With the movie version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in town, Stieg Larsson fever has hit Spokane. Larsson joins Mankell, Sjöwall, and Wahlöö in making the Swedish thriller/detective story popular with English speaking audiences. The Guardian’s John Crace examines why this genre, discovered by German and French audiences years ago, is all of a sudden so popular in England and America when “The plotlines are bleak, the locations are forbidding and the main characters are usually angst-ridden alcoholics.,” which pretty much sums up how I felt about my family’s holiday parties while growing up in Sweden. (Just kidding mom.)
Since the country has a population of only 9.5 million or so, a lot of the books I read in Swedish had originally been written in a different language. I didn’t realize it then, but that meant that I was exposed to great writers that English audiences were not. (Sweden translates roughly 25% of its books; the UK translates only 3%.) I never paid much attention to the original titles of those books, but now that I’m seeing some of my favorites from Sweden translated into English, the changes are kind of interesting. Read more »
on etsy, home to all things hipstercrafty, little blue bird studios has some nice looking prints on old dictionary pages, including one of that mischievous cheshire cat.
and, fittingly, for galleys week at willow springs, enjoy some excerpts and examples from in the land of punctuation, a graphic designer’s go at illustrating typography.
enjoy. issue 66 will be coming your way before you know it.
Here’s a video that’s been circulating the Internet this past week, condensing the multi-hour cover design process into just under two minutes. What was most interesting to me was how you can tell the designer was familiar with the book (since only self-pubbed authors really have control over their covers), and how the design-creation process looks, in a lot of ways, like the writing process. Makes me glad that, when I publish (if?), there will be someone there doing all that for me.
just because i love books doesn’t mean i’m not a superficial snob sometimes. in fact, if chip kidd did the design for panasonic’s VCR instruction manuals, there’s a chance i’d buy an antiquated machine i no longer have tapes for. but if you’re going to write a book about radical approaches to cartography, you better have a radical approach to your cover art. and crapping out something that looks like the unholy offspring of a color test and a barcode doesn’t really qualify.
rather than saying “read me because i have interesting things to say about the future of mapping shit”—which experimental geography might very well do—this book says to me that the author wouldn’t know radical if it time-traveled from the 1980s and punched him in the face.
how the book design review ever thought this qualified as one of the most well-designed book covers of 2009 is beyond me. however, i do give bdr props for calling out the fact that someone finally did a 1984 cover that doesn’t suck. love that book, love the new jacket. doubleplusgood, indeed.
14 Comments 
With the movie version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in town, Stieg Larsson fever has hit Spokane. Larsson joins Mankell, Sjöwall, and Wahlöö in making the Swedish thriller/detective story popular with English speaking audiences. The Guardian’s John Crace examines why this genre, discovered by German and French audiences years ago, is all of a sudden so popular in England and America when “The plotlines are bleak, the locations are forbidding and the main characters are usually angst-ridden alcoholics.,” which pretty much sums up how I felt about my family’s holiday parties while growing up in Sweden. (Just kidding mom.)
