books

Advertizing

Posted by hil

rejoice2
This is a cool idea: the Rejoice Giant Comb! According to How advertising spoiled me it was devised by Somak Chaudhury, an art director from Leo Burnett in Bangkok.

It makes me think of Rohinson Mistry’s novel, A Fine Balance, because the story starts with a vivid image of one of the protagonists buying a comb from a combseller on a train in India, and because hair is a recurrent theme. The book totally
mesmerized me when I read it in January – it’s the finest book I’ve read in a long time – and when I picked it up and paged through the first pages again the other day I realized that inaddition to everything else, it’s a perfect circle. I knew it ended
where it began, but everything at the begining resonates once you have read the whole.

I also recently came across an interesting Adidas advertizing campaign that was run in Berlin. The gist of it was to put up big more-or-less blank billboards, wait till they were covered in graffiti, and then paste over the top an outline of sneakers with cut-outs that showcased parts of the graffiti as the design on the shoe. If you want to trace the whole campaign, start here.

But both ads remind me of the ‘witchcraft’ of advertising in Peter Carey‘s Bliss.

Updated links 2015

Quilt patterns from ‘Alias Grace’

Posted by hil

Lucy Tartan’s review of Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace over at Sorrow at Sills Bend this morning prompted me to go hunting for my sketch of all the quilt square patterns that were used as chapter illustrations. I liked how the motif worked in with the story and themes of each chapter much better than I liked the book overall.

Quilt squares

I always intended to make a sketch of all the knots used similarly in E. Annie Proulx’s wonderful book, The Shipping News, but haven’t as yet.

I once heard an interview with Margaret Atwood; it must have been on the ABC. In it I think – and I might be mistaken, I’d like confirmation – she defined the novel as writing that always has the notion of a clock in it. Does anyone else remember that? I guess it implies that there is always a timeline and a narrative, but being me, I started thinking of clocks and watches and other time pieces!

While you are at Sorrow at Sills Bend, don’t miss the rats and hydatid posters!

The Magic of Marionettes by Anne Masson

Posted by hil

I remembered yesterday that the tip about storing marionettes by twirling them so the strings twist up together (in the comments under my last post) came from a lovely book called The Magic of Marionettes by Anne Masson. It was given to one of my kids, but I got a great deal out of it too, not so much because it was about puppets, but because it is written with a real understanding of the delight and empowerment that creating and making something can give you.

The book covers how to make the puppets, how to put on a performance, write a simple play, and it discusses props, scenery, sound effects and scripts that might be used, while keeping lots of room for individual creativity, and emphasizing that the process is as important as the result.

Letting it rip!

Posted by hil

BookRebound Designs takes old books and turns them into bags. I’m not a handbag user, so in a practical sense they are lost on me, but they are really cool. I took a spin past a couple of the op shops the other day, and came home with a few books to experiment with. Maybe I can make a few Christmas presents this year?

Strange how it feels naughty to rip the pages out, even for books I don’t feel any relationship with. I found four Reader’s Digest condensed book volumes with pretty covers that I don’t feel too bad about remixing. I think they must be in the same series as this one.

I doubt I could have done it to this one. I did get a Dean & Son abridged Pride and Prejudice, with an amusing gaudy cover, but I escape any dilemma because its spine is too thin.

Did you ever do that thing of cutting a secret compartment in the pages of a book? I remember it taking a lot of grunt to cut through all the pages!

Month of Softies: May Flowers

Posted by hil

The theme for Month of Softies this month was ‘May Flowers’. My first thought was of daffodils, as I remember loving how they came up all over the place in lawns in the chilly spring in York and Cambridge; and I thought I might try to make Talitha, the brave daffodil princess from the book ‘The Mouldy’ by William Mayne, and illustrated by Nicola Bayley:

talitha

Then I decided to consider Australian May flowers. There isn’t much flowering here in May, except some irises which usually flower in July, but this year are muddled by our late winter and drought. But there are a few winter-flowering eucalypt trees, so I started planning a red gumnut flower fairy. I thought the stamens could make a kind of drop skirt, or hat fringe, but in the end decided that I liked the flower just as a flower.

Red flowering gum-2

Its quite big; including the leaves it measures just over 40cm (16in). For the stamens I used lycra, an idea that I had previously found worked well for making small octopus tentacles! I like the soft colours, too. There are few more pictures:

 

Little Golden Books: Tibor Gergely

Posted by hil

The following illustration is by Tibor Gergely from the Little Golden Book ‘Houses’ by Elsa Jane Werner. I’m posting it as a comparison to the one by Richard Scarry in another Little Golden Book, ‘Cars and Trucks’, over at Wee Wonderfuls. There is an interesting discussion there about how in updates of the book that particular illustration has been changed to accommodate a more feminist attitude to gender roles. This one obviously belongs firmly in the earlier era, and I wonder if it was changed in a similar way later on?

I don’t have an exact date for this book – its one of a set of four books that together make up a ‘Little Golden Book Library’ that I bought in about 1983, and the dates given collectively are 1948 through 1969.

I was interested to see in an online bio of Tibor Gergely that as a young man he worked for two years in a Vienna marionette theatre as a puppet designer and stage decorator :-).

Who Said: A Literature Game Podcast

Posted by hil

WhosaidMy friend Amy has launched Who Said?, a cool audio literature trivia game. It’s delivered as a podcast if you want to receive it that way; or you can listen on the web site. Two or three times a week, she will make an audio recording from a novel. It will be a short passage, always something a character says. Your task will be to guess the character, book and author.

Amy has been involved with online discussion since the mid nineties (she founded the premiere Jane Austen discussion site, The Republic of Pemberley in 1996, for example) so its no surprise there is an attractive discussion forum at Who Said? where you can brainstorm your hunches, make suggestions about the game and talk about the books that the audio passages are taken from.

Japanese Design Motifs

Posted by hil

ButterflyMeggiecat is a constant source of interesting art-craft-image-related notes. Her link to Japanese Free Clip Art the other day provided this lovely swallowtail butterfly image, for instance.

The designs reminded me of a book called ‘Snow, Wave, Pine:Traditional patterns in Japanese Design’ by Motoji Niwa and Sadao Hibi, which I sometimes page through in the bookshop. Its a beautiful collection of photographs of classic decorative patterns on a wide variety of objects (for example robes, laquerware, swords and ceramics), and many drawings of family crests and stylized motifs.

Penguin Classic Book Title Mugs

Posted by hil

Penguin Books in the UK is having its 70th anniversary this year. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, that wonderful museum of arts and design, is marking the anniversary with a display of about 500 of Penguin’s iconic book covers. It runs from 8th June to 13th November.

Mugs_3

I have been drooling over this range of mugs that feature 31 of the classic Penguin book designs. I supposethey give me pleasure because they are familiar to me from my mother’s bookshelves when I was growing up. There are tea-towels, too. Is it deeply ironic or intentionally funny to have a Virginia Woolf ‘A Room of One’s Own tea-towel? And Arthur Ransome mugs are yet another temptation – just how cool would it be to have a ‘Swallows and Amazons’ mug?