The surrealists had “automatic” abstraction; channeled images from the subconscious. I shot these pictures out of a car window. With their zippy vertical lines, they remind me of Barney Newman. Anyway, the colors are pretty, and the surfaces look painterly in an Abstract Expressionist kind of way.
Have the good folks at Amazon.com been reading this here blog? Last week, I noted the strange appearance of the all-capped phrase “ROUGH-CUT EDGE” displayed adjacent to the title of my book. That phrase was neither appealing nor accurate, and as you can see above (and here), it has now been changed to the more correct “DECKLE EDGE” (though I really wonder about the necessity of all caps that still make it more prominent than the title and—ahem—the author’s name. Why couldn’t they just write “this book has a deckle edge,” after the hardcover reference, maybe with a hyperlink to a page explaining what it is for the uninitiated.) Anyway, I’m happy to report that the change from “rough cut” to “deckle edge” is being implemented across Amazon. The deckle edge only makes the package finer, so advertising its presence in a positive way is a good thing—as opposed to a warning that might scare off some buyers. And one thing they haven’t changed: that 34 percent discount for preorders still stands.
The folks at Amazon have posted a short “why I wrote the book” piece on their Master of Shadows page. “Peter Paul Rubens gives us a lot to think about in his canvasses of rushing color, action, and puckered flesh, so it’s not surprising that his work as a diplomat and spy has been neglected,” it begins. There’s even a photo of your trusty author.
There’s something romantic, eerie, and pathetic all at once about any work of abandoned architecture. Fairgrounds are especially ghostly and melancholic; in their crumbling, weedy decrepitude there’s an almost palpable aura of busier, festive days. Before its demolition in 2000, I liked to sneak around the shuttered Thunderbolt rollercoaster in Coney Island, snapping pictures. You could almost feel the wooden rumble that so distressed a youthful Alvy Singer. The abandoned but still extant Barrington Fairgrounds, hidden in plain sight on the road into Great Barrington, in Western Massachussetts, is another favorite. After a season of heavy rains, it is now overgrown with especially lush vegetation. I shot the pictures here through a swarm of mosquitos on a recent visit. Its future is in limbo, and has been for some time. Across the road is a large, busy shopping center, recently opened. Its customers by and large ignore the mouldering relic, some on purpose, others simply blind to its camouflaged presence. In America, shopping is the new entertainment—I guess that’s nothing new. Still, it’s strange to see the center’s parking lot packed while the fairgrounds, a literal stone’s throw away, is devoid of any traffic.
The overgrown entry booths look ready for business that isn’t likely to come anytime soon. Everyone’s at the Big Y supermarket across the street.
The doublewide staircase leads to the racetrack grandstand.
Underneath are concession areas.
The one-room schoolhouse was used as a counting house for the track. These days, there’s no one doing any counting.
Looks pretty darn sharp. The title type, I believe, will be stamped in gold foil, so it should really jump. Thanks to designer Emily Mahon and the rest of the team at Nan Talese. Altogether, the book is going to be quite the handsome package. Did I mention it is available for pre-order?
In one of his classic routines, George Carlin wondered that there could be a “whole industry based on keeping an eye on your stuff.” In New York City, where space is precious, we have veritable storage palaces, air-conditioned warehouses with sophisticated security systems. Out in the hinterlands, the form is somewhat different: typically a few long rows of sheds with a series of garage-sized private enclosures. They create some rather stark geometries in the landscape that remind me of the work of Robert Adams. I’ve seen a good number of these developments recently, usually close to an exit on a major traffic artery. The one pictured here is in Craryville, New York, at the junction of the Taconic Parkway and Route 23. The Martindale Chief diner is across the road. They make a mean BLT.
Last week I directed my browser to the Amazon page of my forthcoming book, Master of Shadows; though it’s a bit early to be tracking its ranking—it does not come out until late October—I did want to make sure the excellent early reviews it has received have made it onto the site. They have, but I was also surprised to see another addition. Blaring out at me, just after the title and in all caps, is the bracketed phrase “ROUGH-CUT EDGE.” I presumed, correctly, that this referenced the fact that the book will have what bibliophiles call a deckle (or deckel) edge; that is, the fore edges of its pages (opposite the spine) will be rough hewn as opposed to trimmed to a smooth, flat surface. I thought it odd—a technical glitch?—that the notice about this very nice feature was listed in all caps, and larger than the title. I sent off a note to my publisher, who then put it to Amazon, whose agents responded that the extra-large notice was there intentionally, to avoid blowback from buyers who might be upset about receiving a defective book. Actually, I discovered, that’s nothing new.
The modern deckle edge is factory produced, but previously it was a natural product of the paper-making and binding processes. The deckled edge is produced when a sheet of paper is made; it is simply the loose pulp fibers at the edge of an untrimmed sheet. When printed sheets were folded and gathered into signatures, their ragged edges were often left untrimmed; sometimes, the signatures were even left uncut, leaving it to the reader to slice open his or her own book, albeit with care. (This luxury guaranteed the book’s pristine condition.) By the beginning of the twentieth century, modern printing technology was advanced to the point that books were by standard trimmed at their edges. Ever since, however, publishers of quality books have artificially created the deckle edge to honor the bookmaking tradition, as a conveyor of prestige, and because it simply feels nice in the hand and looks good. (It also makes it easier to keep tabs on your progress as you read.) Needless to say, no good deed should go unpunished. As early as 1900, the New York Times was receiving letters from carping book buyers, outraged by the “deckel trend” or “fad.” Here’s a classic from 1903:
We Brooklynites have always known how to complain. Compared to some of the other letters received by the paper, however, this is actually on the tame side. While I certainly don’t agree with its argument, I will say it’s nice to see how seriously people used to take their books—some still do. In any case, let me just state for the record that Master of Shadows, with its very elegant rough edge, is now available for preorder—and at a 34 percent discount.
Albert Goodwill Spalding was the great impressario of professional baseball in its early years, a pitcher of unparalleled ability who leveraged his skill on the diamond into the sporting goods empire that still bears his name. He was the power behind the National League, the owner of its Chicago franchise (today’s Cubs), and the man responsible for disseminating the game’s ersatz Genesis story, according to which Civil War hero Abner Doubleday invented the sport in Cooperstown. When it came to wrapping the game in the American flag, there was no owner more skilled than Spalding, who went so far as to take a pair of teams on a world tour in the winter of 1888 with the stated mission to spread the game and the American way clear around the globe. (That trip is the subject of my book, Spalding’s World Tour.) Given this history, you might think Spalding would make his home in a Colonial manse of ample proportion—something traditional, with a white picket fence and plenty of leg room. Think again. In his golden years, Spalding moved from Chicago to San Diego, where he and his second wife helped fashion a compound for proponents of Theosophy, the inscrutable quasi-mystical religion founded by the Russian-born visionary Madame Helena Blavatsky. It seems unlikely Spalding was ever serious about the religious aspects of Theosophy, though he supported its progressive educational ideas, and appears happy to have humored his wife’s interest in it. (Some conspiracy minded historians have noted a Theosophist connection to Doubleday.)
The house the Spaldings built for themselves (seen at top in 1901) was an oriental fantasy, an octagonal structure with an external spiral staircase, extensive internal carvings, and a crystal on the roof that somehow helped the inhabitants channel their energies. Spalding, for the record, spent most of his time on the private nine-hole golf course he built adjacent to the house, often engaging in Republican politics. After his death, and that of his wife, the entire project lost its chief financial benefactors, and dissolved. The house, however, remains, and today is the administration building for the evangelical Point Loma Nazarene University. They’ve done a lovely job maintaining it, as the photos here illustrate. Whatever one thinks of the school’s teachings, it seems an eminently appropriate adaptation.
When you think about national schools of typography, Belgium isn’t the first country that comes to mind. There’s Switzerland, birthplace of Helvetica and home to an indigenous school of gridded modern design. From Italy we have classicism, from France neoclassicism. Holland generally overshadows its southern neighbor in the design fields. Belgium, however, has a distinctive typographic identity that is both steeped in history and essentially optimistic, if not playful. Two fine examples: the “A” of Antwerp’s city logo, with its blinking hash marks, and the bulbous “B” that is the ubiquitous symbol for the Belgian railway system. Both suggest the national obsession with the comic strip—Belgium, after all, is the country that has given us Tintin.
Any discussion of Belgian typography naturally begins with Antwerp’s Plantin Press, founded in 1555 by the French emigre Christophe Plantin. Under his direction, and later under the oversight of his grandson Balthasar Moretus, the press, distinguished by its famous compass colophon, was the preeminent clearinghouse for humanist ideas in Northern Europe, and was renowned also for its elegant, beautifully made books. (Peter Paul Rubens, a childhood friend of Moretus, often contributed illustrations and designs, and also published with the house.) Today, a visit to the Plantin-Moretus Museum is one of the great pleasures of any trip to Antwerp. The old presses and type matrices look like they’re still in working order.
I would suggest that there’s no more enjoyable place for the modern typophile to stroll than a quiet lane in Brussels or Bruges, Ghent or Antwerp. To each his own, we all have our favorites. I’m partial to the elegant curling serifs that mark an old Antwerp warehouse. Not hard to figure out why.
Metropolis has posted a slideshow of the outtake photographs by Sean Hemmerle for my story on New York’s ballparks. The pictures are phenomenal, so click over and take a look. And if you haven’t read it, the story is here. I’m happy to say it’s been getting much positive feedback. Here’s how it starts:
There are times—too many of them—when it is hard, very hard, to be a baseball fan. I do not mean those days when your team has fallen to its rival by some ignominious score, though that is frustrating. I refer to something more corrosive, a breaking of the unspoken covenant between fan and team on which professional baseball depends. By this agreement, the fan pledges undying loyalty to his team, and in return, said team makes every possible effort to disguise the fact that said fan’s loyalty has been pledged not to a benevolent civic institution but to a mercenary corporate oper ation. It is this suspension of disbelief that allows us to enjoy the game in all its innocence; and this, to a large degree, is why we become fans in the first place. Baseball is at once our national pastime and national palliative.
