I have sketched my house at Easton Pierse and marked with a cross my grandfather’s chamber where I was born. If it had been my fate to be wealthy man I would have rebuilt my house in the grandest of styles. I would have added formal gardens in the Italian mode of the kind I have seen at Sir John Danvers’s house in Chelsea and at his house in Lavington. It was Sir John who first taught us in England the way of Italian gardens. I would have erected a fountain like the one that I saw in Mr Bushell’s grotto at Enstone: Neptune standing on a scallop shell, his trident aimed at a rotating duck, perpetually chased by a spaniel. I would have carved my initials on a low curved bridge across the stream. I would have remade my beloved home in the shape of the most beautiful houses and gardens I have visited in my unsettled life, tumbling up and down in the world. But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
We should take these excerpts with some reservation. These aren’t John Aubrey’s copied diaries, but rather an original format historian Ruth Scurr uses to deploy John Aubrey’s biography.
John Aubrey is a man who knew what he wanted. We see this in the detailed descriptions of the gardens and fountains he dreamed of constructing:
I would have added formal gardens in the Italian mode of the kind I have seen at Sir John Danvers’s house in Chelsea and at his house in Lavington. It was Sir John who first taught us in England the way of Italian gardens. I would have erected a fountain like the one that I saw in Mr Bushell’s grotto at Enstone: Neptune standing on a scallop shell, his trident aimed at a rotating duck, perpetually chased by a spaniel. I would have carved my initials on a low curved bridge across the stream. I would have remade my beloved home in the shape of the most beautiful houses and gardens I have visited in my unsettled life, tumbling up and down in the world.
John Aubrey was a man who embraced his fate. He accepts his fate twice in one paragraph. This was probably a more common character trait in the 1600s. In the modern west we’re taught to battle against our fate. We’re told anything is possible. That if we’re passionate, put our minds to it, we can bend our fate to be anything – yeah, yada, yeah. So when you hear someone admit their fate was not to be a wealthy man, and they accept that, it catches the ear.
If it had been my fate to be wealthy man I would have rebuilt my house in the grandest of styles.
and
But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
John Aubrey sketched! It’s not surprising. Photography was still two hundred years away, so people captured images by drawing. They preserved memories by drawing. They dreamed with their drawings:
I have sketched my house at Easton Pierse and marked with a cross my grandfather’s chamber where I was born.
and
But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
Alomar came to the United States in late 2008 to join his mother and older brother who had emigrated in the 1900s. The fact that he was willing to leave behind and established career as a writer for an uncertain life speaks to the hopelessness of the situation in Syria even before its decent into open Civil War. He and I made these translations together in difficult circumstances: most were done in the front seat of his taxi in a Chicago suburb heavy with the ache of immigration and the unimaginable pain of watching one’s country implode from afar. With books and dictionaries piled on the dashboard, hoping the taxi line wouldn’t advance too quickly and force us to break our concentration with another “load,” we were able to make some part of that lost world in Damascus live again, however briefly. This pamphlet is some of the fruit of that soul-affirming work.
C.J. Collins, Fullblood Arabian, from the translators note, pg 62.
Osama Alomar‘s Fullblood Arabian deserves more attention. It’s a perfect book for returning to the office. You can get through five or six short stories while eating your lunch in the shade. Five or six meaningful stories while eating your lunch in the shade.
C.J.’s depiction of the translator’s life, sitting in Alomar’s Chicago taxi cab, getting through pages, stacked dictionaries on the dash, all the while hoping the taxi line doesn’t move, is a reminder of the hidden work that brings a book to life.
I cherish writers, like C.J. who bring you back to a moment with specific, clear, descriptions. It’s like I was in the backseat of the cab, watching a dream unfold.
Whenever it’s bad weather, I draw at home and lend a hand to raise my little boys. They will never know what we are doing to give them everything they need.
Mostly, it seems, she spent her days drawing. She drew compulsively, rapturously, from a young age, in a sketchbook that she made from drawer-lining paper and stationery. “It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye,” she wrote. She drew when she was unsettled, regardless of the subject. “I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever, and settles on the queerest things,” she wrote in her journal. “Last time, in the middle of September, I caught myself in the back yard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket, and the laugh it gave me brought me round.”
I’ve been waiting months for this podcast episode. Tyler Cowen and Lydia Davis did not let me down.
For a writer of her stature, Lydia openly admits she finds very long books hard to approach:
COWEN: Do you think the late Thomas Pynchon became unreadable, that somehow it was just a pile of complexity and it lost all relation to the reader? Or are those, in fact, masterworks that we’re just not up to appreciating?
DAVIS: Since I hesitated to even open the books, I can’t answer you, because I do find — not all long books — but very long, very fat books a little hard to approach, and some of them, I try over and over. If I sense that it’s really a load of verbiage, I really don’t. I fault myself for not having the patience to get through at least one, say, late Pynchon, but I haven’t.
Don’t despair! Lydia Davis also struggled to read Ulysses. It took two cracks and a move to Ireland for her to finish:
I had a problem a long time ago trying to read Ulysses by Joyce, and started it twice, and finally read it when I lived in Ireland, which made it much easier because I had his context. That too — I suppose because it had different chapters, each of which approached the ongoing story in a very different way — I found that possible too.
I’m believing more and more, that what great books do, what the internet at it’s brightest light does, is make introductions.
Today’s introduction? The Catalan writer Josep Pla:
There’s a book by a Catalan writer called Josep Pla that’s called The Gray Notebook. That’s very fat, but I keep going back to it and delighting in it, but I’m not reading it all at once. I’m going back to it and just sort of nibbling away at it. It was an amazing project. He took an early, very brief diary of his when he was 21, I think, and it only covered a year and a half. He kept going back to it rather than publishing it. He kept going back to it and expanding it with more memories and more material, and I love that idea. Maybe that’s why I can read it.
Lydia admits the Harry Potter series didn’t captivate her. She preferred the writing in Philip Pullman’s The Dark Materials trilogy. But she understands, Harry Potter’s greatest value is hooking kids on reading:
COWEN: How would you articulate why you don’t like the Harry Potter novels?
DAVIS: That’s fairly easy, although I should have a page in front of me. It’s always better if you have the page, and you can say, “Look at this sentence, look at that sentence.” At a certain point, my son was reading Harry Potter as kids do and did. I think he was probably 11 or 10 or 11, 12, 9 — I don’t know. Also, the Philip Pullman trilogy, whose name I always forget. I thought it would be a lot of fun to read the Harry Potter books because I knew a lot of grownups were reading them and enjoying them. I thought, “This is great. There are a lot of them.”
But when I tried to read them, I didn’t like the style of writing, and I didn’t like the characters, and I didn’t like anything about them. Whereas, I opened the first Philip Pullman book and read the first page and said, “This is wonderful. The writing here is wonderful.” I really think there’s an ocean of difference. I wouldn’t put down the Harry Potter books because, as we know, they got a lot of kids reading and being enraptured with books. I think that matters more than anything, really — getting kids hooked on reading.
Brilliant and insightful. Do give it a listen or read the transcript in full here.
Quickly I had learned that in the high Antarctic where I worked, besides the books, a knife to sharpen my pencil was indispensable, any ink in a pen usually freezing. And any sort of electronic device just would not work, and would be unreliable. I also learned, from some anxious experiences, that a field book had to become ‘un-losable’. Starting out, I once mislaid a book when trying to capture a skua with a net; it was often an athletic endeavor, with a bird diving one way, and my book flying out of my parka pocket in the other. Only after painstakingly retracing my steps was I able to recover it, its brown cover camouflaged among the endless boulders and frozen guano of the penguin colony. It was a huge relief – you can’t imagine how happy I was. Thereafter I would plaster the journals with bright yellow tape in fat stripes. Eventually I found field books bound in vivid orange covers. In the polar snows, these were just perfect.
There are famous graphic designers. Paula Shuere. David Carson. Chip Kidd and Saul Bass. But most graphic designers toil and create in the shadows. The majority of the design pieces we profiled did not have a designer attributed to them. This was a surprise. We thought a simple google search, or look on a company’s “about us” page would accredit a designer to their public image.
Not true.
For such a public art form, the majority of the artists are unknown.
Paolo “Paul” Campani – One of the few known designers
Below are the few graphic designers we could attribute designs to:
Contrast is the king of graphic design fundamentals. It draws attention to the design. It helps communicates the message. Contrast acts like a visual speed bump. It’s a quick change in weight that slows our eyes down and grabs our attention.
See this Hyper Bike Company typeface:
Thick to thin typeface
Notes on typography
Typography can stand alone as a discipline. A few typography notes to remember:
Leading – the distance between lines of type. Leading is measured in points.
Kerning – is the space between letters.
Serif = little feet.
Sans Serif = no little feet.
This EPCOT signage from the France Pavillion, combines serif and sans-serif lettering:
Serif on the top. Sans-serif below.
Wide kerning is used to convey elegance.
See the bottom Market & Bakery typeface on this Eatzi’s sign:
Wide kerning for contrast and elegance
Conclusion
Observing graphic design changes your view of the world. Every sign, every book or magazine cover, every piece of packaging you hold takes on a new meaning.
The typography, the logo, the color palette, the layout, it’s there on purpose. It’s there to guide your eye. To nudge you towards one product over another, to make you feel something. To direct you to safety. To implore you to risk.
Looking closely at any piece of graphic design will take your life off of autopilot, and that’s worth the time.
Meinl is a German percussion company headquartered in Gutenstetten.
Today, Meinl is a known brand amongst American drummers and percussionists, but this wasn’t always true. A strategic Reinhold Meinl led branding effort in the 80s lifted the brand into the global consciousness.
The thick circles introduce the drum and cymbal theme. The “legs” establish the M. The simple shapes keep the logo familiar in any color. The simple shapes and thick lines makes the Meinl logo noticeable from a distance on any cymbal, drum case, amplifier, or band van.
Hero typewriters are a Chinese typewriter brand. Originally known as the Flying Fish PSQ, they were rebranded Hero in the 1980s. The logo’s designer, like many of these we’ve profiled in this series, is unknown (if you know please reach out.)
The Hero logo stands out because of its variety of shapes.
There’s the rectangle that frames the “ero”.
The “H” which looks like a small person finishing their morning stretches has four shapes – the “H”, the arm cubes, the small house shaped silhouette inside the arm cubes, and the vertical space-bars on each side of the “H”.
Finally the oval pulls all the shapes together and gives them a structure to live.
The designer also incorporated Chinese characters and English letters. One could assume this is the word “Hero” written in Chinese, but no need to assume here. Incorporating two languages and two typefaces in one logo is a rare graphic design feat.
For all you typewriter junkies out there check out these two additional articles on Hero typewriters:
Floodlights and Goalposts 