Penguin are releasing a new Bond novel entitled “Devil May Care“. Guess who’s writing it? Yes, Sebastian Faulks. It’s released next week and it could be awesome.
archive for the Books category
The new Bond covers from Penguin are gorgeous:
Very interesting interview with book jacket designer extraordinarire Mr Chip Kidd. My good buddies Ian and (the awesome) Jed bought me Chip Kidd’s gorgeous Book One last Christmas, it is supremely shiny.
Billy G is the ‘hood! I’m looking forward to seeing him tomorrow night.
Wahey! William Gibson is doing an event at the Book Festival in August. I’m booked myself a ticket already. Hopefully I can get a signed copy of Spook Country whilst I’m there.
New-found friends, often as not, rented high-ceilinged rooms in crumbling townhouses, their slate rooflines fenced with rusting traceries of cast-iron, curlicues I’d only seen in Charles Addams cartoons. Everything painted a uniform dead green, like the face of a corpse in those same Addams cartoons. If you took a penknife and scraped a little of the green away, you discovered marvels: brown marble shot with paler veins, ornate bronze fixtures, carved oak. In the more stygian reaches of cellar, in such places, there were still to be found fully connected gaslight fixtures, forgotten, protruding from dank plaster like fairy pipes, each with a little flowered twist-key to stop the gas.
Man, I love Gibson’s style. Read the rest of the article over at Canada’s Globe & Mail.
OK, I admit it. I haven’t actually read any Vonnegut but he was on my todo list of books to read. On the way home from work last night I picked up Slaughter House 5 from our friendly local Oxfam bookshop where the emo-tastic girl who worked there greeted my purchase with “omg did you hear he just died!?”. Yes, yes I did.
My parents were visiting last weekend (and Monday) and we managed to cram in a lot of sights and eating out.
Saturday
Went out for a brilliant lunch at Centotre, a swish Italian place on George street. We had to wait a while for a table but it was certainly it. I had some gorgeous pasta with really spicy rustic sausage stirred into it. Then a super-chocolaty desert that was all very well presented. Highly recommended. Kerry had to work in the evening so my folks and I went to the Cameo to see Notes on a Scandal. Pretty much does what it says on the tin. Judy Dench is rather menacing when she gets to play a villain and Cate Blanchett is, as usual, gorgeously serene.
Sunday
Had breakfast out with Ian and Neil and then toured the many second hand bookshops in the South side. I picked up up a load of retro Bond paperbacks which I intend to do something clever with, and Felaheen by JCG.
Monday
Killed time in National Gallery on the Mound, playing with their very intuitive touch screen “library” computers. Caught the free galleries bus out to Stockbridge. Saw Off the Wall and Geometry in Art exhibitions at the Modern Art and Dean galleries respectively. Had lunch in the Modern Art cafe, good food and a good location. We took a very meandering route back into town by walking up the Water of Leith footpath through Dean Village and emerging at yet more second-hand bookshops where I got More Eric Meyer on CSS for 2 quid, bargain! In the evening we had Tapas out at Barioja and Kerry had her first drink (of alcohol) for three months!
I finally got my copy of The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst from Amazon. As part of my new year resolutions I’m on a quest to learn something about typography. I must layout text on a web page every day at work at I’d like to know how to do it properly, and therefore improving the value of the page. After reading around on the web this book seems to be the bible and is very nicely designed and looks to be pretty readable. There’s even some chap doing an online version with Bringhurt’s typographic guidelines ‘Applied to the Web’. If you’re going to buy it online make sure you get the latest edition (3.1), which wasn’t immediately findable on amazon uk.