I don't get to read as much as I'd like so sometimes a graphic novel can be pretty handy (let's face it, they're not as demanding as their wordy counterparts). I love Brecht Evens' sumptuous and inky gorgeousness, but lately I've had a craving for content that only women's work will satisfy!

Roz Chast's "Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?" and Vanessa Davis' "Make Me a Woman" both had their moments, but "Probably Nothing" by Matilda Tristram is simply wonderful throughout. Now I'm a full-on fan, I'd recommend it to anyone… loudly!

Reading Nina Stibbe's Love Nina this month has been a joy, not only does it evoke a strong sense of time and place (literary Camden in the 1980s), it's quietly hilarious too.

Nina's missives are so astute that the whole reads like a loosely structured but knowing narrative, written with all the cultural/emotional bite that's usually brought by hindsight.

Sad to say the hardcover jacket's a bit blah, while the new paperback cover's a travesty of ill-fitting populism… the US edition's my favourite so far.

Hairy Who

I like to screech the bike to a halt outside at least one of our local book dealers and check out the roadside bargains each week. On Wednesday I found a curious catalogue for a UK touring exhibition from 1980. 

Who Chicago? is an overview of Hairy Who (and affiliates), a group of Chicago Imagists. Running counter to the C20th abstracted and intellectual turn, much of the work is seriously ugly, untimely and ultimately compelling. Hopefully this documentary will make it to the UK soon.

It was difficult to miss Elisabeth Frink's book of etchings (Tales from Chaucer, 1972, Waddingtons) in the window of my local high street bookseller this week, it's the size, shape and heft of a tombstone.

More familiar with her sculptures (fascistic figures in atomic shades), these overtly raunchy etchings made me curious enough to ask after the price. Four-Thousand-Five-Hundred-Pounds!

I come home and look at some more on the internet, it's almost free. Turns out she illustrated Rilke, Aesop, Homer and a great selection of ornithological studies too.

1000

A friend got Julia Schonlau's 1000 Illustrations for Children (Quarry Books, 2013) as a gift this Christmas and complemented us on our contribution. I didn't know how we'd ended up in any book until I checked the emails and found all the correspondence from Sept 2012.

While I admit my memory does give me cause for concern, it makes our inclusion an especially nice surprise. To be featured among so many fantastic real illustrators is properly humbling… thanks Julia!

Detour

I didn't know too much about Gerbrand Bakker's The Detour before I trained my ready eyes on it. Somewhere Between Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and All Quiet on the Orient Express, this short novel's an inspired choice for the season; simple, sharp and cold as a dry-stone wall.

While the overall design is not entirely awful, both cover and body text are weirdly pixelated, indistinct as though corporeal presence is no longer publishing's utmost priority.

With a cover illustration by the great Leonard Baskin and type by Edward Gorey, here's my paperback copy of Emily Dickinson's poems and letters instead. Dickinson's life and work colour every page of The Detour; mostly grey with sickly blotches of mustard, sepia and lichen-green.

Life

If you're not running too late you can glimpse the curious new Design Museum taking shape behind the hoardings on route to Kensington Olympia... not that Olympia didn't have enough curios of its own at Top Drawer trade fair earlier this week. It's been predictably good to catch up with old friends (now stockists), Black Bough and some of our oldest friends (also now stockists), Present London.

It wasn't all familiar faces though, we spent a few days in the spirited company of Joy, Anna and Rose of London Pooch and Anna Wright, even getting to meet Polly, one half of pattern-mad design duo, Wrap. While I admit the current copy (No.8) is my first, at least I can check out those back issues while I wait for more!

Too preoccupied to scour the charity shops proper, we did find a copy of Charlotte Salomon's (1917—1943) extraordinary document Life? or Theatre? in Oxfam, W8. This untimely 836 page tome dates from the early 1940s and forms a dream-like diary, or early graphic novel, where each gouache panel becomes a fevered or fluid artwork in its own right.

20-80

I could still see the 'All Books 20p' sign at the back of the RSPCA shop when the cashier charged me 80p for Growing Vegetable Soup last week. It was still a bargain.

A quick image search filled the shameful gaps in my knowledge of illustrator, Lois Ehlert. I also saw her penchant for crazy knitwear… now I really am a fan.

The blossom on our courgette plant is spectacular, but the bounty is nothing compared to our generous neighbours', who've put regular veg on our plates for two weeks now.

Bring on the soup!

• Lois Ehlert, Growing Vegetable Soup, 1987

Tessa Hadley is a clever girl for writing the first full novel I've read since motherhood came knocking (really hard on my front door).

After The Master Bedroom and The London Train, this is my third from her these past few years.

Don't ask me what any of them are about though, the artistry's in the telling, not the tale.

CC

Maybe they're deeply unfashionable, I don't know, but when I bought a swatch of Liberty's Bauhaus fabric last year it sparked a little love affair with the patterns of Collier-Campbell.

In an age when creativity means a handlebar moustache motif on a canvas tote, the live's of these sisters, spent in the highly specialised advancement of their aesthetic, is an absolute inspiration.

This ratty old cushion in CC's exuberant signature fabric, Cote d'aZur, repays its 50p over again in given pleasure.

Watch video clips here or here.

In light of this week's glorious days (and the hope of a whole load more), here's some illustrations by Gertrud Zucker from Hannes Hüttner's Jina och Lillebror på landet (Jina & Little Brother in the Country), 1967.

I'd have to type every line into Google Translate to truly understand the text but the illustrations shine high-summer bright from every page.

ASCII!

As the adult incarnation of the archetypal nerdy kid, I've always enjoyed reading. Conversely, Edward didn't really read a book until sometime in his mid-teens. These days we seldom make it to the end of an email, baby food recipe, or some review for anti-wrinkle cream. It's hard to imagine we ever expressed an opinion on the future of the novel.

I recently took a pile of experimental 'ideas' novels along to the charity shop, though not before photographing their exceptional dust jackets. All bearing a kind of stylistic date-stamp, the first cover, Project for a Revolution in New York, is an excellent graphic example of ASCII.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium differs in that it's not a novel, but comes highly recommended by hordes of those-in-the-know. All I remember is some mythological account of the creation of coral. (While Ovid's Perseus rests,  petrifying blood from the severed Medusa's head spills onto seaweed.) And why it sticks in my mind, I'm not quite sure. Maybe it's the arbitrary genesis of a strange and delicate beauty from such noxious horror, or just the idea of sleeping soundly by the shore.

Bee Reprieve

The hive is a buzz with good news as the EU ban the use of pesticides believed to be behind the decline of apian populations. The first time I've ever signed an online petition!

• Bees and Beelines, Judy Hawes/Aliki Brandenberg, 1964 (this edition: Adam & Charles Black, 1969). Found here.

There's a great Grahame Greene short story, The Innocent (1937), whose narrator visits his childhood town and becomes intoxicated by memories of first-love. He finds the worn out knot of a fence where he once posted a declaration and, to his surprise, the undelivered note still nestles inside. Only, there's no poem on the scrap of paper, or even awkward prose, just a brutally smutty anatomical drawing, an inarticulate outline of amorous intent.

Time does have this way of saccharine-sprinkling our memories; I wince at mawkish moments of self-expression in colourful old correspondence or get a shock when some photo proves my favourite top was a little too small... and maybe not such a great colour after all.

Something similar happened coming across these two pics from the mid-90s in box mis-labelled Record Deck. Edward says he'd swear his hair was more James Dean and less Jamie Oliver, while I'd all-but-forgotten I'd ever had my nose pierced!

Seriously good mirror frames though, eh?

Topical Tale

 
• Egbert the Easter Egg, Richard Armour & Paul Galdone, 1965

Like Nun Other

 

What with this week's papal proceedings, I thought I'd post pics of this bonkers children's book from 1971. The author/illustrator, a minor TV celebrity in the 1960s and 70s, went on to write the odd book... increasingly odd; these covered guides to London cafés or the public restrooms of Paris and New York to compendiums of hangovers and disasters. Due to Routh's self-confessed inability to paint faces and fingers, each of his five books for children focus on nuns or Queen Victoria. You might say he made a habit of it.

• Jonathan Routh, The Nuns go to Penguin Island, 1971, Methuen

A Close Watch

Like most long-term lovers, all industry interests aside, Valentine's was never writ particularly large on our calendar. This year I almost understand why couples might need a designated date to ignore the day-to-day drone and focus afresh on their spouse. If only momentarily.

I've spent more time than ever with my partner these recent months, but parenthood and bereavement means I've missed them exponentially. Of course there's a whole new level of intimacy, not just the visceral stuff, but the stream-of-consciousness baby talk; spontaneous and improvised songs and characters that sometimes take you so far beyond the realm of sense, you wonder if you'll ever come back.

Maybe today we can recall the calm constant centre of our very minor maelstrom. Or maybe not.

Happy Valentine's, boot-face.

Perfect weather for penguins this week. While Robert Bright's Which is Willy? (1963, Windmill Press) is wonderfully wintery, this really gets our little wings flapping with anticipation.

Svalbard

So saddening to see the probable fate of the UK's Ash trees turn ever more certain with steady spread of Chalara fraxinea, or Ash Dieback. Maybe it's because trees occupy that time-frame somewhere between the human life-span and deep geological time that we imbue the landscape they create with something like permanence.

When Charles Raymond (of Joy of Sex fame) completed these illustrations in 1973 the Elm was falling prey to the disease that decimated their population. Still, it's heartening to know, irrespective of our blunders here on the surface, all known horticultural specimens form part of Svalbard Global Seed Vault, interned 120 meters beneath a Norwegian sandstone mountain.

Yay

I do enjoy a topical post, no matter how tenuous, so when it came time to congratulate the US on Obama's second term, where better to look than The Museum of American Folk Art's 1983 book, Expressions of a New Spirit? As you might expect, there's a heap of beautiful quilts and these lovely newspaper patterns for a Bird of Paradise bridal piece (1858-63).