Stray Shopping Cart Q&A at Found Clothing

The blog Found Clothing.com recently did a short Q&A with me about the Stray Shopping Cart Project, you can read it here. There is another recent interview with me about the project at Trap Door Sun.com. If you are not familiar with the project you can check it out here.

Daily Book Graphics #50 / Birds of East Africa

I have a small but growing collection of Field Guides. I look for them in used book stores and at garage sales, it would be easy to buy many of the books I'm looking for on Ebay, but that seems too easy. One of the things I like about these old guides is that sometimes the previous owner has checked off the birds they have spotted. The Birds of East Africa, is full of check marks. I like the idea that the book, that I now own, has been carried to the other side of the earth and thumbed through in the presence of the birds it depicts. I have posted some of the covers from this collection in the past but I'm going to do a little bit of recycling to get them into the Daily Book Graphics Project, nobody was reading back then anyway.

McGovern 72

Readers who have been following this blog for a while, know that I have been mining my family's collection of poorly stored and archived posters from the 1970's, blog posts here and here, Flickr set here. The above McGovern posters are student made screen prints, they aren't very good but they are interesting as documents of the visual culture of 1972. They seem pretty basic compared to last year's torrent of Obama related art and design. My father was an art history professor at the time, and was probably given these by a student. He's in the poster below.

Daily Book Graphics #49 / Svensk-Engelsk

This was my mother's Swedish/English vocabulary booklet from 1975 (the booklet was published in 1972). I really like the design. I'm also using its color scheme as an excuse to include an example of 70's Scandinavian furniture/interior design. I scanned this yellow room from the Design from Scandinavia catalog (see more from that publication here: DBG #30).

Rephotography

A friend of mine has an interesting new blog called Rephotography. The blog describes itself this way:

Appreciation of the photographic moving image that is from elsewhere, a grab, a microexpression that we make a still of, revealing the scratch, the scan line, the layering, the double, the blur, the skew. formal yet content counts. somehow. we are all from flickr. daily posts.

Daily Book Graphics #48 / The World of Mammals

These come from The World of Mammals, a book first published in Italy in 1977 and translated for the American market in 1979. There aren't too many interesting graphics in the book. These are some of the exceptions.

The various feeding habits of bats

The evolution of placental mammals

The urogenital system and scent glands of the male beaver (Castor fiber)

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 #46 / Fred Troller

This cover was designed by Fred Troller. I hadn't heard the name until I came across this book, but after looking into it a little I realized that I had seen Troller's work many times before. He was a Swiss designer (born in 1930) who spent most of his career in New York. Massimo Vignelli said that ''His designs successfully combined Swiss rigorousness with American vitality.'' Unfortunately Troller died in 2002, Steven Heller wrote the NYT obit. The above book was published in 1972.

I found a post on the blog TPW that links to an article in PDF form about Troller. The covers below come from that piece.