(b)logophile

I’m reading Old Men in Love by Alasdair Gray: a Small Beer production touted (along with its more obvious literary qualities) for its design. And indeed it’s very lovely: two-colour (black/blue) with chapter decorations and the occasional sidenote in blue, frequent illustrations (by the author?), and each chapter ending with a gloriously antiquated tapering layout.1 [...]

I needn’t have rushed to the bookstore for Kraken, and I wish Miéville had slowed down a bit too. And that his editor had been a bit more involved.

Polyphony is a short story anthology series, in the direction of “interstitial” or “slipstream” writing (“literary with a genre sensibility” being the “least elegant but most descriptive” phrase according to the introduction to volume 4). I own two volumes (3 and 4) and they have good stuff by good people inside. It turns out that [...]

I probably shouldn’t talk about this, to keep the competition down, but… The fabulous typography/design/art bookstore Nijhof & Lee is having their annual clearance sale. Except that last year they didn’t have one, so this is a biannual (even more stuff worth drooling over, no doubt). February 6 and 7, from 10am. I’ve never been [...]

Here’s a nice setup. John Holbo and Belle Waring write a book about Plato: translations by Waring, commentary and illustrations by Holbo.1 They reserve e-publishing rights, so as well as the whole ink-and-paper business they can put it online, where you can read it in the surprisingly functional flash interface at issuu.com. You can download [...]