Excitingly boring books

[imomus]

I was excited, yesterday, to see Solution 9: The Great Pyramid (by Ingo Niermann and Jens Thiel) in the window of Pro-QM, Berlin's best art and design bookshop. Excited not just because my own Book of Scotlands will be there one day (I'm Solutions 11 to 1010), but because of the exciting boringness of Zak Kyes' jacket design.



Pro-QM likes to put sober, serious, difficult-looking books in its window. It likes books with purely typographic covers, books which run in series, books differentiated by minor differences in colour. It likes Reclam and it likes Merve Verlag. Zak's sober, understated design fits into that taste for starkness, even severity.

Inspired by the interesting boringness of it all, I made a YouTube video tribute to books so boring and abstruse-looking that they come full circle and get interesting again. Here, set to music by Alvin Lucier, is my film -- a tiny documentary about the alluring strangeness, the semi-sensual dullness, and above all the spooky otherness of the fruits of our academic presses.

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My "film" is a close cousin, perhaps, of my recent appreciation of plain Japanese book jacket design, and not unrelated to the almost fetishistic levels of delightful dull dryness to be found in Grain Edit's appreciation of German and Swiss Book Design, or of Publicity and Graphic Design in the Chemical Industry.

Comments

[grimgrim.livejournal.com]

Everyone's a critic, but I found the cut-up treatment of the vocal in your film distractingly interesting, which I felt lessened the impact. Easily remedied, for me anyway, by watching again with the volume turned off, where the beauty of colour, typeface, geometry stand alone without any apparent meaning surfacing.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Predicted Momus Response

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Re: Predicted Momus Response

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I have to talk about him in a documentary soon.

Not the cat, obviously.

Re: Predicted Momus Response

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Assum!! Can't wait to see! ^_____^

Re: Predicted Momus Response

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

This would be tangentially a bayesian evaluation.

albedo 0.39

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

Spookily other and delightfully dry are apt descriptors, but I also find these types of books to be strangely reassuring. As if there is a dedicated group of persons, or maybe just disembodied brains in jars somewhere out there in the ether, who are figuring things out for the rest of us.

Also reminds me of the petit frisson, the strange admixture of fear and excitement I would experience every morning in middle school math class, when the teacher would erase the blackboard of all the strange symbols from the algebra class that had met the night before. Such difficult looking equations, Who were these people? Would I be able to master this when my time came?

Re: albedo 0.39

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes.

I think the binary reference point I'm trying to make -- and what gives these jackets their dignity -- is kitschy, constrasty, over-familiar, aggressive, celebrity-obsessed, idiotic commercial culture, which thinks it's sexy but really, really isn't.

What's sexy is quiet intelligence and understatement, and these books have that in spades. They don't come down to our level; they expect us to come up to theirs. And they believe that we have it in us.

Re: albedo 0.39

[(Anonymous)]

looks like scientific publication with self-humour. always a good thing or publications!

Re: albedo 0.39

[(Anonymous)]

I work in academic publishing, and sorry to dispel your romanticised take on academic book jacket design, but these examples are the norm in serials and monograph publishing. When the end-user is likely to be a library the jacket doesn't have to try and appeal to anyone, as it would in a bookshop, hence the basic, generic, typographic nature of the designs. It's not to convey 'quiet intelligence and understatement', they're just cheap to design and produce, and librarians don't care what they look like, academic library acquisitions departments don't use aesthetic criteria when it comes to this sort of product I'm afraid.

Re: albedo 0.39

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You really don't know how beautiful you are, do you?

[internought.livejournal.com]

The Phaidon book of Boring Postcards is the best.

[(Anonymous)]

Well done. Mind, you could think about turning it into a screamer by having an old hag spring up at the end. What say you?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You might hear my (whispered) response to that if you listen carefully to this white "ghost car" wending its way through the valley:

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hm ...

[brokenjunior.livejournal.com]

I was sitting alone in my dim apartment while watching this - NOT FUNNY!

[bikerbar.livejournal.com]

the soundtrack for the video is great, which album by Lucier is it from?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's from Still Lives (http://www.last.fm/music/Alvin+Lucier/_/Still+Lives+IV.+Lamp+Shade), which is a great, great album.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yay, this film got picked up today by artblog VVORK (http://www.vvork.com/)!

[zazie-metro.livejournal.com]

What a stunning film!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The Guardian searches for the oddest book title of the last 30 years (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2008/aug/30/oddest.book.title.prize?picture=337005741).

How to be Happy though human

[bokmala.livejournal.com]

Penguin is the greatest bird in the publishing kingdom, but still, there is something terribly appealing about this archive of Pelican titles from the 30s and onwards-

http://www.thingsmagazine.net/projects/1950s/pel09c.htm

[(Anonymous)]

muuusic cock-nition?

[(Anonymous)]

This isn't stunning, this is just plain relativism, when will our era cut this irony? Iterativity and bayesian analysis are important matters. I'm not blaming M. Currie who seems to have a sense of analysis, but nevertheless I despise the kind of comments and reactions it provokes, and beyond everything, the irrationalism it celebrates.