Hasta La Ideas

Tweet to win a book and iPhone case in our giveaway

Spanning indie zines to extensive cookbooks, the plethora of books sourced for our holiday pop-up with the Gap last year are all penned by NYC-based authors. Our city’s literary bounty can now be yours—we’re giving away the backstock to a handful of lucky CH readers along with our special-edition Cool Hunting iPhone cases.

To win, tweet @coolhunting with the link to your favorite Cool Hunting book review before Wednesday, 17 August 2011, 11:59pm EST. We’ll pick winners, who we’ll award a grab-bag of one book and iPhone case.

If you associate book clubs with white wine and Jane Austen-inspired chick lit contemporary women’s fiction, think again. Four alumni of D-Crit, the MFA Design Criticism program at the School of Visual Arts, have formed an editorial consultancy called Superscript, and among their first initiatives is a new public book club focusing on architecture and design topics. ADBC (Architecture and Design Book Club) launches Thursday evening in New York with featured guest Alexandra Lange. The journalist, critic, and architectural historian will lead a discussion of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, William Whyte’s seminal 1980 study of NYC plazas. The first meetup takes place on the High Line (how superscriptish!) and is scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. at the 23rd Street lawn.

The aim of ADBC is “to unpack and explore important design and architecture texts—not always necessarily books—with an expert guest,” Superscript partner Avinash Rajagopal tells us. “And we’re open-minded about what we consider as design and architecture texts.” The founders are similarly flexible on club membership. “We really liked the idea of a ‘public club’ and decided we should hold meetings in public spaces around the city that somehow related to the selected texts,” explains Superscript’s Molly Heintz. “We want to keep it accessible enough that anyone passing by can join the discussion and take something away from it.” The partners are now assembling the fall schedule of ADBC meetups, including a possible event at Lincoln Center during Fashion Week. Stay tuned to the Superscript website and Twitter feed for details.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Two new releases from Nobrow, YCN’s latest quarterly Ideas Illustrated journal, a V&A book entitled The Power of Making, Google’s latest Think publication, plus an encyclopedia of 8-bit computer game villains courtesy of GameSpite. Yup, it’s something of a bumper edition of our regular Nice Publications post…

First up is Luke Pearson‘s graphic novella, Everything We Miss, published by Nobrow. Printed in 3 spot colours, the hardback A5 book’s 38 pages follow the final, painful days of a couple’s doomed relationship – but illustrates all the things that might be happening around the central and peripheral characters when they’re not looking or paying attention. It’s beautifully observed and drawn, and darkly engaging.

Everything We Miss by Luke Pearson (£12), is available from nobrow.net

Also fresh from Nobrow, Forming is a larger book in every way. The oversize A4, 122 page hardback is actually the first part in an ongoing saga (there will be three books in total) by Philadelphia-based illustrator Jesse Moynihan that charts a fictional, psuedo-mythological history of planet Earth in which gods, giants, humans and interplanetary assassin droids slug it out in a new, irreverent look at how our universe, planet, and belief systems were formed over several millennia. Moynihan has actually been revealing the Forming story, page by page, on his website since early 2009, but this is the first time it has been printed…

Forming, Vol.1 (£18) is available from nobrow.net

It’s called Ideas Illustrated and it’s an apt title. There’s some great illustration in YCN‘s latest quarerly edition by the likes of Jean Jullien, Martin Nicolausson, Jacqueline Ford and plenty more. Written contributions come from Sir John Hegarty (BBH), Mark Borkowski (Borkowski PR), Tom Uglow (European CD of Google and YouTube) and more. Here are some spreads:

To get hold of a copy of Ideas Illustrated (£5), visit the YCN store online at shop.ycnonline.com

Also making great use of illustration is Google’s latest issue of Think Quarterly, the Innovation Issue – edited and designed by The Church of London. Written contributors include Google’s own president of advertising, Susan Wojicki, Ogilvy’s head of planning, Russell Davies, Nike’s Hannah Jones (vice president of sustainable business and innovation), and interior designer Kursty Groves. Illustration contributions come from Mitch Blunt, Robert Hanson, Steve Wilson, Noma Bar, and Gary Taxali.

Lift Think Quarterly out of its box to find there are some fridge-style word magnets. It didn’t take long to find they ‘stick’ to the front cover.

More about this issue of Think Quarterly at thinkwithgoogle.co.uk/quarterly/innovation

The Power of Making (September 6 – January 2 2012) is the second V&A and Crafts Council triennial exhibition and this book of the same name (cover shown above), edited by Daniel Charny, contains essays by Daniel Miller, Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, Martina Margetts, Ele Carpenter, and Bruce Sterling. It also showcases a host of works from the exhibition. Designed by Oscar & Ewen. Here are some spreads.

We were also sent the latest issue of GameSpite Quarterly, a magazine devoted to all things computer game related. Issue 7 is called the Encyclopedia of 8-Bit Villains and, well, that’s exactly what it is. From Abobo (Double Dragon) through to Zoda (StarTropics) they’re all here. Well known villains such as Atari’s Asteroids, and Nintendo’s Bowser and Donkey Kong are all written up, along with lesser known baddies such as Namco’s Biggy Man (from Splatterhouse released in 1988) and Goruza from 1990 game release, XEXYZ. This encyclopedia of video game nasties even has entries for Gravity which, according to this tome, made its first appearance as an obstacle to overcome in a video game in Steve Russell’s 1962  Spacewar! game. Also worthy of its own entry is the dreaded Edge Of The Screen – a classic gaming glitch that has plagued the hardiest of gamers since time immemorial (well, since about 1971). Here are some spreads:

To order a copy of GameSpite Quarterly (issue 3 is an encyclopedia of 8-bit heroes) head over to gamespite.net. Paperback issues will cost you $14 while hardback editions will set you back $38 a piece.

Ethereal landscapes and moody figurative scenes in Peter Doig’s comprehensive new monograph

Best known for melancholy and dreamlike renditions of bucolic landscapes, Scottish artist Peter Doig has become one of the most internationally-celebrated painters of his generation. The distinction is all the more striking for a modern artist given such ordinary-seeming subjects and his chosen medium—painterly figurative work initially put him on the global stage in the ’90s.

In a new slipcased monograph of the Turner Prize-winner’s work, publisher Rizzoli offers the most up-to-date and comprehensive collection of paintings and illustrations spanning Doig’s career. The 400 pages include found photographs of unidentified figures and settings that have informed his oeuvre as much as his own surroundings. Though he’s lived in Trinidad since moving there as a child with his family, that environment and other source material serves as starting point for paintings that have more to do with memory and subjectivity than true-to-life depictions.

Snowy, tree-filled scenes—sometimes dotted with a lone figure—account for much of the artist’s subject matter. But blurry cabins and solitary, water-drifting canoes (including Doig’s record-breaking “White Canoe,” which sold at auction for $11.3 million in 2007) also feature prominently among the book’s 350 images, each one eerie and hypnotic in its own way.

With the exception of supplemental essays by art critic Richard Shiff and Catherine Lampert, an art writer and curator, the book’s layout is a clean one, comprising just one illustration per page. The design lends a powerful effect to the overall collection, allowing viewers to get lost in one painting at a time.

Doig’s monograph is currently available for pre-order from Amazon or Powell’s, while the official publication release date is scheduled for 11 October 2011.

Newly launched fine art publishers wire-frame has released its first batch of prints, including work by David Pelham as used on covers of JG Ballard’s novels and perhaps his most famous piece of design, for Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange…

Pelham’s painting, The Terminal Beach (above right), is a forthcoming print in the series but currently the site has prints of his work for Burgess’ novel, A Clockwork Orange, and of his painting, The Drought, up on wire-frame.net. Also available are pieces by Brian Aldiss (Metropolis, shown below) and Brigis Marlin.

Pelham’s cover art for A Clockwork Orange

Pelham discusses his work on A Clockwork Orange and on four of JG Ballard’s novels in Penguin by Designers – the full extract of Pelham’s chapter is on the CR blog, here, but here’s what he had to say about his Ballard paintings:

“I met Jim Ballard through Eduardo Paolozzi,” he writes. “They were great friends. I was very familiar with Ballard’s work, having been a great admirer from way back. I admired the bleak style of his catastrophe novels – this being The Drought – and their heartless depiction of technological and human breakdown and decay. Grim perhaps, but wonderfully written. Drawn to the romance of his apocalyptic imagery I wanted to illustrate his covers myself. Consequently I quickly airbrushed this postcard sized image [of what went on to become the painting for The Drought] to show him the idea and talked to him about his other titles in the list. That’s how we started out ….”

(His high pressure story behind the Burgess cover is also fascinating – and detailed. Read it here.)

Pelham’s painting, The Drought, as used on Ballard’s novel

Forthcoming from wire-frame is a print of Pelham’s painting, The Drowned World, again used on Ballard’s novel of the same name

Each print is on matt 310gsm fine art paper and uses pigment-based lightfast inks. They are individually signed and numbered by the artist (and include an accompanying certificate of authenticity). Further prints by these and other artists are set to be released by wire-frame soon. More at wire-frame.net.

Metropolis by Brian Aldiss