Omnivoracious

Book Tour Things (Guest Blogger: Stefan Sagmeister)

I just completed my only two Canadian dates on the book tour and am heading home towards New York City, with a short stop and talk in Chicago. There are already 20 American dates behind me all along the West coast, the Midwest, the South and the East coast. Having previously talked to a couple of authors that traveled from afar only to wind up stuck in a Borders with 8 people attending and 4 more browsing nearby--unsure if they actually should sit down--I paired our publisher with the American Institute for Graphic Arts, whose local chapters organized the events. Thus we wound up with mostly sold-out auditoriums, holding between 200 and 1,000 people, which made the entire endeavor infinitely more pleasurable.

My book Things I have learned in my life so far has been out for about two months. During that time, it has been the bestselling art and design book on the Amazons of the world (.com, .de, .co.uk), and I am still not very happy.

This unhappiness stems in large part from the feature Customers who bought this item also bought, which in my case shows that they all bought other design books, hence all my buyers are other designers.

As a designer, I spend a lot of time around other designers, and I get rather self-conscious about becoming somebody who designs for his peers. I have always felt that art for other artists and music for other musicians can become quite self-referential and incestuous. While some of it is necessary to bring the profession forward, the larger part often presents a rather narrow, insular worldview, and the results are often boring.

So if you yourself are NOT a designer, please do look at my book's Amazon page (and right afterwards, check out The Complete Guide to Home Plumbing). It would make me feel so good.

I run a design studio in New York, and among many other things (we used to concentrate on the design of album covers for bands like the Talking Heads and the Stones), we design books.

This turns out to be mostly picture books, mostly because we get to design the entire thing--the cover, the spine, all the pages inside, the flaps.

Fiction and nonfiction books are often designed by different designers: one does the cover, and other the interior pages.

Within the world of graphic design, these tend to be satisfying jobs because we deal with engaging content, get to meet interesting people, design something that is not immediately thrown away, and after a lot of hard work wind up with a neat, compact object that remains as an artifact of that process.

Here is an example:

We were asked to design Worldchanging, which reports about new, positive developments in science, engineering, architecture, business and politics affecting and changing this world. Through the die-cut holes of the slipcase, the (recycled, of course) paper on the cover yellows significantly over time, allowing the sun to imprint (and change) the book cover itself.

We designed this book to appeal not just to a core, green audience, but to a wide spectrum of the general public. It went well.

The following criteria were important to us during the design process:

We wanted this to be positive. We also wanted something innovative, that does not just talk about change but proofs it in the concept (the book cover changes with the power of the sun, the sun designs our cover). We wanted something that allows the reader to browse intuitively, quickly finding the subject he/she is looking for, without having to learn a new finding system. We wanted something that looks and feels authoritative, yet is pretty enough to be left out on a coffee table, without winding up with a coffee table book. The usability needed to be versatile, so that it can be browsed on a desk, leafed through in bed, or checked out on an airplane.

And I admit that I came up with some of these criteria after we designed it all.

Guest Blogging: Stefan Sagmeister

Graphic design superstar Stefan Sagmeister joins the May guest blogging fray. If you dismiss design as frivolous, hold up--Sagmeister’s doing his darndest to change your mind. Throughout his professional life (which has included projects for HBO the Guggenheim,  musicians like the Rolling Stones and Lou Reed, and others far to numerous to mention), he’s explored how design can promote "good things.”

At his most extreme, he will freak you out. Often, he’ll make you laugh while making a point. Sometimes he goes a little bananas. But with each project, Sagmeister dips into his vast and varied bag of tricks, pulling out all the stops to communicate in a powerfully visual way that crosses cultural and social bounds.

Motivated by a sense of responsibility beyond just branding and selling, Sagmeister has taken more than one commercial hiatus to think and create. The result of his latest "break" is a marvelous new book, Things I have learned in my life so far (one of our March picks for the Best of the Month. This video will give you a sense of its magic.

When he visited us in early spring, Sagmeister was just starting his tour. He asked us for ideas on how to start a dialogue with folks beyond design circles, so we invited him to spend some time on Omni. We hope you find him and his work as charming and provocative as we do. --Mari

P.S. To see more of Sagmeister’s recent work and see his advice for design students, visit his official website.

The Passing of a True Texas Trailblazer: Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008)

The New York Times has reported that Robert Rauschenberg, one of the true heros of contemporary art and culture, died yesterday at the age of 82. We're indebted to Rauschenberg for many forms of expression that we now take for granted.  Consider him a kind of grandaddy of mixed and multi-media installations, performance art, and even eco-art.  From his humble beginnings in Port Arthur, Texas (as the son of his German immigrant father and Cherokee nation mother), this preternaturally brilliant and productive artist shook up the very notion of art-making.  He used the physical stuff of daily life and experimented (like a possessed scientist) with new techniques and technologies that mixed the fine arts like painting, sculpture and printmaking with photography, music, and dance. Out with Abstract Expressionism and in with complex, multi-media installations that dealt with everything from space technology and pop culture to ecological destruction. In conjunction with other postwar greats like Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham and Cy Twombly (to name just a few), Rauschenberg literally reshaped the cultural horizon of the twentieth century.

While this Texan trailblazer will be missed, his art will provoke us to think hard and marvel for a long time to come.  Rauschenberg's life story is just as astonishing as his work. I'm taking some time this weekend to savor Mary Lynn Kotz's classic and gorgeously illustrated biography,  Rauschenberg: Art and Life and insider Calvin Tomkin's  Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg .

Apocalypse Redux: The World of Justin Taylor

    
(The Apocalypse Reader cover and Justin Taylor in his "bomb shelter".)

Last week I blogged about Wastelands, an anthology of contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction. This time, because Monday is all about post-weekend devastation, we here at Omnivoracious bring you some historical, and sometimes hysterical, perspective to the subject via the multi-talented Justin Taylor. His The Apocalypse Reader, published last year by Thunder's Mouth Press and featured on National Public Radio, is the perfect companion volume to Wastelands. It contains a rich mix of stories from a wide variety of time periods, from Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Kelly Link, Michael Moorcock, Tao Lin, Steve Aylett, and Ursula K. Le Guin. The range of tone is quite remarkable. Taylor, who recently edited a second anthology (Come Back, Donald Barthelme, published as part of McSweeney's 24) has done a great job of including everything from black humor to extremely serious and unsettling views of the way the world ends. I recently interviewed Taylor via email, to find out just how serious he is about this whole apocalypse thing...

Amazon.com: For the edification of our readers, can you describe where you are right now, while you're answering these questions? Are you in a bunker or other shelter, for example?
Justin Taylor: I'm writing to you from my special bunker, which is craftily disguised as a bedroom with good natural light on the 3rd floor of a small apartment building with bad pipes. It's all really high-tech next-gen kind of stuff. In the event of Apocalypse, my bedroom will float here in space while the rest of the building and/or world crumbles around it. Oh and the pipes stay connected too, so I'll be floating in space but still able to use the bathroom and shower and stuff, though nobody really knows if I'll be able to get hot water or for how long, though that won't be much of a change from how the water situation is now. Of course the exact location is confidential, but I can tell you it's in Brooklyn.

Amazon.com: Does an apocalypse, by your definition, have to be society-wide or can it be singular and personal?
Justin Taylor: It can definitely be either, or both at once. Not to get philosophical on you, but reality is only ever experienced by individuals, so in that sense all Apocalypse is personal. If God returns to earth later this afternoon and Judgment Day begins, that will be something that happens to every person who ever lived, including me, you, Christopher Hitchens, Oprah, Stalin, and every member of the Ming Dynasty. But my experience of Judgment will be my own; it's not something I can share with Oprah.

Alex Ross Puts the Music Where His Mouth Is

Since we've been blogging recently about Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, I wanted to note that Ross has since put up an extensive list of links to the music he writes about, organized by chapter. The links include straight audio files as well as extensive multimedia sites like the San Francisco Symphony's Keeping Score site, where you can follow the score, with video and annotations, for Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. (I had to fight my hardest not to get sucked into that cultural vortex for the rest of the afternoon.) Since the one thing I wished I had while reading the book was a soundtrack to accompany his discussions of pieces that for the most part I had never heard before, this might be the next best thing, at least until PBS signs up Mr. Ross to do a 15-part Ken Burns-style series on the music of the 20th century (hint, hint)... --Tom

New on Amazon Wire: Saving the Western Canon with Alex Ross

This week's episode of Amazon Wire features an interview our former classical music (and books) editor Tom May and I (mostly Tom!) did with Alex Ross, the classical music critic for The New Yorker who, as we laugh about in the interview, was recently celebrated by one blogger in a post called (tongue just barely in cheek) "Pomo Pied Piper Saves the Western Canon." (The post, which was on New Music Box, seems to have disappeared from the web in the meantime.) Ross's new book, The Rest Is Noise,  is a savvy and delicious history of 20th century classical music ("art music," "new music"--whatever you want to call something that includes Debussy and Copland and also John Cage, Duke Ellington, and Missy Elliott), told through its composers (and, to a surprising extent, its politics, with chapters on Stalin, Hitler, the Cold War, etc.). It's gotten a phenomenal response so far (reviews here, here, and here, where Ross is called "impressively omnivorous," so of course we like him), including from my good pal Josh (admittedly a Shostakovich/Sonic Youth weirdo), who inhaled it like oxygen.

Ross has a justifiably well-known blog at, yes, The Rest Is Noise, and he just noticed with amusement (I think) that we put The Rest Is Noise in our Pop Culture Top 10 in our new Best Books of 2007 store (about which more here later). We weren't sure where to put it (aside from #34 on our overall Top 100 for the year), since books about classical music fall between our usual categories (Arts & Photography? Entertainment?). But given how eager Ross is to break out of the upholstered anteroom to which classical music has lately been consigned, I think he's probably quite happy to be in Pop Culture. (Also on the blog, an illustrated post from his day in Seattle, where the fourth photo must certainly have been taken from the Starbuck's on the 40th floor of our building.)

And to answer his most frequently asked question ("Okay, I'm interested in new classical music--where should I start?"), Ross sent us an annotated list of his 10 favorite 20th-century CDs (as well as 10 favorite books on the subject too), a number of which (Shostakovich, Britten, Messaien, Golijov) he touches on in our interview. And if you want to read more about his books, see the profile of his enviable (if space-constrained) library in BookForum's latest issue. --Tom

P.S. For more from Ross, check out the lengthy back and forth he had this week on Slate with jazz critic Ben Ratliff, author of a new John Coltrane bio that I can't believe I haven't harassed someone for a copy of yet.