Travel Graphics #6

Barcelona

Dutch Book Covers

I found a large book store in Maastricht that had a very large selection of secondhand books. I shot a few of them on the shelf.I wish I had more time to look. Translations or other insights are welcome. More tomorrow.

Montague Projects on 50 Watts

50 Watts (formerly A Journey Around My Skull) is the best book blog out there, they regularly post incredibly strange, beautiful and obscure illustrations and covers. I'm honored that 50 Watts has taken an interest in what I do and posted selections of my faux covers more than once. A new post went up this week. Welcome to any readers that might have found their way here from 50 Watts.

New Faux Titles

Before I get back to real book blogging, here are a few more of my recent faux titles from the Secondary Occupants project, I showed in these in L.A.

Montague Projects at Pulse L.A.

Sorry for the blog silence, this last week was a mad rush to finish multiple projects and get myself to L.A., which is where I am now. I'm at the Pulse L.A. art fair with Black & White Gallery. I'm showing new books and posters from the Secondary Occupants project, a few of them are in this post, you can see the rest on Flickr. I'll be back to Daily Book Graphics posts next week.

My little corner of Pulse

Wrapped up in Books

Daily Book Graphics #71 / Brains

These books seem to relate to one another. The top one was designed by Rudolph De Harak (see DBG #3, DBG #9, DBG #58) and the bottom by Germano Facetti. Facetti was in charge of design at Penguin Books from 1962 to 1971. His obit is here. Flickr set of Penguin and Pelican covers here.

Daily Book Graphics #58 / The DVD of the 1960's

In the days before VHS and DVD the only way to revisit a film you had seen was to buy a book of the script with pictures. L'avventura was published in 1969, the film came out in 1960, I am Curious (Yellow), was 1968, the film was released in 1967. I haven't seen L'avventura, but I recently watched I am Curious. It is interesting as a piece of unorthodox filmmaking and as a document of Swedish culture on the cusp of change. It was very controversial at the time for the sexual content, of course by 2009 standards it seems pretty tame. In 1970 the film was the subject of an obscenity case in Massachusetts that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was ultimately deemed to not be obscene.

I love this logo for Evergreen Black Cat Books from the L'avventura cover. Both books were published by Evergreen, an imprint of Grove Press

Daily Book Graphics #58 / Understanding Media

This is another great Rudolph de Harak cover. I previously posted his work in DBG #3 and DBG #9. ©1964

Daily Book Graphics #47 / First Aid

These illustrations are from the 1973 edition of Standard First Aid and Personal Safety. I think most first aid/injury illustrations are a little creepy. These are especially weird.

Another Blog for the Bookish

The idea for my Daily Book Graphics project came from my friend Mike Kelleher's blog Pearlblossom Highway. For the last few months he has been going alphabetically through his library and writing about each book. He posts every day and at this point is 20 or so books into the C's (he has a lot of books). Our approaches are quite different, go see for yourself.

Daily Book Graphics #31 / Birds of the Malay Peninsula

I bought this book in a used book store in Cleveland in 2005. This got me interested in collecting field guides from far away places (see some of the covers in this Flickr set). It was first published in 1960, this impression is from 1970. These illustrations by A. Fraser-Brunner are some of my favorite depictions of birds.

Daily Book Graphics #20 / Pop Art

This was (mine now) one of my father's books from his time as an art history Professor at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater in the late 60s and 70s. The book was published in 1968 and reprinted in 1969. I like contemporary books about art movements, they often feature interesting artists that don't end up making it into the official art history. The cover illustration is Clip-o-matic Lips, 1967 by Joe Tilson and the back cover features Jim Dine's 1965 painted cast aluminum piece A Nice Pair of Boots. Design: Gillian Greenwood

Daily Book Graphics #5 / Color and Field

This is a catalogue for a group painting show at the Albright-Knox in 1970. I bought it at a house cleaning sale at the Gallery a couple years ago. As with most catalogues from the era, the interior pages are mostly black and white. I love the die-cut cover, I wish I had a less worn copy.

Design: David Battle, Vie Design, Yellow Springs, Ohio

Daily Book Graphics #3 / Modernist Book Covers

The first two of these mid-century modern book covers come from the library of my great Uncle John, who died in 1993 in his 80s. He was an architect and a lot of other things. He had an amazing life that spanned the 20th century in really interesting ways (he used to carpool to work at Harvard with Walter Gropius). But I won't get in to all that now. I have been digging through his books, which are at my parent's house, to look for the kind of modernist book covers I like, I have not been disappointed. I bought the third book just the other day at a book sale. I have no intention of reading any of these, but that probably goes without saying.

©1953, McGraw-Hill Paperbacks / Cover design: Rudolph de Harak, 5.25" x 7.75"

Because the receipt is still in it, I know that Uncle John purchased this book for $3.45 at the Harvard Book Store on the 27th of February 1968.

©1963, Science Editions, John Wiley and Sons, Inc. / Cover design: Davis/Aviles, 5.5" x 8.25"

No receipt in this one but "John S. Nickols, Jan 1967" is written on the inside cover. There are also several pages of hand written notes stuck between the pages.

©1961, A Clarion Book, Published by Simon & Shuster, Cover design: John+Mary Condon, 5.25" x 8"

A New Blog Project: Daily Book Graphics (#1)

So today, (the first day of the rest of my blog), I'm starting a new project where I mine my own personal library for interesting visual material on a daily basis. I was inspired by the numerous projects where people take and post a photograph everyday for a year, and by my friend Mike Kelleher's blog Pearlblossom Highway, where he writes about a book from his collection everyday. I buy a lot of books just for the covers or visual content, unfortunately once they go on the shelf it can be years before I revisit them. This project is going to make me dig into my library in a new way and give me a chance to think about, and curate a collection of visual information. Once I get rolling I'll be setting up a Flickr set to accompany this project.

Book Graphics Daily #1
I bought these dirty (they are pretty tame by today's standards) pulp novels at a garage sale some years ago. They were published in the mid 1960's and are all from different imprints from the same publisher. I'm not as interested in kitsch as I used to be, but boy do I love these smarmy covers! The tag lines are great too, you can't do better than "They hunted for sin in passion country!"

This may be the most brilliant book cover I've ever seen.