Penguin’s graphic design played a large part in the company’s success. Unlike other publishers, whose covers emphasized the title and author of the book, Penguin emphasized the brand. The covers contained simple, clean fonts, color-coding (orange for fiction, dark blue for biography) and that cute, recognizable bird. The look helped gain headlines. The Sunday Referee declared “the production is magnificent” and novelist J. B. Priestley raved about the “perfect marvels of beauty and cheapness.”
Category Archives: Quotes
The edges of the work
[T]here is a great deal of personal narrative on the Web – some of which carries over to the print world as memoirs, some of which doesn’t. I think the online work is marginally more interesting: because there it’s unclear where the edges of the work are. The reader can pull at it; writing can stretch across time and space. Granted, most of isn’t very interesting. But it does seem like we are moving into a celebrity culture, where readers tend to follow personalities rather than their writing. Maybe ten years ago Momus said that “in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people,” and I think the way the web works now does tend to encourage that.
The Visual
So often when you’re thinking of a book, you remember its cover. It’s a way of drawing people through the visual into reading.
Vacuum of Enthusiasm
[The acid of the Fug Girls is] what I want from my design blogs (among other things), but I can’t find it. I feel trapped in the vacuum of enthusiasm.
It is nice to be part of a supportive community, especially in a downturn. And there is a lot of beautiful work out there. But the economics and tempo of blogging mean that most design sites present us with pictures of up to ten beautiful things per day. The text is often just a tweaked press release. I am not sure what I am supposed to do with this, beyond a second’s admiration. If I happened to be looking for wallpaper, or tea towels, or a new poster, I might click through to buy, but most of it just passes unprocessed before my eyes.
Maintain a Queue
To use an analogy from running, blogging is the daily training that prepares me for my “races.”
…
I gave up feeding the blog on a real-time, everyday basis a couple of years ago. … I maintain a queue of roughly 50-100 posts at all times, scheduling the less time-sensitive material at leisure and prioritizing the faster-moving stuff. That way I never get up in the morning dreading the task of tackling the blog. When so moved, I still write in real time, but I make that decision, not the blog. As soon as the blog stopped owning me, I finally began to master the blog form.
So that’s the secret. Huh.
Now, if only I were that organized… 😉
Seriously, a queue of 5-10 posts, I could see. But 50-100 posts?! Dude.
More realistic and down-to-earth
I tend to think of blogs as more realistic and down-to-earth about their topics than their print equivalents. Litblogs reflect how people really do read, compared to that horrid New Yorker list or the best books of the year that the New York Times vomits out. Likewise, food blogs are more how people eat on a daily basis, compared to the Gourmet cookbooks that think you have endless hours stretched out ahead of, with which you can pound pastry dough into submission.
Creative Inspiration
I find that whenever I start slacking off the daily exercise (“I have too much WORK to do…”), I inevitably start feeling more and more tired and uninspired. … Some days, though, I get so wrapped up in my work that it’s hard to drag myself away from the computer screen. … I find that getting some exercise outdoors does wonders for getting creative inspiration flowing plus is good for de-stressing.
I did loads of writing in trigonometry
[W]hen I have to write all the time, the last thing I want to do is write. This is true of almost every writer I know. We all love writing, but when someone makes you do it, it kind of sucks. However, I did loads of writing in trigonometry! If I had been a math major, I would have written about twelve books by the time I graduated. In retrospect, I see this is a GENIUS IDEA and encourage you all to think about it!
A surprising e-mail conversation
Two weeks ago, I saw a review on our Weddings page of a book called “Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality” (HarperCollins). Without much thought, I blurted out in a tweet that it sounded pretty stupid to me. But that started a surprising e-mail conversation with one of the authors, Christopher Ryan. It’s interesting not only for what Mr. Ryan says, but as an example of the way patient authors can profitably engage even caustic critics[.]
Previously Rejected
How readers feel about [self-publishing] usually gets lost in the fanfare and the hand-wringing. People who claim that there are readers slavering to get their hands on previously rejected books always seem to have a previously rejected book to peddle; maybe they’re correct in their assessment, but they’re far from impartial. Readers themselves rarely complain that there isn’t enough of a selection on Amazon or in their local superstore; they’re more likely to ask for help in narrowing down their choices. So for anyone who has, however briefly, played that reviled gatekeeper role, a darker question arises: What happens once the self-publishing revolution really gets going, when all of those previously rejected manuscripts hit the marketplace, en masse, in print and e-book form, swelling the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and iBook offerings by the millions? Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?
You’ve either experienced slush or you haven’t, and the difference is not trivial. People who have never had the job of reading through the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts sent to anyone even remotely connected with publishing typically have no inkling of two awful facts: 1) just how much slush is out there, and 2) how really, really, really, really terrible the vast majority of it is.
The Remainder Table 