Wriggly Riso

This season our fluorescent Octopus print is juggling junk in the Good Stuff section of ANORAK magazine. All press is a plus, though a mention from something you admire is much better!

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.

Happy New Year!

Pssst! Rumour is there's 20% off everything in the Lisa Jones Studio Shop this month. Simply enter the code HOORAY at the checkout and begin 2014 with bargains.

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.

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.

150

Mmm, now, who best to illustrate 150 years of the London Underground this week; Enid Marx; Eduardo Paolozzi; Harry Beck; Edward Johnston or Charles Holden? Why not have some Marianne Straub from the V&A's understandably excellent archive.

Hubbub

Spent last weekend staying with pals in London's bright autumnal sunlight. We felt like just-landed aliens from a US film, eyeing the human hubbub and sudden wealth of stuff with a too naked curiosity, putting away pastries like we'd never tasted your Earth food.

The baby went to his first private view too, Hannah Sawtell's crisply coherent Vendor at the Bloomberg Space but like good parents we swerved the after-show party for some more of your Earth food. And, though we'd missed the opening of Simon Martin's UR Feeling at The Camden Arts Centre, we caught up with him after the Sunday talk from Frieze's Dan Fox.

Simon's work may look like a dour museological re-presentation of the C20th anthropological artefact but plays-out like an ultra-hip cultural studies lecture. Neither entirely canonical nor wholly obscure, works selected here seem to operate on the boundaries of this-or-that discipline. This sharp curatorial collection forms the research for a forthcoming film and includes pieces from Sottsass, Burton and Shore, alongside his own open-edition poster, a knowing skit on the structural exposé of New Wave marketing. 

from top: Richard Artschwager, Chair, edition of 6, 1965-2000 // Storm Thorgerson/Hipgnosis, LP cover for XTC's Go2, 1978 // Ettore Sottsass/Memphis, Malabar room divider, 1982 // Stephen Shore, Twenty-First and Spruce Street, 1974

Really?

Most Eksellent

Sköna Skämt is an international survey of cartoonists and, while its contents are broadly mired in the politics of the period (1985), the alphabetised chapter headings by Swedish designer, Olle Eksell, have aged with exceptional grace. I know it's wrong to destroy a book, but they'll make the greatest children's wall frieze. And how did I choose which letters to scan here? They all appear in Lisa Jones Studio, of course. Yep, I really am that childish!

Fingers & Thumbs

Our crappy studio sprang a leak during the UK's last soggy fortnight. While shifting stuff out of harm's way we rediscovered a nice poster and a naïve etching. Edward spent a sweary day framing them up (don't mention the huge gap at the foot of the black one). The poster's not just gobbledegook (or double-dutch) though, if you've not heard her, Yma Sumac was a loopy sounding Peruvian soprano associated with the exotica movement.

Our Love

Donna Summer (1948-2012) featured on a handful of popular culture's finest moments, for sure, but that AIDS-as-punishment-from-God controversy was a real stinker and no mistake. Here's the only link I can find to 1979's Our Love, a track not really cited in today's obituaries though I love the Acid touches at the end/drum pattern on the chorus... and so did New Order! The images are Gran Fury's late 80s agitprop for ACT UP, to whom she later apologised.

So pleased to receive a copy of One Timid Babbler from Silver Jungle's Joanna Skipwith this week. The same little format as our collaborations, One Timid Babbler features Hannah Turner's fantastic illustrations of equally fantastically named birds: Lemon Poplets; Sugar Marshlings; Chesnut Ruffles; Banded Frowls or Fiery Smidgeons. A simple counting game is introduced with each bird, building to more complex additions, with colour and pattern also combining to a cacophonous chorus! The dawn fade on the cover is paired with a dusk fade on the closing pages and all are wonderfully offset with a smashing Modern/Didone typeface. See more at Silver Jungle... and maybe check-out our books while you're there. Tee-hee!

Nice to see the BBC use Faber & Faber's preferred font, Albertus, throughout the otherwise unremarkable Arena documentary The Dreams of William Golding. "Unprecedented access to the unpublished diaries" did little to dull the image of Golding teaching while writing bombastic boys books destined only to be taught. Yet between those well-known works, sodden with allegory, there's a peculiar, less noisy novelist. I'm unsure what led me to some of the in-between works, Free Fall (1959) for instance, the truly odd Darkness Visible (1979), or the late literary romp The Paper Men (1984), but they're all still there on the shelf; a watermark of sorts. Sometimes I half expect to find Golding's imagined town, Stillborn, out there on Google Maps.

Spent the first week of the year in London catching up with the friends we've missed so desperately since moving to Sussex*. Nice as it was, it wasn't all bad coming back to our little house (and Pocket, the cat, was certainly pleased to see us), but I still can't help wishing the tube stopped somewhere nearer the foot of our hill.

* Our thoughts are with one friend in particular right now, whose family last week began to realise their 19 year struggle for justice over the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

• Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) with Epiphany, 1964

TD11

Trade fairs tend not to be the most exciting venues but this week's Top Drawer came pretty close to fun; catching up with our favourite stockists and making a few friends. Our new print was well received too, especially by cat-crazy folk like the excellent illustrator, Helen Hancocks (evidenced below). Thanks to everyone who dropped by!

So Long, Stuff

This week we began dismantling our lives in the promise of reconstructing them elsewhere afresh. Obviously this starts with a radical de-clutter on that latterday Bonfire of the Vanities, eBay. A Maclamp gave good return alongside an old Routemaster destination blind, but David Hicks books got a huge consumer thumbs-down.

Of all the lots though, I was especially sorry to say so long to a cache of posters (mostly travel & tourism from the 1960s but also this WVS public information number from 1956), a totally 80s Janette Beckman photographic print I found on the street, and a heap of wonderfully pretentious art books we'll realistically never read.

• Janette Beckman, Rosemarie, LA 1981
• The Women’s Voluntary Service was set up in 1938 to augment the work of the ARP. This campaign dates from the early years of the Cold War and was instigated ‘to inform one in five of the women between the ages of 16 and 70 in Great Britain of the simple things they could do to protect their homes and families in the event of nuclear attack – should it ever come.’ [Source: District Nursing Archive]

• Richard Hamilton's typographic version of Marcel Duchamp's The Green Box (1934), 1975 (3rd edition of 2500)