books

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."

With Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol flying off bookstore shelves, we got to thinking about lesser known symbols, those that are usually recognized only within specific disciplines or have been lost to the ages. Famed industrial designer (and symbol junkie) Henry Dreyfuss and his staff once assembled a database of 20,000 symbols that served as raw material for the Symbol Sourcebook. Originally published in 1972 and now available from Wiley, the book still lives up to its subtitle—"An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols"—and comes complete with a wacky foreword by Buckminster Fuller. By focusing on "functional, instructive graphic symbols" and omitting alphabets, numbers, emblems, and logos, Dreyfuss created a visual reference that remains valuable and inspirational to designers—or anyone who might be curious about the universal symbol for everything from apricots to zeppelins.

We asked design historian Russell Flinchum, author of the authoritative biography of Dreyfuss, to shed some light on the Symbol Sourcebook. "The origins began with a desire to label John Deere and National Supply Co. (oil drilling equipment) with standard international labels that wouldn't have to be changed from country to country, thus saving much time and effort," he explained. The symbol gathering was primarily a joint project of Dreyfuss and hiw wife, Doris, who worked closely with Paul Clifton, the main designer on the project. "It began with a mass mailing of every organization involved with symbols they could think of, then collating this information and boiling it down to standard appearances." Dreyfuss used the same approach in preparing The Measure of Man, the pioneering ergonomic reference manual published in 1960.

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What do pioneers of twentieth-century modernism eat for lunch? Kentucky Fried Chicken (extra crispy), served on a three-tier hospital-style rolling cart. That was a typical—and presumably finger-lickin' good—meal at the suburban Connecticut home of Josef and Anni Albers, according to Nicholas Fox Weber, who shared it with them on a fall day in 1970. Weber sheds new light on the life and work of the Alberses, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in his forthcoming group biography, The Bauhaus Group (Random House). Among the delicious revelations in the advance excerpt that appears in this month's issue of ARTnews is that of Josef Albers' deep appreciation for the salad bar at a Boston chain resturant called the Plank House. "For this," writes Weber, "there were many reasons":

The clear plastic domed shield that served the purposes of hygiene while one looked at the produce was...a perfect match of a modern material with multiple goals. The array of salads and condiments thrilled him—especially the pickled beets and the various seeds, which reminded him of some of the tastes and textures of his youth. But what was best of all was the way that the serving bowls and the plates were all kept chilled. He noted particularly how the metal containers retained their coldness even longer than other vessels.

He didn't just make casual comments about these details; he marveled at them. They reflected an intelligence, a knowledge, and a clarity of thought that had, he told me, been the very essence of what he had tried to impart at the Bauhaus.

We feel like absolute louts for not having mentioned this earlier, but yesterday at the office, we saw a copy of Chronicle's new City Walks Architecture: New York sitting out, likely having just arrived, when we thought, "Hey, isn't that the project Alissa was working on?" Lo and behold, it was the work of dearly departed UnBeige editor Alissa Walker. It's been out for over a month now and we really should have told you about it sooner, as it's a thing of beauty. From the skyscraper shaped box to the design of the individual booklets giving you tours through all of New York, along with Alissa's great, fun writing and stellar photographs, it's a thing you much purchase immediately, even if you live somewhere that maybe isn't directly in the city proper, like Oklahoma or New Zealand. But if you can't immediately leave work to go find a copy, we recommend you hit up Alissa's site for this look at the whole amazing package. And so we don't repeat this process of two-months too late and upset any other former editors, we're telling you several days in advance that UnBeige 2.0 editor, the wonderful Eva Hagberg, will be releasing her book Dark Nostalgia next week. It takes a look at the practice of blending historic detail into modern interiors and it looks splendid. But we promise to give her book the full report once it's out and we have it in our sweaty little hands. And before you ask, no, we current editors don't have a book coming out just yet. For some reason publishers still haven't understood the brilliance of Lamar Alexander Versus the Frog People. One day.

Michael Cho recently completed what he describes as "a dream assignment": creating jacket artwork for the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Don DeLillo's White Noise, first published by Viking in 1985 with a minimalist white jacket designed by Neil Stuart. "I am a DeLillo fan," Cho told Ron Hogan of Galleycat, our bookish brother blog, "and White Noise was one of my favorite books when I was a teen....No joke—I was actually reading Libra when I got the call from Penguin." Cho, a Toronto-based illustrator and cartoonist, was chosen for the assignment by Penguin art director Paul Buckley, who consulted with DeLillo on the decision. "I'm impressed by how bold Michael is," noted Buckley. "He uses just a few colors and blocks everything off in a deceivingly simple way that screams confidence."

Cho's only restrictions in designing a jacket for the postmodern tale of an "airborne toxic event" were to leave room for the Penguin logos and a bar code box. "I'd never experienced that kind of freedom with a book jacket assignment before," explains Cho on his blog. "Usually, at least marketing factors partially determine how a book jacket will be illustrated, but in this case, I was asked to just follow my muse. Amazing." And so is the final product—a DeLillo-approved mix of colorful, comics-style panels and pull quotes that would make Jenny Holzer go weak in the knees—which is slated for a late December release. As for the type, Cho decided to turn down Buckley's offer of hand-lettering. "I felt that White Noise was too 'cool' a book for such a 'hot' approach as hand-lettered type."

Previously on UnBeige:

Our highly unscientific survey of designers' summer reading revealed rave reviews for David Barringer's There's Nothing Funny About Design (Princeton Architectural Press) and its Felix Sockwell-designed cover. In his first collection of essays, the writer and self-taught graphic designer takes on topics ranging from blood-soaked DVD cover art and his father's business card collection to the work of Chip Kidd and why drug names overdose on the letter "X." The take-home message? There's a whole lot that's funny (funny ha-ha and funny strange) about design, including Barringer's update of the Kubler-Ross Model, "Nine Emotions of the Working Designer," which comes in the section of the book devoted to the business of design. "I used it as a funny way to advise young designers today, but I let the form evolve into something stranger, part fiction, part philosophy, some of it contradictory, poetic, satirical," he has said. "You should laugh at some parts, shake your head at others, but at some point nod and think, 'Yes. Exactly.'"