Graphics: generics or chaotics?

[imomus]

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.'

Comments

[cubitt.livejournal.com]

Other people think about this?
I thought it was only me.

I too like my books to look generic and sterile. The covers and marketing of modern pop novels turn me off almost as much as their content.

Smiths sleeves are the most identifiable sleeves to me, there's a magic to them.

Does anyone know of an English language equivalent of bunko books?

[psychicmongoose.livejournal.com]

Dover Thrift Editions?

three men in a boat

[(Anonymous)]

my favourite jacket design for jerome k. jerome's three men in a boat

http://www.bloomsbury.com/Images/Books/Batch2/014180100X.JPG

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I love bunko books. They're small enough to fit in a skirt pocket, or the daintiest purse; light enough that one can read holding them in one hand on the metro, while clutching a bag or a passenger grip in the other; flexible and well-bound enough that one can fold the pages back around the spine and not have the book fall into two pieces. (Manga tankoubon have these qualities as well. Sometimes I think half the reason I read Japanese books and comics at all is because I vastly prefer the aesthetics and quality of their presentation. Out of all the countries I know that translate and reprint manga, only North America does so in huge unwieldy volumes of what seems like newsprint. The quality of printing/binding of French manga may be off, but at least it comes in the right size...) Incidentally I find for literature-type books, aesthetics and quality of the volume itself run in descending order: Japan -> France -> North America -> China.

(You see this is a bit of a minor obsession.)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I used to design CD packages for a living, but now I'm more apt to take on small book cover projects. I sometimes miss working out visual systems between the cd, booklet and tray card, but working with most bands (indie or major label) will take the pleasure right out of the process. Vaughan's autocratic "auteur' approach was an effective way of working, in my estimation. To have worked with Vaughan in any way would have been an incredible thrill; it was his work that inspired me to go into design. His sprawling, luxurious album sleeve designs that felt as if one could put their arm into them have retained their glory over the passage of time, but with the advent of cds, the nuance of image, color and type that was the trademark of much of his work eventually diminished, as it was demanded by the smaller format, sadly.

I still lovingly fondle my 4AD 'Lilliput' book whenever I come across it in my old book stacks. I confess that I haven't followed his work of late.

W

[mistresshellena.livejournal.com]

Spring Snow as a color study?
How precious!
I love it!
Mishima's work has given me lots of creative inspiration over the years.

Design is not my artistic medium, it's my vocational medium. Video is my primary artistic outlet and I found that I had a hard time doing it commercially; so I dove into design which fed the creative impulse without feeling like I was "bastardizing my art form". I know that there are many people out there who do design the way I do video; so I love hearing about folks who are just off in the clouds exploring the bounds that I'm not inclined to explore. A big part of why I started reading your LJ. You and people you associate with are doing things that are bringing different perspectives to me as a designer. *and* as an aritst! Thanks!

[sarmoung.livejournal.com]

Bunko editions are great (and cheap) and I've got plenty here in the house - mostly collected in neatly tied bundles that were left out on the street for rubbish collection. I'm intrigued by that photo of the man reading on a train. One frustration I have with Japanese books is that people generally read them with a bookstore wrapping over the cover. This makes it hard to gauge what people are actually reading, unlike the London tube. I've never really established whether this is to protect the book from damage or to obscure your reading choice to those around you.

What you have reminded me about is the question of print size. The print in bunko is fairly tiny compared to what your anglo-saxon might generally expect in a book. I'm quite comfortable with it, but one reason for their compactness is this reduction in scale. Japanese readers seem more content with small print. Japanese magazines at first seem incredibly condensed. A restaurant review will have a map and directions, pictures of various dishes, interior and exterior shots, recommendations, pricing, comments. Everything you might want to know about the place but presented in a far smaller area than you would find in an equivalent British magazine, which would be more concerned with expressing the writer's judgement.

Japanese bookstores are perhaps only exceeded by Japanese stationers in their appeal

[(Anonymous)]

nice contrast with magazines printed for the turkish market, where the format of for example the artforum magazines is twice it's normal horizontal size and it's vertical. it looks more like the west european standard for newspapers.

erik

[pelonius.livejournal.com]

woody allen managed to keep a consistent typeface at the beginnings of his films, each accompanied by the same ragtime, dixieland, jazz music. you gotta admire him for that, if nothing else.
here's a pictorial hisory of his titles and typefaces --> http://contactsheet.org/articles/woodys_typeface.html (click here)

japanese books

[(Anonymous)]

1) why do Japanese book stores organize by publisher? how in anyway is that helpful? do they want to create dependence on the staff? if you are looking for a murakami haruki book - you have to know that some are with kodansha and some aren't. looking for translated works is pure hell. you don't look for ralph ellison, you look for WHO published ralph ellison.

2) the cheap, small size of the books seems to be a way to pay authors less. compare a paperback book in japan for $4 to a new hardcover release in the US of $25. when they bring new foreign works to Japan, they are often released as hardcovers. is this because they have to pay a higher royalty rate?

there definitely seems to be economic concerns in these design concepts.

Kyoto bookstores

[(Anonymous)]

Tbis list of bookstores in Kyoto is quite good:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824/jp-kyoto.htm

There's a map of antiquarian bookshops in Kyoto. Most
of the used bookshops carry it, so if you find one you've
found them all.

I like the fact that the bookstores are spread all over the
city.

Don't miss the amazing book fair at Chion-ji in late
October, early November. They also have a "hand-made"
crafts market on the 15th of every month. It's near
Hyakumanben.

Another Kyoto tip: the best temple market right now for
used kimono, curios, and the like is Tenjin-san, at Kitano
Tenmangu, on the 25th of every month.

And another tip: don't miss Daimonji gozan okuribi, which
marks the end of o-bon.

[lepinktrash.livejournal.com]

dear momus,
i would very much like to design something for you.
here is my page of things to see for today. http://visuel.org/daniel

daniel

[armistice-day.livejournal.com]

having picked up a small, bunko-ish edition of in praise of shadows at a small vendor my last time in london, i have to say that really can't imagine reading that particular work any other way - sometmes it seems that a large part of my affection for a book is wrapped up in it's physical self, not only in it's ideas. i suppose this is why i buy almost exclusively used books, when i don't simply stumble over or inherit them.

from where i'm sitting i can see a stack of books my mother had as a girl - adventure stories of a young nurse. smallish hardbacks, they have dark rose colored covers of frayed cloth, all stamped with the same cursive font, all with the same small picture of a smiling young woman in a nurse's cap.

Contradictions

[(Anonymous)]

I am glad you have seen the light. The world is a better place for diversity even with seemingly unimportant things like books or CD's. Standardisation goes hand in hand with economics, and the bunko idea reflects this. Vintage Penguin books are the classic precursor to this idea. They are appealing for the very simplicity of their design and the idea of popular education in a cheap format. I understand why you like this format but for anyone trying to make their living as a designer they are anathema.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mcgoni/penguins/one.jpg

Richard G

have you ever seen...

[(Anonymous)]

a book called "you shall know our velocity" by dave eggers?

i am not particulary educated about book design but the cover of that i found really imaginative but very very simple at the same time.

the cover has nothing but text all over it, which, when you open the book, you realise is the beginning of the story. normally, with a book the cover design serves to mark out the book itself, i am called this, i have these type of graphics becuase i am marketed towards a certain type of of person, etc. i felt that by intergrating the words with the images and putting the story on the front, it was making the story the whole focus of the book, rather than being sandwiched between.


anyhoo - nice reading ya. found you randomly

www.20six.co.uka/brandnamedme

Re: have you ever seen...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Since you mention Eggers, it's worth mentioning that his McSweeney's (http://mcsweeneys.net/) magazine is held in some quarters to be at the forefront of a new tendency in generics, focusing on fonts, lettering, layout. Personally I find it all rather conservative and retro.