"[...] the old environment is upgraded into an art form while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading." — Marshall McLuhan

From: BookOasis

"Even as more readers switch to the convenience of e-books, publishers are giving old-fashioned print books a makeover.
     Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions — deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading.
     'When people do beautiful books, they’re noticed more,' said Robert S. Miller, the publisher of Workman Publishing. 'It’s like sending a thank-you note written on nice paper when we’re in an era of e-mail correspondence.'
     The eagerly anticipated 925-page novel by Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, arrived in bookstores in October wrapped in a translucent jacket with the arresting gaze of a young woman peering through. A new novel by Stephen King about the Kennedy assassination, 11/22/63, has an intricate book jacket and, unusual for fiction, photographs inside. The paperback edition of Jay-Z’s memoir Decoded features a shiny gold Rorschach on the cover, and in March the front of The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller will bear an embossed helmet sculpted with punctures, cracks and texture, giving the image a 3-D effect."— Julie Bossman, The New York Times
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Unstuck

From: Manhattan Rare Book Company

"A new biography [And So It Goes, by Charles Shields] of acclaimed American author Kurt Vonnegut, beloved by fans worldwide for his work's warm humour and homespun Midwestern wisdom, has shocked many with a portrayal of a bitter, angry man prone to depression and fits of temper. [...]
     'It is a little naive to be surprised by this,' said Gregory Sumner of the University of Detroit Mercy, who recently wrote a book exploring Vonnegut's work, called Unstuck In Time. 'Personal relationships were difficult for him. He had a lot of survivor's guilt.'
     Vonnegut definitely had survived a lot. His once wealthy family was impoverished by the Great Depression, causing grim strains in his parents' marriage. His mother committed suicide. His beloved sister died of breast cancer, a day after her husband was killed in a train accident. But the defining horror of Vonnegut's life was his wartime experience and surviving the Dresden bombing, only to be sent into the ruins as prison labour in order to collect and burn the corpses. The ordeal cropped up continually in his work, but most notably formed the basis of Slaughterhouse-Five, the book that made Vonnegut famous.
     But there was more to it than just coping with such traumatic situations. In later life, despite being hailed by so many as an American genius, Vonnegut felt that the literary establishment never took him seriously. They interpreted his simplistic style, love of science fiction and Midwestern values as being beneath serious study." — Paul Harris, Guardian
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Get And So It Goes, Unstuck In Time, and all of Kurt Vonnegut's books here...

Soft Boiled

From: Folksy

"Of all the thousands of sleazy, trashy PG-rated paperback books published in the 1960's, those with the extraordinary covers produced by Eugene Bilbrew, Eric Stanton, Bill Ward and Bill Alexander stand out and stand above. This quartet of illustrators with interlocking lives and complicated connections produced an abundance of work. All were bright, light-hearted depictions of the darker-side of sexuality. All were also in the employ of a mobster. The work produced by 'The Fun Fetish Four' was aimed at baser instincts and somewhat abhorrent taste, but for the most part were harmless if a bit strange.
     In addition to the artists, a fascinating gaggle of gangsters, smutsters, peddlers and speed-driven writers are involved in this story. This site collects and reproduces a series of posts placed on Dull Tool Dim Bulb during 2009. It will be obvious I have not edited or corrected much.
     The publishers of these soft-core novels were hounded by moral crusaders and ultimately put out of business. The owners didn't comply with rules and regulations to begin with (using phony addresses, avoiding tax laws and featuring questionable content) Larger publishers who used 'better' illustrators and 'real' authors garner the most attention from legitimate collectors and aficionados. More accomplished (that is, more 'painterly') illustrators have had their work better documented, detailed and appreciated. As the books here were mob-commissioned, distributed in darkness and displayed under the counter more often than in racks, they are today scarcer than more legitimate and more often seen mainstream paperbacks, even those which fall into the broad 'vintage sleaze' category. Printed in editions of around 10,000 copies (a guess) they were fugitive literature, undocumented and born outside more established channels of publication. In fact, more traditional scholars and collectors sneered at them until several folks thanked below brought them back to life.[...]
     I also found the fact that two of these artists were African-American quite curious and worthy of study. Black artists in general, and historically, have been neglected by the mainstream art and publishing world. In fact, dozens of the most important artists of the 20th century are African-Americans who existed on the outside of our understanding of art. That they would find themselves producing work for an underground certainly isn't unusual...Jazz and Blues arose from somewhat dicey circumstances after all, so why shouldn't the illustrators. Additionally, the story of how these young comic book artists hooked up with the Jewish Mafia and the fellows who photographed Bettie Page is remarkable indeed." — Jim Linderman, Vintage Sleaze
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Squids in Space

From: Good Show Sir

"Many of her casual readers, and most critics of her work, are aware by now that Margaret Atwood got herself into a spot of bother after the publication of her pulpish dystopia Oryx and Crake (2003), when she disassociated her text from the conversation of SF, the underlying megatext of conventions, phrases, solutions, tags and cliches which honest Science Fiction writers both acknowledge and make new in their works, and which has evolved enormously over the years.
     Despite her conspicuous use of SF topoi copied holus-bolus as they existed half a century ago — i.e., the Superman Mad Scientist who Ends the World while Simultaneously Creating a New Species to Inhabit the Remains — she claimed in 2003 that what she wrote was not Science Fiction at all, because Science Fiction was all about squids in space. [...]
     In 2003, Ursula K. Le Guin — a writer of singular importance to the field not only for her fiction but for her critical work — made it clear that the squids-in-space bon mot was genuinely discourteous. But her measured rebuke seems to have made little difference. Atwood has now reiterated her claim almost unmodified, in her latest book, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination [New York: Doubleday/Nan A Talese, 2011. 255 pp.]. It may be that like a lobster in a trap who cannot find the exit door, Atwood cannot work her way out of the perplex of ill-judged subjectivity in which she had trapped herself: perhaps because, as with any statement of belief as opposed to argument, her 'definition' of SF is as unfalsifiable as any sermon. [...]
     When she genuinely relaxes, though, it is not all bad. The [Richard Ellmann Lectures presented in 2010 at Emory University] themselves give us, in three sections combining memoir and excursus, an attractive picture of the young Atwood discovering fantastika in general, SF in particular. Her early reading was clearly intense, and she conveys a sense of that sensual intensity here through some dextrous narrative passagework, though without giving any large number of specific textual referents. Indeed — to return to the main burden of complaint about the failure of In Other Worlds to argue its case — it is noticeable that, utopias and dystopias excepted, almost no SF novels published after the early 1950s are either mentioned explicitly or by inference, with the exception of William Gibson (but stopping short at  , which is treated as both utopian and dystopian, but not as an SF prayer to the Gods Inside Tomorrow), Ursula Le Guin (inescapable chider and presider) and Bruce Sterling (for his Slipstream riff) [see more here]. I may be failing to remember others, but the book (or at least my advance review copy) contains no index. As far as “SF and the Human Imagination,” we are left with teen encounters with pulp, and the extremities of the utopian mind (which mainly, I think wrongly, are extrinsic to the line and structure of SF itself). As far as the megatext is concerned, nought. There is no there there."
— John Clute, Los Angeles Review of Books
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The Whole Story...

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"[E-books] smell like burned fuel."—Ray Bradbury

Source photo from: Wikipedia

"At age 91, Ray Bradbury is making peace with the future he helped predict.
     The science fiction/fantasy author and long-time enemy of the e-book has finally allowed his dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451 to be published in digital format. Simon & Schuster released the electronic edition Tuesday.
     First published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 has sold more than 10 million copies and has been translated into 33 languages. It imagined a world in which the appetite for new and faster media leads to a decline in reading, and books are banned and burned.
     Bradbury himself has been an emphatic defender of traditional paper texts, saying that e-books 'smell like burned fuel' and calling the Internet nothing but 'a big distraction.' "
— The Globe and Mail
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"Scientists may not be able to tell a good book by its cover, but they now can tell the condition of an old book by its smell. In a report in ACS' Analytical Chemistry, a semi-monthly journal, they describe development of a new test that can measure the degradation of old books and precious historical documents based on their smell. The nondestructive 'sniff' test could help libraries and museums preserve a range of prized paper-based objects, some of which are degrading rapidly due to advancing age, the scientists say. [...]
     The new technique, called 'material degradomics,' analyzes the gases emitted by old books and documents without altering the documents themselves. They used it to 'sniff' 72 historical papers from the 19th and 20th centuries, including papers containing rosin (pine tar) and wood fiber, which are the most rapidly degrading paper types in old books. The scientists identified 15 VOCs [volatile organic compounds] that seem good candidates as markers to track the degradation of paper in order to optimize their preservation. The method also could help preserve other historic artifacts, they add."
— Michael Berstein, EurekAlert
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From: Breathing Books

“Can images reproduce the unimaginable?” [Marco Sonzogni] asks. “And how are those images to be interpreted?”

Winning design: Anna Zysko (Poland)

There is no right or final answer with a book cover. Where music albums are forever identified with the artwork that clad them on release, book covers change and change again. Over time a much-reprinted novel or short story collection will generate scores of different cover designs around the world. While the visual interpretation of any book’s contents can be taxing, with some books the stakes are especially high.
     Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is that kind of publication. Los Angeles architect and book lover John Bertram has organized a series of cover design competitions in which he asks designers to interpret a demanding work of fiction. In 2010, with the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Los Angeles as co-sponsor, Bertram set the challenge of designing a cover for Borowski’s harrowingly bleak collection of 12 stories based on the writer’s experiences in Auschwitz. These speculative covers later became the starting point for a fascinating visual and literary study — This Way: Covering/Uncovering Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen — edited by Marco Sonzogni, with Bertram’s help, and published in April this year.
     I read Borowski’s book, available in the U.S. as a Penguin Classic, a few years ago. I had never heard of it until I happened to see it in a bookstore. From the author’s Polish name and the ferocious irony of the title, it was obvious what it was about and the cover photograph of something fiery and blackened (burnt metal, though the subject is unclear) clinched my desire to read it. The image played menacingly against the title — it could be interpreted as a deadly miasma — and had great metaphorical power without stating anything specific."
— Rick Poynor, The Design Observer Group
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