Pop Chart Lab breaks down the taxonomy of movie monsters, from oogly to googly, from the classic to the very weird. Look at a larger version (like, huge) here.

If you like it, buy the print here.

Artists create 164 unique speculative designs for Nabokov’s Lolita:

As does artist Jim Tierney for Jules Verne’s classics:

Does book design matter to you? If you weren’t interested in reading these books before, do the spiffy new covers convince you to give the book a shot? I’m curious.

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[Via The Rumpus and The Millions.]

Andy Warhol was fascinated with the high and low in art, and even twenty years after his death, his Estate has managed to sell limited-edition Campbell’s soup cans in Barney’s for twelve dollars each. But just a few years before the debut of his first soup can screenprint, Andy Warhol illustrated a children’s book, THE LITTLE RED HEN, which will be auctioned off on December 9th.

To me, nowhere is the juxtaposition of the high and low in art more apparent than in children’s illustration. Though one might look at a Jackson Pollock and think (but perhaps not say), “I can splatter paint on a canvas!,” one hears people browsing the picture book section and declaring, “I could draw this!”

But after over three years of reading the query box, I can assure you, ninety-eight percent of the people that scoff at the artwork, cannot just “splatter paint.” I’ve seen everything from four-fingered Santa Clauses, to illustrations of children without necks. And though we advise aspiring children’s writers not to illustrate their own stories unless they think their artwork can truly measure up to the illustrations that are already on the bookshelves, sometimes it’s clear that this advice is ignored at best, and followed at worst. Read more »

Is November also National Book Cover Redesign Month? NaBoCoReMo? Did nobody tell me?

Carin Goldberg’s iconic series design from the late 1980s has been replaced with an ostensibly hipper-looking one:

Art director John Gall has also undertaken a book cover redesign project. The assignment: redesign Vladimir Nabokov’s entire book covers, all 21 of them. The result: 21 beautiful specimen boxes (a lovely homage to Nabokov’s passion for butterfly collecting), each created by a different designer: Read more »

My Grandfather in Venice Way Back When

I have always suspected the missing links between the scattered parts of my being lay within the life of my maternal grandfather.

My paternal grandparents are open books – my grandmother with her inexorable tongue and my grandfather with eyes that can’t betray a single emotion.  My maternal grandmother is a storyteller on speed – something always reminds her of something else and various tangents can be made within a single sentence.  My paternal grandfather, however, was a little less clear in his communication.  My uncle used to joke that all it took to keep my grandfather happy was his daily newspaper and a bowl of mixed nuts.  For years, I believed this to be the case – but as I got older, I suspected something much more existed within his alleged simplicity.

After he passed away in the fall of 2005, my aunt emailed our family scanned photos she found of him.  The photos dated back to the forties and consisted mostly of posed portraits.  I was excited to find that I looked quite a bit like my young grandfather since I grew up looking not quite like either parent.

It was, however, in a photo where his face was less visible that I found myself identifying with him most: in the middle of Piazza San Marco, stood my grandfather in an ascot and a three-piece suit – tall and full of quiet confidence.  Though we all knew that my grandfather suffered from a hushed case of wanderlust, we never knew he ever had the means to treat it. Read more »

I stopped by Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward last week for the opening of Selena Kimball’s “The New World,” a stunningly untraditional retelling of American history. Kimball, probably better known for her work on The dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz, is a visual artist fascinated with history and the wild, aiming to reveal thematic narratives which progress through the ages and continue still today. She produces series of collages, drawings, and reinterpretations of archival documents that both honor and poke fun at the undercurrents of history. For example, in the photo above, if you look closely on the right you can see several businessmen having a meeting atop a lynching tree. Delicious!

Though her work is made, literally, from historical documents, it isn’t fact. Then again, it isn’t quite fiction either: looking through “The New World,” you will find objects reshaped into something else, characters reimagined, events reordered. It is through this seeming din that Kimball’s narrative emerges. Time is restructured to align with theme, and theme progresses to spin a tale that, by its end, becomes all to familiar to us in the modern day. Pictures and more after the jump. Read more »

A tinge of The Crazy may aid creativity, according to Roger Dobson’s recent article in The Independent. Well…um, no shit. I coulda told you that, Roger. Some of the most brilliant and creative people I have encountered in my life have had at least one screw loose, sometimes more. Hell, most days I feel like I am merely hovering over the Crazy/Sane divide myself, precariously vacillating between the two. I try to coincide my Crazy with moments of artistic creation and my Sane with moments of bill-paying-related activities and interactions with other human beings…but wouldn’t you know it that those damn bitches don’t listen to a word I say and just show up whenever they feel like it? But I actually cherish this internal instability, even though it sometimes causes me pain and isolation and depression. And it appears as if I’m not the only one (The Icarus Project seeks to navigate “the space between brilliance and madness”). And apparently, “there is no clear dividing line between the healthy and the mentally ill.” Read more »