A Different Stripe

Jenny Linsky's first days at school

The start of the school year got us thinking about Jenny Linsky's first days at school, and how scary they were for her. As you know, the most common word used to describe Jenny Linsky is "shy"—so it wasn't easy for her to adjust to life at the boarding school she went to when the Captain was "obliged" to go away to sea. At first Jenny was intimidated by all the things the other cats already knew. For instance, this little tune:

"If you will learn manners,"
The dear Teacher said,
"Then you shall have Catnip
Before going to bed."

"Oh give us our Catnip,"
The kittens insisted.
"Without any Catnip
Our Manners get twisted."

"Untwist your best Manners,"
The kind Teacher said,
"For you shall have Catnip
Before going to bed."

and they all lined right up for their catnip before Jenny had any idea what was going on.

To make matters worse, that brash creature, Pickles the Firecat (who might be familiar from his own book) picked on Jenny mercilessly, as you can see from the pages below. 

We don't want to give anything away, but in the end, Jenny does manage to gather courage, and make new friends at The School for Cats—including the formidable Pickles.

The School for Cats was originally published in 1947 and the design of the title page below has a surprising Bauhaus flavor. Look at that use of Futura, which complements Averill's simple drawings and at the same time suggests a schoolroom ABC chart. Someone very hip must've been designing children's books for Harper (Jenny's original publisher) back then!

Ounce Dice Trice, a collaboration between poet Alastair Reid and artist Ben Shan

We've been sitting on this preview of Alistair Reid and Ben Shan's Ounce Dice Trice for a while now. And even though the book isn't on sale yet—we've only just received a few advance copies this week—we couldn't resist sharing some choice pages. The only problem was, figuring which pages to choose, since almost every one contains something delightful. Alastair Reid, who for many years worked at the New Yorker, drew on "odd notebooks" for wonderful, private, obscure, mouth-bending words. He addressed his young readers in a very short introduction to the book:

"And if you grow to love words for their own sake, you will begin to collect words yourself, and you will be grateful, as I am, to all the people who collect odd words and edit odd dictionaries, out of sheer astonishment and affection."

An aside: A few months ago, Vicky Raab just happened to run into Mr. Reid on the subway, and she wrote about the chance encounter at the New Yorker's Book Bench blog.

Deaths in the extended family (pt. 2)

Not long ago, Richard Howe conveyed to us some exceedingly sad news: Darragh Park had died. We met Darragh through his connection with James Schuyler's estate. But Darragh was an artist in his own right, and the covers of both of our Schuyler books feature his paintings. A kind and funny man, Darragh was also particular about checking the proofs of his work. But if he hadn't been, we wouldn't have had the pleasure of paying a visit to his Bridgehampton house to show him proofs. Visiting Darragh gave us a glimpse of a vanishing bohemian East End of artists and writers living in genteel disarray. How wonderful to see Darragh's many bandannas and denim jackets draped around the place. No one else could make a motorcycling ensemble look so elegant (Schuyler referred to him as "Mr. Elegance" in an 1985 letter).

David Lehmann at The Best American Poetry blog has been doing an excellent job of cataloging all of Darragh's many covers and offering his thoughts and memories much better than we could. 

An obituary

Multimedia Monday: Inspired by Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines

Joanna Neborsky, a student in the MFA illustration program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, has produced an illustrated edition of many of Félix Fénéon's concise reports of crimes and misdeads in early 20th-century France (aka Novels in Three Lines) as her thesis project. The work will be part of an MFA student exhibit that's on view until May 16, 2009 at the Visual Arts Gallery.

You can see more of Ms. Neborsky's work at the website of Gigantic Magazine.

A textbook case

Look, we're a textbook example of something! And that something is "the optical center." A visual principle that, according to the very wise publication, Essentials of Visual Communication by Bo Bergström, is illustrated by our series design by Katy Homans (and more specifically the cover of My Century by Aleksander Wat, featuring an image by Aleksandr Rodchenko that was originally the endpaper to his photo album Red Army):

If the title of a book is placed on the cover at the optical centre, it will create a harmonious whole.

Thanks Bo, you look pretty harmonious yourself!

Art by Maude Hutchins

There's still time to bid on this colored-pencil study by Maude Hutchins. Hutchins, author of Victorine, had a modestly successful career as a visual artist before she settled down to write her peculiar psycho-sexual novels. In fact, she was an art student at Yale when she met her future husband (also future president of the University of Chicago), and while she was in Chicago, she collaborated with Mortimer Adler on the book Diagrammatics—which displayed her "psychological" nude drawings alongside Adler's experimental verses.

 

Hutchins also drew the cover illustration for at least one of her own books, the scandalous Diary of Love. And no discussion of Hutchin's covers would be complete without mentioning the cover Andy Warhol designed for the New Directions edition of Love Is a Pie. Of course, nothing puts us in mind of Hutchins's novels so much as the work of Lisa Yuskavage, which is why a watercolor of hers illustrates the nyrb edition of Victorine.

 

Casting the Runes by M.R. James

A gift from us this week before Halloween, the story that Olivia Laing recently called, "Scariest story ever, so horrifying that to this day I can't keep it in my house" and puts on par with stories by Bram Stoker and Stephen King. And perhaps more importantly, Edward Gorey selected it for his anthology, The Haunted Looking Glass.

Download "Casting the Runes" by M.R. James

Monday Multimedia: The animated Tulip

Via LineBoil and MyToons, some preview clips of the recently completed animated feature film, My Dog Tulip (based, of course, on J.R. Ackerley's memoir of his "ideal friend"), created by the team of Paul and Sandra Fierlinger. Christopher Plummer provides the voice of J.R. Ackerely. The cast also includes Lynn Redgrave, Isabella Rossellini, and several distinguished stage actors.

The filmmakers intend to enter the film in next year's Cannes Film Festival.

The first clip, featuring as it does a comparison between the bowel movements of Tulip and the emporer Napoleon, reassures us that the film has not been neutered in the interests of gentility. Is this the first animated example of a dog shitting on the sidewalk (or, in English, "pavement")? If not, it must be the best. Enjoy these three clips, and then have a look at the official MyDogTulipFilm.com site for excerpts of a documentary about the making of the film, wonderful for the way it shows the Fierlingers at work (frequently accompanied by their dogs).

Ochered'/The Queue

Not to knock our cover of Sorokin's The Queue (Ochered' )—which shows a painting by Russian artist Eric Bulatov (who, incidentally, is mentioned in passing by Keith Gessen in a New York Review of Books article on several contemporary Russian writers, including Sorokin—a pleasing coincidence) but the 2007 Russian edition (Zaharov) of the book might outdo it in cleverness.

And here's the title page, which picks up on the visual queue of the front cover.

A new translation of Collodi's Pinocchio

 

top: front cover featuring Pinocchio by Tim Rollins and K.O.S.; back cover

middle: title page (and facing) with two illustrations by Attilio Mussino (1911)

bottom: final pages showing another Mussino illustration (spoiler: Pinocchio becomes a "proper little boy")

from: The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, newly translated by Geoffrey Brock, introduction by Umberto Eco, afterword by Rebecca West, available November 2008