Tag Archives: books

Pen and pencil to paper

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.

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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.

Free books!

Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod are now available for free download off of BitTorrent. The publisher No Starch Press calls it an “experiment”, to see what kind of reaction they get and if they can measure it.

“I’ve been in publishing for just over 20 years and my training has not been to give books away,” writes Pollock on the No Starch blog. “But I think there’s something to this and logic tells me that if we increase the visibility of our titles, we’ll sell more books.”

I have checked out the Cult of Mac book, from the library and really enjoyed it. I haven’t flipped though the iPod book yet. Both books are at least a couple of years old.

So go download them if you want them! I do hope someone will share the results of their little experiment here. You can click through to wired.com’s site to get the torrent links.

{via wired.com}

The Hobbit is a Cash Cow

This week a 1937 first edition inscribed copy of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit sold at a European auction for £60,000 (or $119,122.61, for those folks who want to gripe about the weakness of the US dollar). All told the BBC says this is double the expected sale.

This is why I go to yard sales… the dream of one day running across an unkown copy…

Hey, it could happen!

{via Bookninja}