This is an old edition of Meanwhile from an inferior, more simian newsletter platform that has unhelpfully severed all the hyperlinks. It’s included here in the archive simply for sake of completion.
On gendered book covers and being a woman designer – Jennifer Heuer wonders why she's always being offered a certain kind of book.
Illustration Chronicles is quickly becoming one of my favourite design-related sites. You can't beat thorough research, passion for the subject and nice big pictures. This post on Einar Nerman's beautifully illustrated sheet-music covers is particularly fab.
Future Library – 1000 trees planted outside Oslo will make 100 books over 100 years.
“You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. … If you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.” — Everybody needs a bliss station.
The question on everybody's lips: what does Slaugherhouse Five look like as a building?
Scents and sense ability – why books should be more than just a visual experience. And yes, I am rather proud of that headline.
"Can you jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace?" – nineties Julia Stiles explains nineties internet, nineties style.
Art of darkness – some ponderings on Mike Mignola and Paul Buckley's beautiful cover for Penguin Classics' Heart of Darkness. For more of this sort of thing, check out the recently published Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover.
Ruskar? Roosher? Ruushay? How tp pronounce modern artists' names.
Can serialised fiction convert binge watchers into binge readers? Is there a market out there for Dickens-esque serialised fiction? Isn't everything serialised fiction now?
Book readers live an average of almost two years longer than those who do not read at all. Get in.
Welcome to The Last Bookstore is a short, inspiring documentary about Josh Spencer, owner and operator of The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles.
Small Spanish publisher wins rights to reproduce the Voynich manuscript, a centuries-old book that no one will be able to read.