I’ll explain the title of this blog. The words themselves just occurred to me as something that might sound nice. But it also relates to the idea of culture viewed in a sudden wallop of understanding, a fresh perspective like what the Zen monks are always after. The equivalent of the possibly-apocryphal “wheeled airplane” that drove up onto Eskimo permafrost many years after the people there had become accustomed to winged vehicles passing overhead.

I remember the time I first recognized the value of standing on one’s head. I was out in Center Campus at my high school on one fine spring evening. The quadrangles there are lined with nice little buildings and neatly-kept trees, and the chapel’s clean white steeple stands at one end. A very nice view, but like all views, it becomes customary for those who pass through it every day at 7:55am on the way to Mathematics. So it was, in an adolescent way, a kind of revelation when I flipped over and looked at things upside-down. I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if the whole world were upside-down and we could walk around on it and hang off it, our heads dangling into space! I stood up. But that’s exactly what we do. Problem solved. Magic is restored to the world of the living.

I’m going to Sweden in a couple of days to visit a grandmother I haven’t seen since I was three and an aunt I’ve never met. I’ll be staying with the father I couldn’t bear to think about for more than a decade, and a stepmother and half-brother I’ve only seen once. We’ll have a cottage on the water in Åhus, just a short drive from Kristianstad, where my father was born and my farmor still lives in an old people’s home. After my dad and his family leave, I’ll have the country to myself for about a week. Perhaps I’ll rent a bike and camp if the weather’s nice.

On Friday I’m flying out of PDX on a direct route to Amsterdam that goes North, not East, in a so-called “great circle” route up over the Northern Territories and into the Arctic. We’ll probably be flying in sunlight the whole time.

So this is the time, my big trip of the year. I’ll try to keep things updated from the road.

Part of the reason for this is a general uneasiness on my part concerning the thematic scope of the postings and the format warranted by their level of content. Are they to be treated as pieces of real writing, with paragraph breaks and room to breathe in the margins? Are the things I post better suited to something like Tumblr (from whence I came), where brevity is the norm and community trumps autonomy? I made some effort to combine those two extremes on this site, combining the main column and the “Below the Fold” section. But the hierarchy inherent in this design seems forced. The layout is basically a first-shot adaptation of a sketch I made over a quarter-liter of red wine on a rainy day in the outskirts of Paris sometime last March, and I don’t pretend that it’s in any real thoughtful way informed by the content it must now contain. The recent expansion of my design education and attention has shifted my way of thinking, so that now I feel the need to envision my content, and create a thoughtful design to hold and present it. I’m leaning toward simple and fast-loading, less gimmicky, more readerly.

Also, I’ve wrestled with how intimate one should be when writing on a blog. My thoughts on this now are certainly different from this winter, when I was holed up and posting scads of information to Facebook and sending out oddly two-dimensional versions of myself to any computer that happened to stumble upon them. I’ve reined that in: Twitter (who knew) now satisfies most of my exhibitionist desires, I’ve stripped all extraneous jabber from Facebook and locked down my pictures, and I recently resumed writing entries in a private journal that I kept for ten days in the summer of 2007. I have turned inward, in a way that is only possible after solidifying one’s connections with the outside world.

But never fear. The bully pulpit stands strong, and my PHP/CSS skills grow stronger every day. Stay tuned for exciting developments in this space . . . or don’t. I’ll surely come knocking, or at the very least Tweeting, at your virtual door when I have something new to sell and advertise.

A cover (or jacket) is a token for remembering a book: after its initial task of enticing a consumer, it will be opened, closed, looked at and handled dozens of times. After the sale, matters are in the reader’s hands, and a gawking author photograph can haunt his experience as much as a well-planned cover can illuminate it. Still, he traverses two worlds: carrying the book as object and then diving into its textual content, forgetting (one hopes) all superficial cues.

A lifelong reader and Russophile, Peter Mendelsund entered the design world seven years ago, securing a position with the acclaimed in-house team at Knopf. Trained as a concert pianist, he sought more productive work to earn money after the birth of his daughter. “Someone must have been pumping narcotics into the water fountains at Random House the day I came in,”1 he says. His selling points? An eye for color and composition, and familiarity with the books themselves. Today his designs fill bookstore windows. But translating the ambiguous, ethereal literary universe into concrete visual signs has never been easy. Thus Mendelsund’s style cautiously fuses abstraction and wit, leaving room for the relationship between a book and a single reader.

When Mendelsund met with Richard Pevear to discuss the jacket for a new War and Peace translation, they both brought the same unconditional demand: no representations of the characters. I can sympathize: my searches on both sides of the Atlantic for a lady-less copy of The Portrait of a Lady have turned up fruitless. The scenes in a book should be privately imagined and deeply personal. I ask Mendelsund if this leads to performance anxiety: “Absolutely,” he says. “What’s great about literature . . . is its amorphous quality, its ability to transport. The moment when you have to make something concrete . . . That is frankly really depressing.”2 Every design is necessarily a funeral, a pinned-down creature committed to visual form.

Two expert opinions on jacket design differ subtly in their implications. In 1967 the vehemently old-school designer Adrian Wilson wrote, “Jacketing is much more than packaging because the product inside is not cornflakes or detergent but human thought and spirit.”3 His designs are restrained, hand-lettered and almost primitively composed. Charles Rosner, a decade earlier: “In a space [of] six inches by eight inches it has been necessary to convey visually, by word or design, the feeling and character of a book which often may run into four or five hundred pages.”4 The first opinion conveys solemn reverence, the second a need to distill and communicate. Taken to ideological extremes, the first leads to the uniform typographic covers of French Gallimard editions; the other to pulp paperbacks and movie tie-ins.

A designer has two mandates: make something pretty and signal the book’s genre. “Hopefully,” Mendelsund says, “you’re allowed the freedom to express something deeper that’s in the prose . . . but really, our mission statement is just to do those two things.” Moments of humor and surprise in a cover are a designer’s “little acts of civil disobedience,” says Mendelsund, and he “would like to think that if you’re a good reader there are little exegetical clues you can sneak in.”2 The court artist hides his private mark in the appointed painting.

Of course, the publisher and designer may not agree on what constitutes proper communication. Mendelsund mentions his recent work on a Stieg Larsson novel: a cold, bleak, hauntingly quiet Scandinavian mystery. His first proposal was a blank snow-white cover with a blind-debossed title. “Marketing went completely ballistic,”2 he says. He dragged them to a bookstore and demonstrated how much a minimal design can stand apart. Still, they rejected it. Another Larsson book inspired a muted typographic layout entwined with a girl’s long hair, preserving a feeling of simple ambiguity: vetoed again. The accepted designs are brightly colored or awash in motifs.

But editorial intervention can be a plus, says Mendelsund, especially in tempering the guilt of modifying what has previously belonged entirely to an author. Copy editors have already had their way with a book when it arrives on his desk, so he is not the first to manipulate the author’s work. The hardest books for Mendelsund to design are the ones he loves the most, particularly Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. “I always try to bear in mind the triviality of what I’m doing,” says Mendelsund. This mentality helps hurry the process along, but it may not be true. Books are not only judged but identified by their covers. They are tangible objects that must be fetched and carried as long as they are read. Mendelsund had a “very difficult”2 time designing The Idiot, finally committing to the blocky constructivist design that I, as a result, have always associated with the story.

While its responsibilities are grave, design begets a wonderful arena for creativity, every generation of covers forming the names and faces of otherwise amorphous text. While beloved classics present a humbling design challenge, they are also most appealing to Mendelsund. He lists Calvino, Borges, and Thomas Pynchon as authors whose work he would love to design because of their “narrative, story-telling brilliance” and “stunningly imaginative visual landscapes.”1 A personal affinity for a story is both the threat and the potential reward behind a design project.

When pressed for his favorite jacket design, Mendelsund first recalls a book that he has not read: Transrational Boog,2 an obscure title by the Russian artist Olga Rosanova. He flips through a MoMA exhibition catalog to find the work in question: a tiny, square kraft-paper cover with beautifully set Cyrillic typography. A misshapen cutout heart sits large and off-center, adorned with a single white button. Mendelsund has no idea what the book says, but the simple, beautiful arrangement of the cover has carved out a place for itself in his memory. The jacket remains separate from the text, sheltering it, advertising and interpreting it perhaps, but never entirely matching it.

Works Cited:

1. Christopher Tobias. “Peter Mendelsund: An Interview with the Designer.” design:related.

2. Peter Mendelsund, telephone interview with Stefan Kamph, February 27, 2009.

3. Adrian Wilson. The Design of Books. Salt Lake City:
Peregrine Smith, 1974. 101.

4. Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast. Jackets Required.
San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995. 16.

I’d make a couple of espresso stops in the environs, because I had probably recently awoken or been released from a long, plodding class on Romantic philosophy. Newly energized, I threaded my way through the vast crowds, the tawdry entrepreneurialism, the fashionably down-at-heels that picnicked in the wide slanting plaza in front of the building. A quick bag check, and I was inside the great entrance hall, watched over by sharply glowing signs and a multi-story revolving prayer wheel.

I realized here that a museum’s bookshop can be equally or as engrossing as what hangs in the gallery. Part of this has to do with volume, I’m sure, but it’s also the inherently satisfying nature of looking through the pages of well-made books to find something to linger on, an image a foot or so in front of your eyes that can come back again and again. This is especially true for illustration, a medium that relies less on hermetic spectacle than simple, two-dimensional flirtation with the visual cortex.

Jason Brooks (links to site)

Illustrations were meant to thrive on close, glossy pages. Until recently, I hadn’t thought very much of “illustration,” associating it with antiquated production techniques and the kinds of doe-eyed three-quarter portraits you find on the backs of colored-pencil boxes. Of course, it’s right out there in front of us every day, in the form of advertisements and messages. If they are ugly, we ignore them. If they are beautiful, we tend to associate this with our perception of the brand or product, or we gaze at the beautifully balanced visual fantasies and ask ourselves, “where is that magical place?”

As it happens, it’s right here. There is more exciting work in illustration and hand-drawn art going on than I could have imagined. One book led me to this realization again and again, startling me with impossibly lovely images that betrayed the loving influence of a human mind. The book is called Illusive: Contemporary Illustration and its Context.

The first illustrator in this book to carve out a place in my memory was Hiroki Tsukuda, a Japanese illustrator whose technique is listed as “drawing + graphic.” His work is angular, almost cubist in a sense, architectural, and starkly black-and-white. Look closer, and tiny elephants and camels wander the geometric planes.

Hiroki Tsukuda for Simone (enlarges)

The book travels through various styles, including Fashion, Collage and “Basic,” which is anything but. It’s hard to pick favorites. But by seeing in one place images that were meant for corporate clients alongside the personal, quietly obsessive intricacies of hundreds of illustrators around the world, I forgot about “commercial” vs. “artistic” distinctions and let my eye be the guide. I hold unabashed esteem for pictures that look good, be they high, low or in the middle. In other words, my taste for visual decadence took a big leap forward.

Illustration by Nawel for Bahlsen Biscuits France (enlarges)

I have shown you work by Jason Brooks and Nawel, and both images are heavily commercial and idealized. This does not detract from their merit as beautiful illustrations. There’s a double spread of those Bahlsen biscuit ads, and I lingered over them for a long time.

After my return from France (with the 45€ book the only item on my declaration form) I moved to Portland, where I would discover a whole intricate little network of hideouts for amazing, groundbreaking illustration. The bookstore-heavy, coffee-shop culture nurtures the kind of browsing I did at the Beaubourg as much as it facilitates work for those with drive enough to do it.

Head downtown in Portland to where they’re tearing up Fifth Avenue to make the new bus mall, and you’ll find Compound Gallery, an internationally known institution in its own right. Downstairs, the place is a fancy shoe store and skate-wear shop cum Japanese toy gallery. A friendly mix of Japanese and Caucasian dudes preside over the place. Up a flight of stairs, you’ll find a wonderfully stocked small bookstore that has kept me for hours… and yes, they carry Illusive as well as its sequel. There’s also a gallery that shows trendy, contemporary Japanese and domestic illustrative art. It’s not commercial art, but it has a slickness and visual appeal that sets it apart from more heavy-hitting “statement” art. That’s why so much of this stuff is picked up for use on skateboard decks.

Eduardo Recife (enlarges)

I got the feeling there was a thread running through the different works I’d been seeing, giving myself a crash course in current illustration trends by visiting galleries, looking at books and magazines, and writing down for later research the names of any artists I particularly liked. Across the street from Compound Gallery is Upper Playground, another skate-culture store connected to a gallery that features some big names in illustration like Eduardo Recife. They handed me a free copy of Juxtapoz magazine, another great source for inspiration.

I did a lot of local browsing with Jeppe, the Danish fellow who stayed with me for nine days in September. On his recommendation we headed over to Grass Hut, a marvelous little shop, gallery and workspace run by artist and toymaker Bwana Spoons. They hang great pictures on the walls and stock their shelves with all kinds of books and zines from very talented people. What’s more, the space is so small, cozy and nonpretentious that you could probably establish a firm social footing in the Portland illustration scene just by sitting on their floor reading and chatting for a while. In fact, I think I might.

"Geovani Flies," by the Grass Hut Gang's APAK (enlarges)

Another great way to find art is by reading good old fashioned magazines (quick, before they shrink or almost die). Stumptown Coffee on 3rd has more free magazines to read (or buy, I suppose) than you can shake a stick at. I settled down a couple days ago with Juxtapoz, I.D. and CMYK. The latter was a new find for me, and it focuses almost exclusively on submissions of student or independent work that are judged and reprinted for the world to see. The portfolios include work presented at student crits last semester, as well as work by seasoned self-taught artists.

Ronald J. Cala II (enlarges)

CMYK this month featured an interview with Ronald J. Cala II, a graphic designer, poster artist and illustrator (in that chronological order) who has recently had work featured in the New York Times and is developing a style of clever silhouettes, unstable negative space and bold colors. He’s a much crisper, more grid-based illustrator than some of the skater boys featured downtown, but I’ve started to get a sense that everybody and their divergent schools are sort of growing up together. It’s comforting to know the human hand (whether with pen or digital tablet) still wields the power to arrest, enchant, inform. For those of us with even the most modest artistic aspirations, it’s refreshing to have it all so close at hand.