Meanwhile #175

This week’s discoveries, oddities and doppelgängerisms.

— Pastiche or piss-take? From Rachel Cabitt’s substack exploring the history of album covers throughout the decades, a look at artwork doppelgängerism. Sometimes tricky finding the line between homage and rip-off, and some are just downright shameless.

— Can’t believe I somehow missed that The Gentlewoman celebrated their first decade with an adorably tiny (60 x 81mm) collection of all their fantastic cover interviews. I need to get me one of these. I mean sure, you could read any of their 135 profiles on the website, but I want to feel like a giant dammit.

— See also: NYPL’s tiny books collection.

— Via P&C, a fantastic photo essay on the world’s last internet cafes. Such a bizarre and brief cultural phenomenon – they used to be everywhere.

— Sam Missingham’s inaugural Book Marketing & Publicity Show (3–5 November) is lining up some great speakers. I’m particularly looking forward to hearing from designer/illustrator Micaela Alcaino and bookshop.org’s Mark Thornton.

— Love this composite photograph taken by Casey Sims of the semi-finals of the men's 110-meter hurdles at the 2023 World Athletics Championships. Photography as infographic is very my bag.

— Thanks to Eric Wilder for pointing me in the direction of Matt Stevens’ Good Movies as Old Books project. There’s an awful lots of this sort of thing about (including by yours truly), but these are particularly fine.

— A rather handy reference for fans of this sort of thing, an index of the cover illustration credits for the first 100 or so issues of White Dwarf. Lots of Christos Achilléos and John Blanche, surprisingly little Ian Miller.

— Interesting blog post from Jamie Clarke on matching typography and illustration on cookery book covers. Would love to get my filthy design hands on a cookery book brief one of these days.

— They said it could be done, but last week’s Five Rectangles post somehow featured both Kylie Minogue’s arm and the violin-playing lady from Spider-Man. Upgrade your subscription now to get more of this sort of thing.