Daily Book Graphics

I've decided that instead of dumping the books I've blogged in our guest room, I'm going to start stacking them on top of the record shelves in the living room. Someday I'll build shelves, but that could be years from now.

Daily Book Graphics #45 / Atomic Energy

These images are from A Grosset All-Color Guide: Atomic Energy published in 1970. I previously posted illustrations from A Grosset All-Color Guide: Computers at Work here. The book is packed with great illustrations, but what struck me was the number of depictions of nuclear power plants. This is the kind of thing you would want to feature in a book about atomic energy, but it doesn't seem that informative to have so many straight forward architectural illustrations. There are probably five more in addition to what have included here. This must have been right before they started building plants with the huge cooling towers, they are nowhere to be found in the book.

Daily Book Graphics #13 / Space Craft

These illustrations come from the Terran Trade Authority Handbook: Spacecraft 2000 to 2100 AD by Stewart Crowley (©1978). I first found this book at some kind of flea market in England in 1982 (I was 9 years old so I can't entirely remember the circumstances). That copy may still be somewhere in my parents house, but I found it again at a garage sale in Buffalo a couple of years ago. As a kid I found the book fascinating and kind of creepy. It's presented as a guide to the spacecraft of the 21st century and details the way they were used in the "Proximian War." It's all pretty silly, but some of the illustrations are amazing, and do succeed in creating an alien atmosphere. The book is illustrated by several different people, the best among them being Angus McKie. The Terran Trade Authority Handbook that addresses alien life forms (which I will get to later in the year), is more ridiculous than this book by several orders of magnitude.

Illustrator: Colin Hay

Illustrator: Angus McKie

Illustrator: Angus McKie

Illustrator: Angus McKie

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.