Recently I’ve amassed quite a pile-up of quality literature on my shelf. Unfortunately, reading these days has become confined to the sparse 15 minutes between home and work on the g2, (and only, of course, if I’ve opted against the alternative of dozing off for a few.)
Anyway, slowly but surely I’ve been putting a few items into the rotation. Over the summer I picked up a few vintage finds at Eastern Market that I’ve just gotten around to, including Dostoevsky’s The Double (sweet cover art below) and Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, which I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read. I also picked up a rather curious novelty of sorts entitled The Wonderland of Tommorrow. If you ever wanted to know what the future looked like in 1961, this book gives it to you straight (check out the cover below). It is seriously like a field manual for the rides at Epcot center. Chapter 3 is called “Machines Will Take Over.” Okay.
Back in the spring I subscribed to the magazine Gastronomica, a quarterly journal on the culture of food. It’s the most minimalist, elegantly art-directed food magazine I’ve ever laid eyes on and I love it. Sort of like the New Yorker meets Bon ApetÃt, (and I hate the New Yorker, personally. It’s way too pretentious for its own good and that’s exactly what this is, almost.) Food is arguably more democratic though, so I don’t mind it as much here. Cultural-foodie-trivia-cum-editorial pieces, short fiction and photo-essays abound. An OCCASIONAL recipe. Though, it’s worth picking up for the covers alone.
As awesome as those are my main focus the past two weeks or so has been this wonderful release from Unit Editions called Studio Culture., a tight little set of interviews profiling a handful of prominent designers / studios based out of the UK, greater Europe and the Americas. I learned of it via Build’s blog and sprung for the limited edition signed copy immediately (at half price? duh). Included in the truly great lineup of studios featured are Michael C. Place of the aformentioned Build, personal faves Non-format, Edenspeikerman, iconoclasts Experimental Jetset, Milton Glaser Inc., Paula Scher / Pentagram, Spin, Marian Bantjes and several other trendsetting studios, many of which I hadn’t previously known of. The work and candor of these individuals is inspiring to say the very least. Definitely worth picking up if you’ve ever wished you could sit down with any of these people and pick their brain as to how they got their operation off the ground and what it took / takes to keep it going. My only gripe is that there were no studios doing strictly motion / interactive work profiled at all. That romantic allure of traditional print and branding over new(er)-school web persists I guess.
Finally, I decided to drop a bit of money on two particularly special monographs. The first, (previously cited personal favorites) Non-Format’s LOVE SONG published by purveyor of fine art books, die Gestalten, and the second, Stefan Sagmeister’s Made You Look. Both of these have been great to flip through whenever I need to take a break for a minute or am looking for a drop of inspiration. The bi-color stereographic printing on the Sagmeister cover is particularly great.
All images property of Victor Alejándro Aguilar © 2010 unless otherwise noted.
ha.. i almost bought Sagmeisters “things i have learned” book the other day.. shit is so cool… also a dude i work with found the book he did for David Byrne’s Feelings album back in the 90’s in the trash in DC, it’s incredible.
reading for me is limited to a bus ride as well these days, when i don’t bike – i’m in a Paul Auster phase right now.
yeah, i actually considered buying that one too, but i feel like that’s arguably one of his most popular works, and i’ve gotten a pretty good idea of ‘what he’s learned’ from seeing interviews and reading reviews about the book (and also his presentation at TED). i dunno, i haven’t physically flipped thru it ever so i may not know what i’m missing.
my friend mariana owns a copy of made you look and after flipping thru a few pages i coveted it immediately.
yeah, well.. the thing that is cool about it is that it’s not really a book.. its like.. a series of thematic pamphlets or something.. each of their covers interact with the die cut of the outer box in a cool way… it’s the type of thing i’d by for novelty sake, and then probably never take it off my bookshelf again.. so i didn’t end of getting it
that’s a great dostoevsky cover, who did the translation on that one? On a related note, check this out; i came across it in looking at different versions of brothers karamazov. It’s pretty amazing how much the tone of a piece of writing can get altered in the process (now if only i spoke russian too, to compare):
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~karamazo/translations.html