Gerhard Steidl is Making Books an Art Form — The New Yorker

Fascinating profile in the New Yorker last week. The whole thing is worth a read, but here are a few of my favorite bits.

Steidl was struck by the book’s durability: despite having been made in the fourteen-fifties, it looked almost new.

Dayanita Singh, an artist who lives in New Delhi, has been publishing with Steidl since 2000. She told me, “Everything is done to keep you focussed on whatever you are doing. There is this utter concentration—nothing else that is going on in your life is relevant. It’s like if you went to a Vipassana retreat for ten days.” She added, “He might call you down at five in the morning and you could be stark naked, and he wouldn’t notice.

Steidl is not sentimental about print qua print; he reads the newspaper on an iPad when he is travelling. But there is nonetheless a moral dimension to his bookmaking, a conviction that the book remains an ideal vehicle for culture’s remediating powers.

Steidl’s family was poor, and his parents had received no formal education. There were few books at home, and it was momentous for Steidl when he received one—Hans Christian Andersen’s “Thumbelina”—as a Christmas gift. Steidl begged his sister to read it aloud to him immediately, and afterward he told his father how much he had loved it. Steidl’s father, angered that the children had finished the book so quickly, struck the sister. Years later, Steidl’s father explained that he had believed the book, having been read through, was now useless; before buying the gift, he’d never been in a bookstore.

The Strange and Grotesque Doodles in the Margins of Medieval Books — Atlas Obscura

“Manuscripts can be seen as time capsules,” says Johanna Green, Lecturer in Book History and Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow. “And marginalia provide layers of information as to the various human hands that have shaped their form and content.” From intriguingly detailed illustrations to random doodles, the drawings and other marks made along the edges of pages in medieval manuscripts—called marginalia—are not just peripheral matters. “Both tell us huge amounts about a book’s history and the people who have contributed to it, from creation to the present day.”

Cool stuff.

Why We Use Giant Post-It Notes As Our Publishing Calendar — The Focus Course Blog

With 90% of our working hours spent staring at a screen, we’re always looking for ways to incorporate more analog tools.

For us, this publishing calendar has one purpose, and it does it really well.

What we believe in.

The humble ballpoint pen has become a new symbol of China’s innovation economy — Quartz

Fascinating. And there’s  some great stuff here about the surprising difficulty of manufacturing ball point pens.

New letters shed light on Hemingway’s unrequited love and early life — Paris Review

What have survived are two previously unknown letters from Hemingway to Coates, kept in a trunk for decades. The correspondence dates to a time when Hemingway was not yet famous—he had only a handful of short stories to his name.

This is a fascinating find.

The hand-painted background scenes of the original Star Wars trilogy — Jason Kottke

Back in the 70s and 80s, before photorealistic computer graphics became commonplace, elaborate background sets in movies were hand-painted. Sploid’s Jesus Diaz took at look at the background art featured in the original Star Wars trilogy and the artists who painted them.

These are cool.

‘Last Jedi’ Trailer Reveals Books and Paper Exist in ‘Star Wars’

Another point for books and paper. If they were good enough for the Jedi, they’re good enough for me.