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Tag: New Books

The Inside Scoop on Spring 2012

by Dan
Design & Typography + Fiction + Graphica / December 05, 2011

Vancouver snapshot

For those of you who don't know, I'm usually based in Toronto. But last week, I was out west for the Raincoast Books spring 2012 sales conference. Sadly I didn't get to see much of Vancouver (the photo above was taken less than a block from the hotel!) or catch up with half the people I meant to, but I did get to hear about a lot of great new books and so I thought I would quickly share a FEW of my personal favourites...

The strangest book on the week was surely How To Build Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick's Robotic Resurrection by David F. Dufty which is on the Henry Holt & Co list. Spoiler alert: THEY LOST THE ROBOT!

 

Henry Holt also have a new novel by Herta Mueller, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2009, called The Hunger Angel, and the latest from John Banville's alter-ego Benjamin Black, Vengeance.

Picador are publishing a collected edition of Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose trilogy in January — the first time they've all been properly available in the US & Canada I believe — to coincide with the release of his new book At Last (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). Picador also have a collection of essays by Siri Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking.

Although this season's long-awaited Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design will be hard to beat, there are several art and design titles that caught my eye. Princeton Architectural Press are publishing Woodcut, a book of beautiful prints by artist Bryan Nash Gill and Up on the Roof, a collection of photographs by Alex MacLean of New York's hidden rooftop spaces. PAPress are also publishing a paperback edition of Michael Bierut's must-read Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design, and a paperback edition of the beautiful Typography Sketchbooks by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico.

100 years of fashion

Lawrence King are publishing a new book on the history of picture books, Children's Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling by Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles, and a new edition of The End of Print by David Carson. 100 Years of Fashion by Cally Blackman also looks stunning.  

On the comics side, Drawn & Quarterly are publishing Jerusalem: Chronicle from the Holy City, the latest travelogue from Guy Delisle who previous books include The Burma Chronicles, Pyongyang and Shenzhen, and a new edition of Chester Brown's controversial, scatological and long out-of-print comic Ed The Happy Clown.

I'm also looking forward to seeing more of Baby's in Black: Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart Sutcliffe, and The Beatles in Hamburg by Arne Bellstorf which is being published by First Second in April, and to getting my hands on Darth Vader and Son by Jeffrey Brown and All My Friends Are Still Dead by Avery Monsen and Jori John from Chronicle Books.

And lastly — because I am big nerd and recently finished reading his earlier book about the Dark Knight Batman Unmasked — I'm excited about Will Brooker's Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman, which is being published by I. B. Tauris in July.

Phew! More to come... grin

Comments (0) | Tags: new books sales conference vancouver Bookmark and Share

Pop Upstart!

by Dan
Graphica + News / January 27, 2010

Pop Sandbox Logo
Award-winning Canadian book distributor Raincoast Books has signed Pop Sandbox, a new Canadian publisher with extensive experience in the Canadian film industry and ambitious plans to expand into multimedia. 
 
Launched by independent film producer and entrepreneur Alex Jansen, Toronto-based Pop Sandbox will publish their first book in May 2010. The much-anticipated Kenk: A Graphic Portrait is a groundbreaking journalistic graphic novel about Igor Kenk, "the world's most prolific bicycle thief" (The Guardian), who was arrested in the summer of 2008 in one of the biggest news stories of the year. 
 
“I'm excited about Pop Sandbox. Alex and his associates are clearly very smart and truly innovative and they're going to bring journalistic non-fiction to a new audience,” says Paddy Laidley, Executive VP Sales & Marketing at Raincoast Books. “We don't sign small publishers, but we think it’s worth breaking our own rules in this case. We’re looking forward to a long and happy partnership.”
 
Prior to launching Pop Sandbox in 2008, Jansen managed Home Entertainment for Mongrel Media – the Canadian distributor of films such as Persepolis, Away From Her and Water – and his producing credits include the dramatic feature film Walk Backwards, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was distributed by Think Film (March of the Penguins and Born Into Brothels).
 
With his new venture, Jansen plans to bring his experience in independent film to create a series of innovative multimedia projects. “What makes Pop Sandbox unique is that we're taking a film producer's approach to graphic novels right from concept and telling new types of stories in new ways with the medium,” says Jansen. Pop Sandbox is also developing an interactive technology that allows readers to expand the graphic novel beyond the printed page; in the case of Kenk, readers will be able to launch right into the original documentary source material.
 
Future projects include a graphic memoir about Canada’s residential school program by filmmaker Nadia McLaren, whose acclaimed 2007 documentary Muffins for Granny told the story of her Ojibwa grandmother by combining fragments of home movies with the stories of seven elders dramatically affected by their experiences in residential schools. Pop Sandbox also recently won the National Film Board of Canada and TV Ontario’s Digital Calling Card to produce The Next Day, an interactive graphic novel constructed from interviews with survivors of near-fatal suicide attempts that Jansen describes as “a philosophical exploration of life, the decision to end it, and what comes after…” 
 

Richard Poplak

For his first project as a book publisher, Jansen is working with Canadian author Richard Poplak (Ja, No, Man: Growing Up White in Apartheid-era South Africa and The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop-Culture in the Muslim World, published by Penguin Canada), filmmaker Jason Gilmore, and Toronto-based illustrator Nick Marinkovich (Underworld and Underworld: Red in Tooth and Claw, published by IDW Publishing) on the 256-page punk-infused documentary graphic novel Kenk: A Graphic Portrait.
 
Kenk Cover RGB
 
“Igor is an absolutely compelling character that gave us unbridled access to his life, ideas and questionable practices,” says Jansen. “He’s been characterized by the media as either a petty thug or a criminal mastermind, but he’s both more and less than that. I'd describe him as an exceptionally bright street-philosopher, a hoarder, an environmentalist, an opportunist, a communist, a capitalist, an idealist and a crook. He’s a Slovenian-born immigrant who came to Canada from the turmoil in Yugoslavia, continually preaching the dangers of western excess and foretelling the collapse of the North American economy.”
 
 
Kenk is built from more than 30 hours of never-before-seen footage taken over the year leading up to his arrest and is a portrait of an outsize neighbourhood figure, a city, and a world in flux.
 
 “He was the last hold-out in a community that quickly changed around him,” says Jansen. “Kenk bought his building 10 years ago for $85,000 and was being offered up to $700,000 in the days leading up to his arrest, which ironically coincided with the downturn of the economy. He explicates not just his own neighbourhood, but his city, his country and the very system under which we all live. It is not just a local story, but a universal story. It is as poignant in Vancouver or New York or Beijing as it is in Toronto.”
 
Kenk: A Graphic Portrait published May 15th 2010

Kenk: A Graphic Portrait
Richard Poplak, Jason Gilmore, Nick Marinkovich, Alex Jansen
ISBN 978-0-9864884-0-5
Pop Sandbox
$26.95 paperback
 

To request further information on Kenk: A Graphic Portrait, or to arrange an interview with Alex Jansen, owner and publisher of Pop Sandbox, please contact Dan Wagstaff at Raincoast Books.

Comments (2) | Tags: alex jansen bicycle thief bikes canada graphic novels kenk new books pop sandbox press release richard poplak toronto Bookmark and Share