http://www.themillions.com Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:00:33 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Last year we had fun comparing the U.S. and U.K. book cover designs of a sample of the Rooster contenders, so I decided to do it again with this year's batch. There are all sorts of marketing considerations behind these designs, and it's interesting to see how designing for ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/03/judging-books-by-their-covers-u-s-vs-u-k.html One might think that physical books are on the verge of extinction, given all the consternation over ebooks of late. There's a faction in this debate that predicts that physical books will become something of a rarity as the ebook market matures and the technologies involved become ubiquitous. In a ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/02/deckle-edge-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction.html For about a year, the books in our apartment threatened to swallow my husband and me.  Adding another bookcase, like adding another lane to an already clogged freeway, didn't help--it only encouraged us to read more, and the piles kept growing.  During the holidays, it got so bad that those ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/the-great-book-purge-of-2010.html If you are a popular and prolific enough author, an interesting thing happens to your books, they all begin to look the same. This is the primary outward manifestation of an author as a brand. As a large oeuvre gets rounded out to perhaps a dozen or two ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/06/uniformity-and-blandness-designing-body_10.html The upcoming paperback edition of Netherland looks suspiciously like the 10 year anniversary edition of Infinite Jest. What say you? http://www.themillions.com/2009/03/up-in-sky-it_12.html I've always thought that British book covers, generally speaking, are nicer looking than their American counterparts, with the latter seeking to target a demographic rather than to dazzle the eye. With this in mind, the following is an incredibly unscientific experiment in aesthetics. I've taken as a sample ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/02/judging-books-by-their-covers-america_25.html In one of my first posts for the Millons, a post on books used for purposes other than reading, I mentioned the British artist Su Blackwell and her book cut sculptures. Blackwell's work is enchanting and I find myself (in week six of a post-dissertation/graduate school illiterate malaise in ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/01/books-not-for-reading-redux-su_7628.html If you thought books were just to read - to entertain, educate or enlighten - then think again.Macleans Magazine ran a piece recently on a little bookshop in Old Montreal that displays its wares as museum-pieces. Librissime offers Dante's Divine Comedy, "bound in buttercream-white calfskin leather, a hand-chiseled brass rendering ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/01/books-as-objects-artifacts-and_8018.html I'm seriously digging these new cover designs for the British editions of John O'Hara classics BUtterfield 8 and Appointment in Samarra. They were done by illustrator Tomer Tanuka, and he shares his inspirations for the covers at his blog Tropical Toxic (where you'll also find posts from his twin ... http://www.themillions.com/2008/04/judging-books-by-their-covers.html The cover of this past week's New Yorker, "Shelf of Life" by Adrian Tomine, could be a visual entry in our "Books as Objects" column. An avid reader of the magazine (NOT our fearless editor and self-professed NYer junkie, Max) examined the cover art and observed that it carried a ... http://www.themillions.com/2008/02/books-as-objects.html