Blog
The Inside Scoop on Spring 2012
by Dan
Design & Typography + Fiction + Graphica / December 05, 2011
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.
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... :-)
