Graphics: generics or chaotics?

I'm thinking rather intensely about graphic design right now, because a record isn't finished until it has a sleeve. 'The 2005 album from Momus' will be packaged by James Goggin of Practise. I dropped by his Dalston studio in mid-July and really liked the pieces he showed me, particularly a book translating Mishima's 'Spring Snow' into colours: artist Alison Turnbull took every colour reference in the English translation of Mishima's text and gave it a Pantone colour. The narrative becomes a colour chart. (This subject, the relationship between text and texture, has been a big part of my recent work too.) Assigned the job of designing Alison's book, James gave it the look, feel, type and weight of the generic Japanese paperback format called bunko.



I love bunko books. People take me for an avid reader, but I'm really not. I'm reading all the time, but it's not usually books per se. I harbour a lot of passive aggression towards the anglo-saxon publishing industry. Outside of fine art and architecture publishing, anglo-saxon publishers don't make the kind of books I want to read, either in their selection of writers or in their presentation of books as beautiful and desireable objects. The books are garrulous, familiar, chatty, a sort of printed television. The graphics, whether slick or sick, are flashy. Marketing is everything. What I tend to want from books is something quiet, wise, curious, otherworldly, intriguing and dignified. I love French, Italian, German and Japanese books, and I love old books. I want texts with a sombre and strange tone, something like Peter Handke's 'assaying' into tiredness or Tanizaki's essay 'In Praise of Shadows', which I just bought in Kyoto in a tiny, cheap bunko edition. I suppose I want books to have something dead about them. Perhaps I prefer my writers dead too, or at least morbid. But mainly I want books to be small, cheap, delicate, generic, portable, modest, understated, serious, collectible. I want books I can read on a train, or sitting cross-legged at home on tatami at my kotatsu table, my denki poto to hand, its combination of electronics and thermos vacuum keeping my green tea water bubbling.



I love classics and I love generics. When I first arrived in London and invented the Momus character I was buying a lot of Loeb Classics. Like French books, these come with a strict fixed format and a generic wrapper. They have a timeless dignity (which also happened, in the 80s, to tie in with the timely typographic classicism of Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville). I wish I'd had the foresight and the balls to make every Momus album sleeve conform to a strict generic pattern; the same layout, the same typeface, like classical sheet music or the NRF. I suppose the people who've come closest to that are The Smiths and Belle and Sebastian.

I missed my best chance at generic sleeves when, making my first album for 4AD, I turned down Ivo's offer of a sleeve by 23 Envelope. It's one of the biggest regrets of my career. But things haven't turned out so badly in the end. Far from generic, Momus sleeves have been made by all sorts of people and used all sorts of styles. They've come from acclaimed names like Pierre et Gilles and Me Company ('Timelord' and 'Hippopotamomus'), they've bought into existing styles (the in-house designers of Smash Hits magazine and John Calder Books made several of my early sleeves -- an odd dialectic, but one which tells you a lot about early Momus), or they've helped launch the careers of new talents (Rafael Jiminez, now an established graphic designer in LA, made his first sleeve for 'Voyager', and 'Folktronic' and 'Oskar Tennis Champion' were the first CD jackets by the very talented 3D environments designer Florian Perret. The 2005 album will, rather surprisingly, be James Goggin's first published record sleeve too.)



In Kyoto -- a city full of great bookshops -- I snapped a lot of the generic bunko book jackets that I love so much, as well as the restrained, elegant graphic design of some Japanese magazines (Relax is a great example, a style magazine with refreshing painted or drawn covers). I also snapped an old man reading a little hand-shaped bunko book on a train (Japanese people, super-discreet, usually put a decorative paper wrapper around the books they're reading on trains, which makes them even more generic). Then, in a cafe overlooking the rapids of the Kamo River, I came across a book of the graphic work of the wonderful Josef Capek (in fact the catalogue of a show I saw two years ago in Kamakura). Capek's appetising, almost yukata-like jackets strike the perfect balance between uniformity and diversity, the generic and the chaotic. In an essay Capek describes the appeal of generic jackets, as well as his adoption of a more anarchic, individualistic style:



'When I first went to Paris I was greatly impressed by the standardized jackets of the low priced editions such as Arkan and Flammarion. I thought that with their large print runs and simple bindings they had the perfect answer. This is how it should be done! I thought. But at that time I wasn't really conscious of the fact that circumstances affecting books were not the same everywhere. Those old-established publishing companies have used those editions for a long time. But in my country, it is the young publishers that are the most active, and many of them have a strong following among modern readers, and they handle the less popular forms of literature. Also in my country, print runs are relatively speaking quite large, and the book market is always full of books -- some that are not so successful and some by famous people, so new publishers must work extremely hard to attract attention. This realization turned me from my love of standardization to a conviction that each and every book should be given a unique style, a special, individual appeal.'