Hasta La Ideas

Amazon’s publicity blurb for The L.A. Earthquake Sourcebook bills it as “the coolest earthquake preparedness-book ever published,” which I imagine to be true, but I also can’t think of much competition. A collaboration between Stefan Sagmeister and The Art Center College of Design in association with the L.A. Earthquake Get Ready Project, the Sourcebook juxtaposes essays by experts like FEMA Director James Lee Witt with excerpts from authors like Joan Didion. The essays, fiction and graphic design are all interesting and on more than one occasion, I was curious to look into the works of the fiction authors included because the excerpts left me wondering about the works profiled after reading the short three to five page teasers.

The problem, both with the book, and explicitly acknowledged by the authors is that people (presumably both readers and California residents) don’t really want to be reading or hearing about “the big one.” Despite plenty of content and good intention, the graphic design, fiction and informative work each seem to exist in their own planes rather than coming together in synthesis. Individual graphic exercises like Clifford Elbi’s transcription of the names of faults on the lines of the hand in a palmistry chart can provoke thought and inspire conversation, but most of the graphic design serves as bookends for essays rather than providing a template for action. At the very end of the book pages from Martin Kaplan and Darren Ragle’s graphic novel “A River in Egypt” actually begin to combine graphic elements with earthquake advice on the same page, but the rest of the book feels more like a collection of (very good) poster design shuffled between informative, but somewhat disconnected essays. That said, I was never bored while paging through the book, which may be the highest praise to which an earthquake manual can aspire.

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