Category Archives: Book Column

Typography and Instagram

The folks over at We Love Typography are mobilizing the world’s font faithful in a very cool new project mapping cool fonts around the world. To participate all you have to do is have the iOS Instagram app installed, have geotagging turned ‘on’, snap a pic and upload it with the tag #wlt or #welovetype. Then the crawlers will grab it an place it on the correct place on this Google Map.

Typography World Google Map

No doubt it’s going to get crowded fast. But it’s a great idea.

There are also two new FREE iOS apps for font and type geeks:

Fontli iconFontli, has an Instagram-feel, and is trying to build a social network around fonts. The idea being that you could submit a snap shot of some type and your virtual rolodex of font-ish friends could help you identify it. Also, there is…

 

FontMaker IconFontmaker, which lets you create your own font variations to use in text messaging and emails sent from your mobile device. Not super-useful, but I could see where some would get a kick out of throwing in some random ligatures and letter forms.

 

Michael Chabon’s New Book

Chabon’s next book Telegraph Avenue doesn’t come out until September of this year, but Harper Collins did release the final cover a couple of days ago, via their catalog site. I wonder how many revisions they went through before everyone agreed on the red and the label was just retro enough… very cool! The blurb they offered up on the site:

The fictional world of Telegraph Avenue is grounded in Chabon’s deeply researched, lovingly painted pop culture of Kung Fu, Blaxploitation films of the ’70s, Jazz, and Soul.

This is one book that I can not wait to read this year.

Telegraph Avenue Cover

 

 

Movie Based on a Bill Bryson Book

Last week, novelist Richard Russo mentioned that he is working on a screenplay based on Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. This very cool… if Hollywood doesn’t mess it up (I mean c’mon what are the chances of that?). A Walk in the Woods, which logs Bryson’s travels and experiences along the Appalachian Trail, was my first introduction to Bryson and I have now read every book of his except At Home, which is currently sitting about half-way in my TBR pile. So maybe by 2016… at the rate I’m going… anyway…

I did some digging and found out that Robert Redford is slated to play Bryson and *maybe* Nick Nolte as Bryon’s buddy Stephen Katz. Seems this project has been in the works since 2005 and has dragged on so long that no one is really paying attention. I hope they keep moving though. I think Russo could do well with it.