy. But maybe that's the point.

And because I can't help but look forward to the movie, the latest trailer is after the jump.

You remind me of this other book cover

 

On Sunday, we reviewed the debut novel from Brian DeLeeuw, "In this Way I Was Saved." It's the story of two boys -- one real, one less so. "Although he's a constant presence, and couldn't be more real or threatening to Luke, Daniel doesn't exist in a form anyone but Luke can see," our reviewer Eryn Loeb writes, continuing:

Still, because the story is told from Daniel's toxic, misanthropic point of view, he seems more vital than his pale, fumbling counterpart....

DeLeeuw ably pulls off what seems at first to be a questionable conceit, with echoes of the destructive, delusional protagonists of Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club," and that book's attendant questions about masculinity and self-deception.

When I first saw "In This Way I Was Saved," I knew none of this. What I did know was that a shiny, empty pair of men's shoes on a mottled, slightly golden surface seemed very familiar. And there it was: Dan Chaon's "You Remind Me of Me."

OK, they're not exactly the same shoes. One pair has wingtip-style stitching; the other is more of  a plain box-toed oxford. And while this might be Photoshop magic, one pair is smoking, while the other is knotted up.

But they're still really similar. And what's odd is that the books are playing in somewhat similar territory. Questions of identity, creeping malevolence and a kind of dual self are also at play in Chaon's marvelous "You Remind Me of Me."

What's with the empty dude shoes?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Images from Simon & Schuster, left, and Random House, right.

Who should a book's cover speak to?

On his blog, Seth Godin argues that the job of a book cover is not to attract everyone's attention, just the right people's attention in the right way.

Is the purpose of the cover to sell books, to accurately describe what's in the book, or to tee up the reader so the book has maximum impact?

The third.

It's the third because if the book has maximum impact, then word of mouth is created, and word of mouth is what sells your product, not the cover.

His argument makes sense. The people who should be attracted to a book are the people who would like that particular book, who will be thrilled when they get to its contents. Disappointed customers won't help an author's reputation, while happy readers will build it.

Then again, in a competitive marketplace, isn't it nice to capture any attention you can? I am a big fan of the cover of Julie Oringer's short story collection "How to Breathe Underwater" -- to me it implies freedom and secrecy and emergence. But a male literary friend -- who liked it a lot -- really only saw hot, almost-naked chicks. I imagine both reactions would please the book jacket's designer, and author.

Should a cover sell books to any old passer-by? Or should it speak to a specific audience, setting them up for maximum impact?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Covering Jane Austen

Jane Austen's books, which are in the public domain, are reissued as fast as publishers think they can sell them. The covers rely on certain themes -- a portrait of a demure yet wise-eyed regency-era lady was pretty universally acknowledged to imply Jane Austen-ness. So much so that "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" simply added a little rot and blood splatter and -- bingo! -- the Jane Austen satire flew onto the bestseller charts.

Of course, it isn't always just one comely regency lady. Sometimes it takes two.

Property also is a concern for Austen's characters -- who will live where, what will happen to this house or another, where they're heading to go to the ball. So the fallback, if you haven't got a lady for your Austen book jacket, is going to be a building. Make sure it's a grand building, which will be guaranteed by sticking some teeny people in for perspective.

A design student has come up with her own version that combines the above (minus the zombie gore). Thinking about what all those ladies were doing in their regency parlors, Leigh-Anne Mullock went with handcrafted elements that portray the books' themes. Look, there are Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy!

Mullock herself did the needlework that she incorporated into her book cover designs. The Book Design Review blog, which found her work, applauds Mullock for sticking to the advice of design teacher Paul Rand: "It is important to use your hands, this is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator."

I find the needlework designs charming. Maybe some future publisher who reissues an Austen novel -- without zombies -- will too.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos (bottom): Leigh-Anne Mullock

Bookshelf cravings: the Wisdom Tree

The Wisdom Tree bookshelf is one of the pieces Spanish designer Jordi Mila will be showing at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York later this month. The shelf is meant to be both organic and to underscore the idea that books are a source of knowledge; with the careful placement of the apples, it's clear that these bookshelves are inspired by an Edenic, Biblical tree.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Jordi Mila

'Vietnam Posters' highlights propaganda images

Collector David Heather found a shop in Hanoi that he considered "an Aladdin's cave of old propaganda posters dating from the 1960s to the present." What he found there appears in the new book "Vietnam Posters" from Prestel Publishing -- see our online gallery.

In a brief introduction, critic Sherry Buchanan writes that "black, red and gold leaf, the traditional colors of lacquer objects in Buddhist temples morphed into the yellow, gold and crimson of the socialist revolution." This is just one of the intersections that combines to make these prapoganda images so compelling: French artistic techniques were absorbed and adapted, brutalist styles were taught in art schools by visiting Soviet and Chinese artists, and Vietnamese folk art traditions were revived.

The North Vietnamese were at war for decades, against the French starting in 1945, and America from 1964-1975. This week marks the 34th anniversary of the fall of Saigon; the posters provide a window into the visual language of the regime that drove two major Western powers away.

For all I'm writing here, there is very little writing and the book. At times I wish there was more information: when exactly a poster was printed, who the artist was, if there was a specific event to which the poster was responding or an action it supported. But it's not a history book, it's an art book, and without that context the art -- which is stunning -- stands on its own.

The posters appear on entirely white pages that provide, along the margin, English and German translations of what the posters say (Prestel is a German publisher). The poster above reads, "The battlefield needs weapons and munitions." Others in our gallery advocate for more shrimp production, fighting against aggressors and celebrating Uncle Ho.

This is the second book from Heather's collection, which must be massive. The first was 2008's "North Korean Posters."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: "Vietnam Posters" / Prestel Publishing