The Birmingham Museum of Art has opened an online doorway into their art library. If you’ve never been, there are tons of cool books there that aren’t available anywhere else in town. So many of the 35,000 items, you can’t check out.
As of right now, the site is a bit bare bones and takes a few trial searches to figure your way through the catalog. But it’s a great resource for research or inspiration. Thanks to the powers-that-be that helped make this available!
{via Emmet O’Neal}
Greencup Books has a ton of books upstairs all priced at a dime. It’s not a stellar crop to choose from. But if you’re into the serialized mass market paperbacks, this is the Holy Grail. Also, fans of Harlan Coben and Patricia Cornwell should take note, there are hundreds of Hardbacks up there. (I did nab a Simon Winchester paperback and a board-book for our Little Speed Reader, for a total of 20 cents).
It’s one of those masses of books where there are 75 hardback copies of the same book. But, c’mon they’re a dime!! So it’s worth scavenging. Maybe this is my chance to build some sort of furniture made of books. You know, the coffee table/lamp/shelf that requires you to drill through books to put it together, but you never have the cash or heart to destroy that many books. But if you were using 30 copies of a jacketless Danielle Steele novel…. would you be so heartbroken?
I also know that Greencup Books neighbor Barehands Gallery is having a show tonight, so the bookstore is planning to stay open late too. May be worth a stop tonight.
Out of the 50+ book covers I was in on last year, only one required the hire of a real-life pencil smudging sketch artist. In these days, everything is done super-quick with a dash of Illustrator, a big stir with PhotoShop (sprinkled with some stock pics) and baked up in InDesign. All that techno-solutions can get dry… and stale feeling… which is why I L-O-V-E cruising through Scamp, every so often.
It’s a blog staffed by professional illustrators over in Ireland. Some of it is weird. But some, like this post from Monday which chronicles the illustration of a book cover, are very cool. If you skim through that post you’ll see that even the pencilers use PS. Enjoy! Let me know if any of you know that free ghost filter he mentions…. I’m looking for it.
There is a full trailer on YouTube for the upcoming documentary on southern letterpress artist Amos Kennedy. The film, Proceed and Be Bold, will debut at Columbia College in Chicago on May 9, 2008. Here is the older teaser.
He is supposed to be at the Alabama Book Festival on April 19th, down in Montgomery. And if you are a fan, then you need to go see him…
word on the street is that he’s moving to Virginia soon.
