More postcards, more George Square. Nothing To Write Home About is a collection of John Hinde postcards, put together by Susan Beale and Michelle Abadie. The messages on the back are included, so it's like dawdlr from 40 years ago. Designed as "a photographic album, a social record, an historical document, humorous tourism, a celebration of Britain, a trip down memory lane, it celebrates the exquistness of the everyday". Part of the proceeds go to Carers UK and there's a celebrity postcard auction at the start of December. Available from Amazon and other good bookshops.

Posted on November 27, 2007 | Filed under: Books Postcards Shopping | Permalink | Comments (4)

Princeton Architectural Press sent me a lovely pile of books. I get asked to write about things now and then, but not many freebies. It was nice in this case to get the goods, and feel like the batch was tailor made. So I'm happy to give them a plug:

• Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects With Unexpected Significance by Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes - some things that look like tat to most people have a story that makes them precious to their owners. This is a really lovely idea. Sweetly presented.
• Hand job: a catalogue of type by Michael Perry - a spanking big book of hand-drawn type. Designery types should like this.
• The Guerilla Art Kit by Keri Smith - impish art projects. Good for kids too.
• The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings by Kaylynn Deveney and Albert Hastings - photolog of a Welsh OAP with his own notes. Very sweet and sad.
• Mingering Mike: the Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar by Dori Hadar. Mind-blowing archive of imaginary record sleeves and the story of the man behind them.

• Paris Changing: Revisiting Eugène Atget's Paris by Christopher Rauschenberg.

Posted on November 13, 2007 | Filed under: Books | Permalink | Comments (5)

Open Week Day 3: Books. I've got a bit of a problem with my reading habits. Since a couple of years ago I can't read fiction. Don't really know what happened, but I can't follow a story. So I stick to non-fiction, mostly biographies, diaries or books that are just about interesting stuff. I'm currently reading Head On/Repossessed by Julian Cope and next up I've got Nothing by Paul Morley to look forward to. The best books I've read lately are 45 by Bill Drummond, The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton, How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson, Lost Cosmonaut by Daniel Kalder and A Year With Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno. There have already been some interesting suggestions for books. Anyone got any more?

Posted on January 31, 2007 | Filed under: Books | Permalink | Comments (15)

I got a question through one of my other sites This is M. Sasek, asking what type face or font is used in Sasek's This is books. Can anyone identify it from the picture above (full size)? This picture is from This is Cape Canaveral scanned in by Ward Jenkins for his great Retro Kid flickr group. There are a few more Sasek's in there plus some other gems so it's well worth a look.

For anyone thinking "Who?" M. Sasek was an artist and illustrator of children's books, the most famous being the This is series of travel books. Born 1916 in Prague he left in 1948 and settled in Munich working for a spell at Radio Free Europe. He died in 1980. There are 18 titles in the This is series, each one describing a city or country, published between 1959 and 1974. He has a remarkable style, evocative of its time but somehow timeless and although the locations have changed over the years the books don't date. I did a page about him when I like started, and when it got a lot of interest decided to move it to a separate site. 3 years on it steadily attracts interest, not in huge quantities but generally from really cool people - lots of illustrators, animators and designers. I neglected it a bit last year but am trying to get back to it now. If you'd like an introduction there is a little slideshow. Some of the books have been reissued - details on This is M. Sasek. You'll like them, you really will.

Posted on January 13, 2007 | Filed under: Books | Permalink | Comments (10)

I couldn't resist a shot of the library catalogue card generator (via The Morning News). How lovely. Being an ex-librarian a call number sprang to mind (I classified books for years and know parts of the Dewey Decimal System off by heart) which turned out to be the number for Research. I guess that's quite appropriate for I like.

Classification systems are pretty fascinating if you like that kind of thing. Any attempt to organise knowledge shouldn't be sniffed at and reading through the Dewey classes is intriguing. There are romantic subjects like Celestial mechanics, Incunabula, Dreams & Mysteries, Salvation & Grace and lots of words to look up in the dictionary like Syllogisms, Theodicy and Eschatology.

Old Melvil Dewey himself was a bit of a character. Having successfully organised everything in the world he turned his passions to spelling reform. He insisted that his name should be spelt Melvil Dui and the American spelling of catalog is all his fault. A quote from his Wikipedia entry:

His theories of spelling reform found some local success at Lake Placid: there is an "Adirondac Loj" in the area, and dinner menus of the Lake Placid Club featured his spelling reform. A September 1927 menu is headed "Simpler spelin" and features dishes like Hadok, Poted beef with noodls, Parsli or Masht potato, Butr, Steamd rys, Letis, and Ys cream. It also advises guests that "All shud see the butiful after-glo on mountains to the east just befor sunset. Fyn vu from Golfhous porch."

Wise cream? The great big fool. Vaguely related: The epic 1995 film Party Girl with Parker Posey as a New York raver who turns into a dedicated librarian, AceJet 170 on flight ticket nostalgia and a whole raft of Flickr library groups including Library postcards.

Posted on January 10, 2007 | Filed under: Books | Permalink | Comments (10)

This week I've been learning all about John Betjeman. It's the centenary of his birth this year so there's a series of programmes on BBC Four. For all that he's one of Britain's most famous poets, I couldn't have told you anything about him apart from the "Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough" line. So, if you're a Betjeman fan, you can imagine that I'm beside myself with glee because he liked so many things that I like - seaside, suburbia, trains, travel (especially the Shell guides), preserving old architecture (with The Victorian Society) and his poems weren't bad either. In the second Betjeman and Me programme Stephen Fry said something about him creating a sort of nostalgia for the modern and Griff Rhys-Jones talked about him making the ordinary extraordinary. All good stuff. Considering I used to read a lot of poetry I can't quite figure out how I missed him. Anyway, I'm looking forward to Metroland on Monday and to reading his books. Where should I start?

Betjeman links:

• Diamond Geezer revisits Metroland (photos on Flickr).
• Why we love John Betjeman by British Sea Power - "even the fact that Rick Stein likes him doesn't put you off".
• Channel 4: The Real John Betjeman - "an apolitical old duffer who spied for Britain".
• Radio 4 Betjeman Season.
• Wikipedia: John Betjeman.

Posted on August 25, 2006 | Filed under: Books | Permalink | Comments (2)

Following on from yesterday's post. Alasdair Gray (Scottish writer and artist) has a blog. Exciting. On the new Art Galleries:

The curator, Mark O’Neill, told me these arrangements were better than the old ones where natural history exhibits, human artefacts and paintings were displayed separately – better because more democratic, since people would have to find their own connections between such very different things, instead of having the connections made clear. I regard this as a Post-modern idea. I am an old-fashioned chap who insists on being just modern.

Posted on July 16, 2006 | Filed under: Books | Permalink

Alain de Botton has a new series on architecture starting tonight - The Perfect Home (More 4 Mon-Wed, Channel 4 Thu-Sat). There is a book that goes with it The Architecture of Happiness, which I've bought but not read yet. I have however just read his book On Seeing and Noticing, a slim Penguin 70 which covers boring places, sadness and Little Chefs ("ugly places full of bad food that are nevertheless resonant with poetry"). And his book The Art of Travel is one of my favourite books ever. One of these books where I savoured every single word. But back to houses: 1. Does anyone know how I can get hold of The Dilapidated Dwelling, Patrick Keiller's film about housing? 2. My new house: a Flickr set.

Posted on May 01, 2006 | Filed under: Architecture Books TV | Permalink