Meanwhile #053
Mechanistic process and the captured eighties.
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 completeness.
“I’m interested in the idea of publishing as an artistic practice. For me, rather than being a mechanistic process, it’s much closer to curation. Designers are natural curators.” – Adrian Shaughnessy on making design history relevant and the success of Unit Editions.
Next year, every Italian will get €500 from the government on their 18th birthday to spend on books (or theatre/cinema/museum tickets). Investing in culture from the consumer end of the process seems like a fantastic idea to me – it'll be interesting to see how this experiment goes.
In a landmark move, the Collins Dictionary invited cameras behind the scenes to film the mysterious process by which they choose their annual Word of the Year.
In the first of a new #AskFaber series, Senior Designer Alex Kirby answers questions about the cover design process.
The annual best-of lists are upon us already, starting with the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2016.
How do you capture the 1980s in writing? Six novelists discuss recreating the decade.
Mapping the trees of NYC and mapping London's green spaces and mapping the pub cats of London.
Jon Ronson's excellent 2008 documentary Stanley Kubrick's Boxes is now streaming online (and you can get your own Kubrickian archive boxes from G. Ryder & Co. Ltd.).
Some thoughts on indexing. While designing a book’s index allows for little creative expression, it’s a task that has its own rewards – turning a collection of pages into a working object.