books

High-flying advertising executive turned author James Othmer's new book, Adland: Searching for Life on a Branded Planet (Doubleday), offers an inside look at the past, present, and future of the ad industry. His tales of the wild and morally questionable ride from the days of Mad Men to branded iPhone apps have proved to be a hit with readers, and AgencySpy editor Mathew van Hoven recently caught up with Othmer for an illuminating chat. In addition to revealing that he parted ways with one of his first literary agents when she quit to enroll in clown school, Othmer offers this tantalizing synopsis of his next book, a novel called Holy Water that will be out in June from Doubleday:

It's about a water-filtration salesman who gets transferred to a third-world nation to open up a back office in a drought-plagued nation. His wife has thrown him out of the house because he lied about his vasectomy. It's one of those books. But he's vice president of Underarms and Sweat at a P&G Colgate-like multinational. It's this kind of droning job. It touches upon globalization, consumerism, 'What are we doing with our lives?'

If you like interesting or attractive scenery, but particularly if you enjoy looking at it through windows, 2009 is going to be a red letter year for you, given that there are two new books available that provide just that. First up is Matteo Pericoli's The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York, where the artist asked well-known New Yorkers to let him come in and recreate the view from the windows they look out of everyday, be that at home or at their offices. The participants include Nora Ephron, David Byrne, Stephen Colbert, and a whole host of others (New York's Daily Intel has a nice slideshow of a few -- you can also take a peek at a few more pieces at Google Books, though some of the image scans are a bit wonky). Second is a bound edition of images from political writer/blogger Andrew Sullivan, taken from the regular series on his The Daily Dish, "The View from Your Window" (the book, appropriately, will take the same name, along with the caption "The world as seen by the readers of one blog.") Instead of heading to a publisher, Sullivan decided to ask his readers if they would want such a book. Because the response was good, he decided to go the self-publishing route, getting on board with Blurb.com to help put it out, all the while asking his readers for pledges to buy the book to try and drive the costs down and be able to print extra copies. It has ultimately arrived at $16.25 and is set to ship on December 3rd.

It's been quite the year for iconic children's books. Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar recently munched its way to age 40, and now The Polar Express is celebrating 25 years of enchanting readers with its mildly creepy brand of Christmas whimsy. Written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg, the Caldecott Medal-winning book has sold seven million copies worldwide and spawned a 2004 animated film version starring the voice of Tom Hanks. In celebration of The Polar Express chugging to the quarter century mark, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has released a shiny new hardcover edition that includes a slightly spooky letter from the author, a companion CD with narration by actor Liam Neeson (good choice), and a silvery ornament that features Van Allsburg's first full-length illustration of the story's conductor. The fun extends to the virtual world with a Polar Express-themed online advent calendar (launching December 1) and assorted holiday downloadables aimed at young readers. Hungry for a sneak preview? Try this recipe for Polar Chocolate Nougat Carmel Squares.

Previously on UnBeige:

Here's one for your holiday wish list: Alex Steinweiss: Creator of the Modern Album Cover. Out today from Taschen, this lushly illustrated coffee table book celebrates the career of Steinweiss, now 92, who revolutionized the way music was packaged and marketed. As Columbia Records' first art director, he created colorful, whimsical combinations of illustration and typography that helped to boost album sales for the likes of Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, and Henny Goodman, while breathing new life into the works of classical composers with albums covers he approached like vibrant miniature posters. In addition to Steinweiss' personal recollections and previously unpublished work, the book includes an essay by design historian Steven Heller and a foreword by Grammy Award-winning art director Kevin Reagan.

Following up on our post from last week about LA Times reporter Dan Neil's tearing apart ad man Alex Bogusky's new book Baked In, the affronted author has decided to reply to the bad review with a bad review of his own, though not with his own mightier-than-sword pen. Bogusky has posted on his blog an unpublished letter to the Times' editors, written by fellow ad man Ernest Lupinacci, which attempts to take Neil and his review down a few pegs. There are certainly some well-reasoned thoughts therein, and delivered very well (so much so that we worried that maybe we were a little harsh in our initial post when we sorta kinda sided with the review). But as we reread, we think Neil still has the upper hand, given some of Lupinacci's odd arguments (Bogusky himself admits, "Sometimes Ernest is so smart I have no idea what he's saying") and Bogusky's opening statements (he brings up that the reviewer usually works for the paper's automotive section, which is interesting, but we don't understand why that disqualifies Neil from having an opinion). But your opinion on the debate is entirely your own and we will say no more about it (unless, god forbid, there's a reaction to the reaction to the reaction).

Let's start this last day of the work week a little mean, shall we? Currently making the rounds in the ad agency world is Dan Neil's scathing review of modern ad icon Alex Bogusky's latest book (co-written with John Winsor), Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves. While Neil admits there are the occasional useful thoughts in the very, very slim book, he spends most of his review tearing it apart, saying that most of it is either very obvious words of wisdom ("better products tend to sell better") or not entirely grounded in reality. He sums it all up nicely toward the beginning when he writes "perhaps Bogusky and Winsor never had an editor to challenge them on some of the most evident holes in their book." It's a great picking apart of the book (we've always been a little critical of Bogusky's literary work ourselves), but also seems to have a wide spread, speaking to the many other self/business-help books that follow that "well this is all great, but how does it apply to the real world?" model.

"He was not a great draftsman. In terms of what it means to draw beautifully, in terms of control, I don't think he was very notable....He had an enormous sense of style, and he could bring that burnished style to a product in way that enhanced its value. That was a very substanial gift. When you gave him a shoe to draw, the shoe became more sophisticated. You got something extra.

He was really not related to the field of illustration. He was an outsider who came in and proved that you could be an enormous personality, do an individual thing, and still be used successfully in commercial art."

-Milton Glaser on Andy Warhol, who he calls "the perfect commercial artist," in Tony Scherman and David Dalton's POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol (Harper)

When a website defies both logic and easy description (e.g., Scanwiches), you know you're in for a treat, and so it is with the "I Can Read Movies" Series by Mitch "Spacesick" Ansara. The growing collection of film-based book covers designed with a Saul Bass/Alvin Lustig flair imagines "novelizations of major pictures" such as Ernest Goes to Camp, Space Jam, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—in Japanese (English subtitle: "Mr. Wonka! Just Punisher of Coddled Children"). Click on each cover for a bonus comment/film quote. In the case of Wonka, it's "You're going to love this...just love it," which should be said with a maniacal Gene Wilder gleam in one's eye.

A couple of weeks back, we told you all about UnBeige 3.0's Alissa Walker's great City Walks Architecture. And while we yammered on about that release, we briefly mentioned UnBeige 2.0's Eva Hagberg's upcoming book through Monacelli, Dark Nostalgia, but hadn't been able to say much more than "It's coming out soon!" But now that it's out, we wanted to give it its justly due by saying that we've gotten a chance to check it out and have aptly drooled all over its gorgeous pages. It's chock full of beautiful, mostly dimly-lit, cozy-yet-cool interiors of restaurants, hotels, and houses, all of which caused us to suffer through a variety of feelings, from hunger to sleepiness to, perhaps most frequently, outright envy. It's a great look at the blending of the modern with the classic.

And while we're on book talk, with our copy of Dark Nostalgia, we also just got a sneak peek of the not-yet-released, five volume series Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which is now ranked highly on our wish list for the upcoming holidays. We've only seen the final book, which covers 1997 to 2008, but judging from that, the whole collection should be just incredible. The edition we've seen runs through the most high-profile and/or impressive buildings the firm put together over that span of time, making you regularly stop to think "I didn't know SOM did that one, too!" If you're an architecture buff, it's a great batch of information (and if you live in Chicago, where SOM calls home, you really don't have any excuse not to show some local pride by taking a look when the whole series gets released in mid-November).

Here at UnBeige, we love a good dust jacket almost as much as we love a good book (which we store in teetering stacks on any flat surface we can find), and so we were intrigued to read Ron Hogan's recent post on Galleycat, our bookish brother blog, concerning the dust jacket switcheroo for Mathilda Savitch (FSG). The debut novel by Victor Lodato started life as an advance reading copy (ARC) wrapped in an illustration with a macabre Alice in Wonderland quality. We also found a slightly tweaked American ARC (pictured above, at center) that tightened up the typeface selection and toned down the Alice factor, ditching the girl's headband and sash, trimming her hair, and ensuring that she was outfitted in more sensible shoes for a scramble through the forest, which has also been tidied of a craggy tree.

"Both my editor, Courtney Hodell, and I thought this was a great cover," Lovato told Hogan, "but maybe it just needed to be...sexier in some ways. It was a little cold. So they wanted to play with some other ideas." The new dust jacket cover (above, at right) of the novel, which hit bookstore shelves nationwide last month, features what you'll probably recognize as the work of artists and snowglobe wizards Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz. Specifically, it's "Traveler 48 at Night," a photo of a snowglobe they created in 2003. "The novel's about a child alone in an emotionally frozen landscape, and she's trying to figure out lots of things, from where her sister went to death in general," said Lodato, pointing to the final cover. "And this just seemed very resonant to that."