Meanwhile #110
Disappointingly few pictures of ambient cats.
Hello and welcome to a pile of carefully curated hyperlinked distractions about art and design and suchlike that will make you miss that important deadline you’ve been fretting about. You’re very welcome.
Not sure when this is – mid-sixties maybe? – but I love this twitter thread from Lublin Center, showing sign painters hand-lettering the hoarding around the CBS construction site.
Pioneering “non-musician” Brian Eno talks to Port about his long-standing environmental activism, holograms, hypocrisy, and his newly launched charity, working to reduce the music industry’s carbon footprint. Disappointingly few pictures of ambient cats.
There’s a thousand reasons to rave about Letterform Archive’s growing collection of lettering, typography, and graphic design, but I always end up being drawn to the full-issue scans of Emigre magazine. You want an education in eighties/nineties typography? Set a day aside, open these up and absorb.
More signs! One of my favourite design books from last year was Alistair Hall’s London Street Signs, which explored the history of the city from a fascinatingly specific perspective. A very welcome companion to that is Isola Press’ new title Ghost Signs: A London Story, crammed with typographic hauntings and the stories behind them.
Oh my very actual word, look at these Gustave Doré illustrations for an 1877 German edition of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I’m only familiar with Doré from his Paradise Lost art, so these are a right treat. And, just before hitting send, I noticed even more Doré on twitter –
In a nice spot of serendipity (serentwipity?), I was about to hit send and then Daniel Holland popped up in my tweets with this wonderful thread that ties together the last couple of links: “In 1869, French artist Gustave Doré began an extraordinary collaboration with the British journalist Blanchard Jerrold. Together, over four years, they produced a landmark account of the deprivation and squalor of mid-Victorian London.”
That is all.