Hasta La Ideas

by Emily Bihl With selvage denim’s ever-increasing popularity, the surfeit of new brands popping up seem to do little to differentiate themselves—but Wales-based Hiut Denim proves to be the exception. The brand’s remarkable yearly publication …

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In “The Field Guide to Typography,” Peter Dawson, co-founder of London-based Grade Design, leads the journey through 125 different typefaces (which is not to be confused with fonts). From…

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Do you have some precious heirlooms — things with great value, sentimental or monetary — you want to preserve and pass down to other family members?

If you do, it’s well worth the effort to make sure these items are taken care of properly. And, whenever I get questions about how best to do it — for art, books, textiles, etc. — I pull out my copy of Saving Stuff. I’ve owned the book since 2008, when it first came out, and it’s a reference I always keep close at hand.

As Deb Lee mentioned before, Saving Stuff encourages you to be selective about what you keep. But once you’ve decided something is a keeper, it teaches you how to make sure you’re taking good care of it.

Saving Stuff was written by Don Williams and Louisa Jaggar. Williams is a senior conservator at the Smithsonian Institution, so I trust his advice. Pair him up with a professional writer like Jaggar, and you’ve got a winning combination.

Jaggar got interested in the subject when she had a flood in her basement, and lost many items she treasured: old scrapbooks, photos, her daughter’s art projects, and more. She shared the story with her friend, Williams, and asked for advice. I loved this bit from The Christian Science Monitor’s interview with Jaggar:

“He helped save the Wright Brothers’ airplane, and he’s helped save Archie Bunker’s chair,” she says. “And I’m sitting there asking, ‘How do you save the macaroni art that my daughter made?’”

So how do you save stuff? Williams begins by explaining about perfect preservation:

The best way to ensure that stuff lasts is to place all your collectibles in an Egyptian tomb and then seal them in — after leaving the prerequisite deadly curse on all who dare enter. Stuff lasts for a really long time in a cursed tomb. Why? No light, no humidity, no contaminants, no bugs, no furry friends, and no people.

But since that’s not what anyone is going to do, he goes on to explain the major risk factors, and then tells us which ones are most relevant to different kinds of stuff we might be saving. The remaining chapters deal with the different forms of items we save: photos, newspapers, linens, old letters, sports memorabilia, etc.

While there’s plenty of detail for the dedicated preservationist, there are also numbered lists of simple rules: seven rules for photographs, eight rules for preserving coins and stamps, 20 rules for preserving textiles, 22 rules for caring for stringed wooden instruments, etc.

And the book sometimes gives you multiple ways to preserve a category of stuff. For example, for vintage books, there’s the “quick ’n’ dirty method,” the “middle road,” and “Pharaoh’s tomb” (the last one being for books you want to preserve forever).

If you have stuff you want to be sure you’re saving properly, this may be a book to buy or to borrow from your library to help you protect the few cherished sentimental items you choose to keep.

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Orion’s repackaging of F Scott Fitzgerald’s writings enabled designer Sinem Erkas to get stuck into some Jazz Age-influenced typography. Her work for the series now covers six titles, the latest of which, The Last Tycoon, is published this week…

Referencing Art Deco-era typography, Erkas has created bespoke faces for each book cover, aiming to design covers that are rooted in the 1920s but have a contemporary feel. Writing on the Waterstone’s blog, she talked through the look of series which has, since May this year, used a striking type-only treatment across all of the new editions.

For The Last Tycoon, above, Erkas writes that she “designed a grid of dots to represent the Hollywood Lights without being too literal, and made the structure of the typeface quite architectural.”

As the novel was unfinished at the time of Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, Erkas left some of these letters “half-formed, filling the blanks in with the dots. I have also confused the boundaries between some letters by making interesting ligatures,” she explains in her blog post.

For This Side of Paradise, Erkas merged Art Deco scripts with her own handwriting (the book’s main character is a writer), and created letterforms with intertwining arms. “These intimate letterforms can suggest romance or relationships and also creates an interesting sea-like rhythm,” she writes.

For The Great Gatsby, the first title Erkas designed – to coincide with the release of the new film – she developed a serif slab, breaking the typeface up with randomly positioned line work.

“I wanted this to have a glitzy feel but be quite haphazard at the same time, subtly reminding us of the book’s subjects,” she writes on the Waterstone’s blog.

The cover for Tender is the Night references some French Riviera “hand-painted seaside lettering that unusually had dots above the uppercase I’s,” writes Erkas. “I used double lines and bars on this typeface evoking the Art Nouveau design style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.”

The type used on the cover of The Beautiful and the Damned was inspired by 1920s cafe culture; “the heavily geometric shapes on the cafe shop fronts and design paraphernalia,” says Erkas.

Using Futura, Erkas distilled each form to its basic shape and “the cover is a mixed bag of readable and more abstract letterforms … something beautiful but at the same time broken up, hinting at Fitzgerald’s themes of money, relationships and destruction.”

For Fitzgerald’s collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age, Erkas’s cover is just a celebration of the Jazz Age, she says. “This is probably the most contemporary-looking design out of all of them,” she adds, “and I drew the typeface in continual line to look quite industrial as well as heavily stylistic.”

The F Scott Fitzgerald series is published by Orion, with The Last Tycoon available from the end of this week. Tales of the Jazz Age will be published in March 2014. More of Erkas’s work is at sinemerkas.com.

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Hiroshi Sugimoto, “Sea of Japan, Rebun Island” 1996

“Humans have changed the landscape so much, but images of the sea could be shared with primordial people. I just project my imagination on to the viewer, even the first human being. I think first and then imagine some scenes. Then I go out and look for them. Or I re-create these images with my camera. I love photography because photography is the most believable medium. Painting can lie, but photography never lies: that is what people used to believe.”

–Hiroshi Sugimoto in an interview that appears in Art Studio America: Contemporary Artist Spaces, out later this month from Thames & Hudson

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