My friend just put me on to the quarterly Cereal Magazine. Thank goodness she did. The magazine covers food, books and travel topics with care and beauty.
Here’s a glimpse of images from the current issue, in a piece they did about the Korean alphabet and language. I’m so excited to see what else Cereal is up to, online and on paper.
Nina Katchadourian creates poetry and comedy from the spines of library books. Her collection of work is available in print: Sorted Books (about $14 from Amazon).
Nina describes how she began this project in 1993:
I suddenly recalled a moment in the university library when, looking for a book, I had turned my head sideways as I walked down the stacks and thought how spectacular it would be if all the titles formed an accidental sentence when read one after the other in a long chain. Standing amidst the bookshelves in Half Moon Bay, my next move was simply to make this imaginary accident real. I spent days shifting and arranging books, composing them so that their titles formed short sentences. The exercise was intimate, like a form of portraiture, and it felt important that the books I selected should function as a cross section of the larger collection.
(*via Brain Pickings)
Photographer Adrien Broom dreamed up a project called Where did All the Colors Go? It’s recently been backed on Kickstarter and I’m looking forward to watching it unfold.
Shot as still photography and simultaneously as a short video piece, Broom plans to make a children’s book out of the images and concept. A darling little girl wakes up to a world void of color where everything is white. Bunnies, onions, frosting, clouds, snow. It’s not just that everything is white, it’s that there are only white things.
She then finds a doorway that leads to red, a brick road, roosters, red velvet cakes…and on it goes as the world of color opens up to her.
Enjoy this video teaser below and follow on Adrien’s website for more images as they are completed. Each set takes a month to build and develop.
Long live Roald Dahl and his magical stories! This is a wonderful postage series, designed by Magpie Studio for the UK’s mail system, Royal Mail. There’s a nice interview with Magpie co-founder Ellul, on the How Design blog. And if you’re in the US like me, you can still order these stamps as keepsakes even if they’ll do no good for your actual postage.
Emma Thompson was responsible for authoring a new book in the beloved Peter Rabbit series! The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit is the 24th book. I tend to trust Emma completely, so I’m not too worried about how it came out, but the pressure is on! This is the first book since 1930 and the only one written by anyone other than Beatrix Potter.
I listened to Emma in an interview on NPR. This was a highlight, when talking about some made-up words and a particular writing style she used:
Like, ‘inside wrapped in brown paper were some excellent sandwiches of cheese and pickle’; it’s not the kind of construction that you get anymore. What, now we say, ‘cheese and pickle sandwiches.’ But there’s something about ‘excellent sandwiches of cheese and pickle’ that’s very Potter-esque. It’s Victorian, you know? … It’s an old form, and I find it very charming. And I find it draws me into the books still. So I wanted to hold on to that.
Writer, blogger and music lover Maria Popova of Brain Pickings started a new web project called Literary Jukebox. “Daily quote from a favorite book, thematically matched with a song.”
I really like what I’ve seen so far of it. Check it out. Click to listen and then read.
(*via Notcot)
Photographer Ed Panar created a book of images called Animals That Saw Me. It’s a great concept. And the images explain it all.
For a bit more detail, here’s the description from Panar’s site:
Roaming the natural and urban world with a camera for over 16 years, often alone, on foot, keeping a low profile, Ed Panar has repeatedly been caught in the act of photography—not by other people, but by a random assortment of familiar animals: cows, cats, frogs, dogs, turtles, deer, geese…you name it. The animal sees Ed, and Ed sees the animal; an unspoken communication passes between them. If he’s lucky, the moment is captured on film, catalogued, tagged for future reference. In Animals That Saw Me: Volume One Panar brings together the first collection of his most surprising and unexpected encounters with ordinary fauna—a brief, deadpan field study of the uncanny moment of recognition between species. What exactly have the animals seen? The pictures are a reminder that we must appear as strange and exotic to them as they do to us.
Available for purchase ($29.95) at Spaces Corners or where I found it at Powerhouse Books in Brooklyn.
What a fun idea! The Tattoo Notebook is 100 pages of matte drawing paper printed with imagery of all sorts of limbs and body surfaces.
Available from Suck UK for £ 12.00.
(*via Notcot)
Cute and cheap products for how to make use of your Instragram photos by PRINTSTAGRAM. Fun.
Tiny books (3 for $10); Mini prints (48 for $12); Mini books (2 books, 50 pictures for $12); Posters ($25); Stickers (2 books, 252 pictures for $10).
(*via Svvply)
Flavorwire recently had a feature post about 20 beautiful bookstores around the world. So much fun for travel daydreaming and visions of whiling away an afternoon. Here are some of my favorites from the list.
Above, Cafebreria El Pendulo in Mexico City. Below, Ler Devagar in Lisbon.
Livraria da Vila in São Paulo:
Shakespeare & Company in Paris:
Selexyz Bookstore in Maastricht, Holland:
The American Book Center in Amsterdam:
Browse the complete list at Flavorwire.