Fall Favorites Preview: Three really cool books that just showed up here at the house.

   

Not a lot to connect these three – but they're three books I've been selling all summer long for Chronicle Books and their distribution partner publishers, Laurence King and Princeton Architectural Press – and they have been really warmly received by the bookstore buyers I've been talking with.

Girl In The Kitchen
by Stephanie Izard with Heather Shouse
photographs by Dan Goldberg
Chronicle Books | 9780811874472 | $29.95 | Sept 2011

The first cookbook from the winning chef of season four of Top Chef, and now the chef/owner at Chicago's hot restaurant, Girl & The Goat.

First off, in the category of cookbooks by celebrity chefs, this is a great one. Though I haven't yet made my way to Girl & The Goat for a dinner reservation, Chef Izard's reputation precedes her. And this book seems to do a wonderful job of capturing her lively personality and her way with mixing flavors and inspirations.

Like all of Chronicle Books' cookbooks, it's beautifully produced with funky & highly cookable text design, luscious photography, and a rich blend of insider tips, personal history, and yes, recipes. You can check out a few sample pages at Chronicle Books' page for the book.

(Chef Izard's co-author on this book is Heather Shouse, the well-traveled food writer and author of Food Trucks, a survey of the nation's best & coolest food trucks.)

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Graphic Design Thinking: Beyond Brainstorming
edited by Ellen Lupton
Princeton Architectural Press (dist. by Chronicle Books) | 9781568989792 | $24.95 | July 2011

Princeton Architectural Press's resident genius for inspiration, design chops, and generally thinking outside the box is Ellen Lupton. Before Graphic Design Thinking, she also gave us Thinking With Type, Indie Publishing, Graphic Design: The New Basics, and one of my territory's all-time best-selling books from Princeton Architectural Press, D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself. She is also the curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore.

This new book packs a ton into fewer than 200 pages: it's a toolkit for designers, writers, filmmakers – any humans, really – on ways to think about a problem (a design brief, a stalled project, that troublesome second novel), how to unleash your brain's creativity, and how to structure your ideas.

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Let's Make Some Great Art
by Marion Deuchars
Laurence King Publishing (dist. by Chronicle Books) | 9781856697866 | $19.95 | Aug 2011

A tall book, a beautiful object, with paper that begs to be drawn in or doodled upon. An inspiration.

But nothing I could say about this book will match what these charming introductory videos will show you. (All via the author's page at Vimeo.)

Ta-da! It's my3videos!

How to draw a simple bird from Marion Deuchars on Vimeo.

Draw on the Plinth from Marion Deuchars on Vimeo.

Can you draw the Mona Lisa's smile? from Marion Deuchars on Vimeo.

The book has a lovely homepage all its own, too. Explore more.

Spring 2010: Chronicle Books' illustrated books

Here's the introduction to the Spring 2010 First Impressions series.

The Art of McSweeney's
By McSweeney's
Chronicle Books | 9780811866231 | $45 | March 2010

Longtime fans of McSweeney's fine products know that there is a crew of passionate, book-loving, word-loving insane people working side-by-side with Dave Eggers behind the scenes to make every issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Wholphin, and their stand-alone book projects, come out as magically as they do.  I know some of them in a distant-cousin-who-used-to-live-closer-than-they-do-now sort of way, from back when I was a sales rep for PGW, their distributor to bookstores.

When I was sitting in those sales conference meetings and the folks from McSweeney's would come in and pitch their upcoming products to us, describing in maddeningly vague yet tantalizing detail, you couldn't help but be caught up in it.  Possibly my favorite memory of a McSweeney's sales conference was when they described the then-upcoming Issue #22, it of the three separate volumes of poetry-chains, unused F. Scott Fitzgerald story ideas, and current Oulipo experiments.  It went something like this.  They described how there would be three parts, and "well, we're trying to figure out a way to bind each volume into hardcovers with magnets."  Silence.  Then gasps.  Magnets!

And they did it.  They made a book with magnets.

You can learn about that issue of the Concern and more – pick up this inspirational look back at all the amazing creativity that has come out of McSweeney's, an oral history of sorts, with all the players remembering how their favorite projects came to be.

Naturally it's a beautiful object of a book, with dozens of tiny short stories printed on the book jacket.  No magnets that I'm aware of.

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Ramayana: Divine Loophole
By Sanjay Patel
Chronicle Books | 9780811871075 | $29.95 | Jan 2010

  

I first met Sanjay Patel on the Internet.  At the time, I was the above-mentioned PGW sales rep and regular Boing Boing reader.  A Pixar animator, Patel had just put together his own self-published edition of Little India (which eventually became The Little Book of Hindu Deities) and it got a mention on Boing Boing.  I was really interested in how it looked and I ordered a copy from him.  We corresponded briefly about ways to help bring his book to a wider audience, but what happened in the end was that Plume brought out a really charming and beautiful edition of Hindu Deities.

Since then, at least on the book front, there's been silence.  But now, after years of work, Sanjay Patel is back with a wonderfully illustrated retelling of the Ramayana in his own style: Ramayana: Divine Loophole.

Fans of Sita Sings The Blues will definitely find something to love here.

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Tiny Art Director: A Toddler and Her Vision
By Bill Zeman
Chronicle Books | 9780811872294 | $14.95 | March 2010

Based on the well-loved blog, this book showcases the parallel development of Bill Zeman's talent as on-demand-illustrator (primarily for his in-house client, his daughter) and her growing skill and imperiousness as a demanding art director. 

The Brief: I want you to draw me a dinosaur! Not a scary one! He's taking a bath. The Critique: I don't like him. Job Status: RejectedBeginning when she was two, Zeman's daughter would give him a brief for a new art assignment, typically involving dinosaurs or crocodiles.  After his piece was complete, she would evaluate his work, frequently with withering disdain, and either accept or reject the work.

Capturing all that is enchanting and frustrating about both parenting and working as an illustrator-for-hire, Tiny Art Director is a fun little book (and still ongoing blog!) with a lot to laugh about.

my3books' First Impressions for Spring 2010: Princeton Architectural Press

Recap: Here's the introduction to the First Impressions series of posts.

Princeton Architectural Press is distributed to bookstores by Chronicle Books.  These three books on their spring list absolutely wowed the reps in the conference room – wonderfully illustrated books, a quirky take on pop culture, a peek inside the lives of creative people.  You can count on PAP to deliver books in those veins every season, right alongside their signature architectural monographs and reference books for professionals.

Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?
by Kate Bingaman-Burt
Princeton Architectural Press (Chronicle Books) | 9781568988900 | $19.95 | Mar 2010

Alien anthropologists wondering where all our money went in the first decade of the third millennium A.D. would do well to lay their tentacles on this book.  On the surface, it's a diary of self-absorption and typical consumerism, but with a closer look, Obsessive Consumption cleverly leaves those first impressions in the dust.

A professor of graphic design in Portland, Bingaman-Burt has been documenting her personal relationship with consumerism across a range of artistic endeavors.  Here in this book, though, she bears witness with a daily drawing of something that she spent money on that day, beginning on February 5, 2006.  The book covers the first three years of her documentary urges and her impulse spending.  From her monthly credit card bills to a bottle of soda at the CVS to an iPhone (finally, on 11/21/08!) to more fancy artist's pens (the last entry), Bingaman-Burt bears witness to how we live today, and where all the money goes.

Her drawings are tart doodles, combining representative line art, squiggly captions, and how much money she spent and where she spent it.

Fans of the documentary & book Handmade Nation (also from Princeton Architectural Press) will recognize her work - she provided all the illustrations for the book.  Kate Bingaman-Burt can be found here on the web, with a blog here and you can even buy a print of one of her pages at 20x200.  Twitter.  Etsy.  Flickr. Frankly, I think she may be the most findable, connected author I've ever profiled on my3books.

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Lists: To-do's, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts & Other Artists' Enumerations from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art
By Liza Kirwin
Princeton Architectural Press (Chronicle Books) | 9781568988887 | $24.95 | March 2010

This book makes a nice pairing with Obsessive Consumption, above, providing another way to peer inside the surprisingly mundane lives of artists.  Curator Liza Kirwin has gathered from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art dozens of examples of unremarkable lists made by remarkable men and women. 

The lists themselves demonstrate clearly that geniuses truly are just like you and me. But it is precisely those actual accomplishments outside of the mundane list-making realm that make these lists worthy of collection, curation, and in the case of this book, further study.  We see lists of paintings sold, lists of appointments, lists of books to read and more.  Many of the lists give us more than just daily ephemera: we see Pablo Picasso listing his recommendations for the epoch-making Armory Show in 1912, Alexander Calder's address book is a who's who of the Parisian scene when he lived there.

The catalog copy provides a list of its own: the artists who have been collected here, including Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Andrew Wyeth.  And yes, the list does goes on.

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Bird Watching
by Paula McCartney
Princeton Architectural Press (Chronicle Books) | 9781568988559 | $50 | Feb 2010

Another clever subversion of the observer's expectations, Bird Watching documents artist Paula McCartney's recent work in art and nature photography.

Each photograph captures a scene of purest wilderness - trees, branches, sky, pine needles underfoot, distant trails.  Carefully framed in each photograph is a beautiful specimen of passerine, or perching bird.  Notations accompany each photo, citing location, weather conditions and descriptive text of each documented bird.

Look a second time at these photos, though, and you may begin to see that there is more artist than naturalist at work in this journal.  Each bird has been carefully affixed with wires or strings to the branches, because these birds were purchased at craft stores.  McCartney's work is walking the divide between the artificial and the real, and along the way, she has found a way to make the real world feel that much more vivid.

You can spot some examples of her work on her page at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography, and at the web site for the Photo-Eye Gallery in Santa Fe, NM.  Her own web site is here.

Before the sleds and shovels come out: 3 books about snow for kids

Here at the very beginning of December, before we Snow Belt dwellers come to loathe the very sight of a fresh snowfall, let's pause to appreciate the magical qualities of the white stuff.  Yes, it's three books for kids about snow.

Two of them were recently featured in the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2009 (A Penguin Story and The Snow Day).  Though they were both published earlier this year, the NYT reviews were the first I'd seen of them, somehow.  I tracked down copies of both and I was completely charmed.  The third is a book I spent all summer talking about with my booksellers - it takes a close look at the science behind snow, with real photographs of super-magnified snow crystals.

A Penguin Story
by Antoinette Portis
HarperCollins | 9780061456886 | $17.99 | December 2008

For a couple of years now, whenever I begin to talk to one of my buyers about a new book that touches on childhood creativity, or with kids creating something new from the stuff around them, my savvy buyers give me a little shake of the head and say something like "Nope. We've got Not A Box."  After this happened a few times, I asked my buyer to show me this magical ur-book of youthful creativity.  And of course, that's exactly what Not A Box turned out to be.  I had nothing to compete with Not A Box.

And now, the Evil Genius author and illustrator who has frustrated so many of my book presentations is back with another delightfully charming story, sure to squelch any future sales I might otherwise make with books about penguins.

In A Penguin Story, Edna the penguin has finally grown weary of the somewhat limited palette of colors in her antarctic world: white snow, blue sky and water, black sky at night, and the black and white of her fellow penguins.  She bravely leaves her colony in search of some other colors that believes must be out there.

When she stumbles upon a scientific expedition, she soon sees that there are more colors than her usual blue, white and black - she sees sweeping tents, cold weather gear, and especially a mitten, all made of bright orange.

The hilarity of a whole colony of these charming little penguins "helping" the human scientists pack up to go home brings the story to sweet closure with the gift of a glove.

***

The Snow Day
by Komako Sakai
Arthur A. Levine Books / Scholastic | 9780545013215 | $16.99 | January 2009

There's an entirely different snow story working here - the quiet warmth of a wintry day spent close to home, the unlooked-for pleasures of a day with no school and no work, mother bunny and child watching a storm blow through, waiting for dad to come home safely from a trip.

From the first quiet panels as the small bunny wakes up to discover a darkly snowy day beginning, this is the best kind of story to share with young readers on the sofa watching their own snow day underway.

Komako Sakai's other book published in the US is Emily's Balloon.  You can find out about more books published by Arthur A. Levine by following them on Twitter.

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The Story of Snow: The Science of Winter's Wonder
by Mark Cassino with Jon Nelson, Ph.D.
Chronicle Books | 9780811868662 | 16.99 | October 2009

After two imagined journeys through snowy tales, some readers may be wondering what it is that makes snowflakes form?  What is the lifecycle of snow?  Perhaps those readers would be surprised to learn that some snow crystals are not flaky at all, but can be cylinders. What is the truth behind the story that each snowflake is unique?

With drawings, actual photographs of highly magnified snowflakes, and tips on how to catch and observe your own snow crystals, The Story of Snow would make another great companion book for a snow day at home!

The Story of Snow

Chronicle Books' page for the book offers a downloadable teachers' guide.  The microsite and blog for The Story of Snow can be found at StoryOfSnow.com.  Mark Cassino has a separate blog for his photography here.

New visual treasures from Fantagraphics, Princeton Architectural Press & Chronicle Books

OK, having got that little throat-clearing end-of-summer group hug out of the way, I'm free to talk about three of the cool books that recently arrived here at my3books HQ.  

I'd like to use the traditional phraseology "landed on my desk", but to be honest, so many books and catalogs and packages come and go here that nothing really lands on my desk.  Also, when you say "landed on my desk", that more or less implies the presence of mailroom staff or interns or something like that.  And I'm usually the only one who opens up the jiffy mailers and book cartons.  

Nevertheless, you must check out these three beautiful books.  I can't think of a single good phrase to refer to them in the aggregate but at least one of them is perfect for the traditional "gift book" section in your typical indie bookstore.  One of them is simply a graphic novel from one of my favorite artists.  And one of them is a book that I would say is a no-brainer for any customer or loved one who is hoping to become a visual artist one day.

    

Pictorial Webster's: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities
by John Carrera
Chronicle Books | 9780811867184 | $35 | Sept 2009

A visual delight, a word-lover's coffee table book, a fascinating historical document - Pictorial Webster's is all of these things.  John Carrera stumbled across an ancient and battered 1898 Webster's International Dictionary at his grandmother's house in 1995.  He was struck by the quality of the illustrated section: 80 pages of engravings in a variety of styles.

He embarked on a 10-year-long quest to find more examples, track down the original engravings and restore these beautiful images to print.  He ultimately located the original engravings at Yale University, organized their holdings, and then put together a collection that spanned the different editions across the decades.

   

Carrera published the extremely limited letterpress edition through his own fine press company, Quercus Press. The Fine Press Book Association recently featured a video by Carerra that walks viewers through the steps that were required to create his book. Chronicle Books has finally brought out the trade edition. They're also hosting a drawing - one lucky individual is going to win a copy of the Quercus Press edition. Chronicle is also hosting another drawing with IndieBound: five winners will win beautiful framed posters of Pictorial Webster's art.

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Low Moon
by Jason
Fantagraphics Books (W.W. Norton) | 9781606991558 | $24.99 | June 2009

When I started repping for W.W. Norton, one of the special treats awaiting me as a longtime fan of graphic novels was the Fantagraphics list.  I've always been a fan of their particularly lovely bookmaking and their wide-ranging participation in both the history of the field as well as the future of comics.  To be dropped in amongst their riches was like Dorothy stepping out of her ruined farmhouse into technicolor Oz.

Consider this short list: The complete Peanuts.  Daniel Clowes' Ghost World. Love and Rockets. Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library. Complete Crumb Comics.  Bill Griffith's Zippy. Tony Millionaire's Maakies.  Jules Feiffer.  Krazy & Ignatz.  I could easily fill this blog with nothing but Fantagraphics books, if I wanted.

 But my most exciting discovery of all has been Jason.  The mono-named Norwegian artist has been a prolific creator and a recent star of Fantagraphics' list.  His "clear line" style is immediately appealing and understandable to readers, and gives those readers what I think of as a head start - your focus and attention can be spent in finding the emotion and the subtext that runs below the surface narrative.

Some of my favorite backlist titles by Jason include I Killed Adolf Hitler (a time-traveling assassin is sent back to 1939 to do in the Nazi dictator, though the mission does not go as planned), and Pocket Full of Rain (a collection of 25 works from Jason's first 10 years as an artist).

He was one of the contributors to the Funny Pages serials in the New York Times Magazine, creating in the title piece from my featured book, Low Moon, an Old West homage that somehow combined gunfights, thwarted romance and chess.  Fantagraphics' Web site features a short video peek at Low Moon.

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Inside the Painter's Studio
by Joe Fig
Princeton Architectural Press (Chronicle Books) | 9781568988528 | $35 | Paper | Sept 2009

Jackson Pollock 1951 (2002)This book began in 2000 when artist Joe Fig began a series of miniature sculptures of historically significant artists in their studios (see the Jackson Pollock sculpture, right).  After two years of working from memoirs and paintings and other source materials, he moved on to a related study of contemporary artists.  As he says in his preface, "my intention was to get a clearer understanding of the real, day-to-day practicalities of being an artist..."

Chuck (Chuck Close 1997) (2000)The resulting book combines all of the elements of Joe Fig's work and his behind-the-scenes research: an interview with each artist (which Fig quickly standardized as The Painter's Studio: An Artist's Questionnaire, seeming to riff on the Proust Questionnaire...), site photographs of each artist's studio space, their painting table, and works in progress, and photographs of the resulting miniature sculpture of the artist's studio by Fig.  In the end, what the curious reader holds in their hand in a guided tour through How Artists Work, told by an insider.  It's truly fascinating.

Fred Tomaselli 2003 (2003)Among the 24 artists involved in this project are Chuck Close, Ross Bleckner, Jane Hammond, Julie Mehretu and Fred Tomaselli.

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