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These are preliminary design pages for a new book about the art of Bali. The font is Garamond Premier Pro. The image is a cool piece by I Ketut Ngendon (1903–1948) called Goodbye and Good Luck to Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, 1938 (Batuan, Bali. Ink on paper. Mary Catherine Bateson).
The pages are the [...]

The New York Times recently issued its list of 100 notable books of 2009 — and I don’t think I’ve read any of them!
But it’s not like I haven’t been reading. What’s up with that?

The first post at The Art of American Book Covers, by Richard Minsky, was made on August 26, so this blog is less than a month old. I regret that I don’t remember who directed me to it, but this blog is so rich in knowledge about techniques of book production that it makes me feel like an absolute novice. The blog will apparently focus on fine books of the nineteenth century.

A lot of people have weighed in with examples of book titles then and now over at kottke.org. These are some of my favorites:
Then: Book of Genesis
Now: FLOOD! A true story of heartbreak, heroism, and the will to survive
Then: Moby Dick
Now: Orca Obsession: How the Whaling Industry Is Destroying Our Sea and Sailors
Then: [...]

Green Apple Books — located right here in the Bay Area — has launched a ten-round battle between the book and the kindle. Who do you suppose wins round one?

That seems to be the argument that Douglas Rushkoff is making in the August 24 Publishers Weekly. I have described previously the corporate consolidation that has caused the largest book publishers in this country to be subsidiaries of foreign-based conglomerates. For about as long as I have worked in publishing that has been a pretty [...]

Over at the Asian Art Museum blog I’ve written a post briefly outlining some of the issues involved in designing Emerald Cities: Arts of Siam and Burma, 1775-1950. I oversaw this project; the book was designed by Tag Savage of Wilsted & Taylor.

There are special issues for American designers when working with Southeast Asian subjects. This book demonstrates, I think, how they can be successfully addressed.

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I’m working on a reprint edition for another publisher of a book originally published by Mercury House sometime in the 1990s. The layout files were on a zip disk — I had to scrounge to find a working zip reader (amazingly, the disk was readable). The files were in an early version of Quark. They [...]

Who says you can’t take it with you? Well, you might have to leave your books behind, but at least you no longer need to be separated from your bookshelves, thanks to William Warren’s “Shelves For Life.”

The image at right is a selection from my inlinks tag in Google Reader. It shows websites that have been linking to mine (these are all via Google Blog Search). This is less than a single day’s sample. As you can see, all of a sudden many people are posting links on their blogs to [...]

Ten Speed Press, a mainstay of Bay Area Book Publishing for nearly forty years, has been sold to Random House, which means it is now part of the Germany-based megacorporation Bertelsmann AG, which is the world’s single largest owner of book publishing companies. This continues the long trend of independents getting swallowed by international entertainment [...]

John Gall, book designer for B&N, shares some thoughts about book cover design.

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The second biennial CODEX Book Fair will be held this weekend, February 8-11 in Berkeley. The Codex Foundation promotes the art and craft of the book and strives to increase awareness of the book arts.
For those unable to attend in person, Codex now maintains a blog.
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Over at India, Ink., the redoubtable India is thinking about “what materials and processes and vendors to use to make books that will last a hundred years.”
I think traditional books will survive the digital revolution but that their role will change. They will become luxury items, keepsakes, so whoever still knows how to make the [...]

That’s the topic of my first column over at ForeWord magazine, where I will be doing a series of four guest posts for their Publishing Insider section this January.

I’ll be on the road for a while, and posting could continue to be light until mid January.
Meanwhile, I’ve agreed to be a reader for this translation award. Books translated in calendar 2008 by writers based anywhere  between Fresno and the Oregon border are eligible. So far these are on my reading list:

Castellanos Moya, Horacio, [...]

Steve Rubel, one of the sharpest web marketers (and a prolific tweeter) claims that  “five years from now all media will either be completely digital or well on its way to becoming intangible.”
I’ve had a website since 1994. I’m glad content is being digitized. I love being able to find stuff I don’t have in [...]

Yesterday I began a list of ten independent Bay Area book publishing companies, all of which are producing interesting work, though each has its own unique personality and focus. Today I continue with nos. 6-10.

Following the example of Kyle Semmel, I offer here ten independent presses (five today and another five tomorrow) based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Compared to the corporate multinational companies that have swallowed up the traditional New York publishing houses, independents tend to be devoted to the content of the books they publish and [...]

Back in September I mentioned that I was working on a couple of outbuildings that will house much of my library. I’ve been progressing on this pretty steadily, and now I’ve moved in my desk and am starting to move in books.
I still have to frame the window, install a threshold, put up the siding, [...]