Category Archives: Product Reviews

New York Review of Book Design

literary lint, Product Reviews, ,

Most book covers are terrible. Most book design is terrible. It’s terrible in that it’s over-designed. Too many words trying to describe, capture, sell what’s inside. Too many overly literal cover images. Too much goddamned art. Are there instances of visually complex covers that successfully complement the book? Absolutely. But in my more curmudgeonly moments, when I see covers for books that I like, I think they would have looked better had they looked plainer. They would look better if they’d had the cover removed, if they were left with the stark honesty of the title page. Honestly, I like the example established by French publisher Gallimard. Plain cover, title, genre, publisher, author name. Leave everything else off. I am compromising by allowing any genre indications. Everyone’s life would be more interesting if readers were forced to figure out the genre themselves. There is too much overt, aggressive, front-end explanation and style categorization of art these days. 

And I hate blurbs. They are marketing copy coerced from the author’s friends and acquaintances. Or (if one is extremely lucky) they are quotations from reviews pulled out of context. The blurb forces writers to become ad copywriters, and I don’t know if it’s lack of skill or resentment at the unpaid labor, but the blurbs aren’t any good. They fail as description of the work contained inside, and they fail as provocative enticements to read the work inside. And they turn writers of literature (briefly discarding the quotation marks that typically shackle that word) into harvesters of clichés. It’s worse than a grade school awards ceremony, because we are all adults and theoretically should know better. Do blurbs even work? Has there been one reader pulled in by the canned hyperbole of some secondary author? It seems like by now there should be some data on this question. 

And no, I don’t like author photographs either. And I think the downfall of American literary journals is tied to when they, collectively, began including author photographs alongside their essays and poems and such. What is this, high school? Facebook? Have a little pride. America, let your writers be ugly and at peace!

And since I’m being thorough here: I also hate contributor’s notes in literary journals that list anything more than where the author is from and if they have an interesting job. (No one has interesting jobs anymore. They all teach.) The contributors’ notes now are so bloated they read like a more insufferable version of LinkedIn. If the blurbs are a kind of inter-personal logrolling, the contributors’ notes are a kind of institutional logrolling. I realize that logrolling occurs. I’m not that much of a Pollyanna. But I just wish it wasn’t so glaringly obvious, boring, and poorly written. Not even your mother cares about all those awards!

Are there exceptions? Sure. The black-and-white, windswept-yet-embalmed, deb-in-heat photos of Marion Ettlinger are, of course, provocative, making even the most agoraphobic sweater-covered humanoid temporarily alluring. The Vintage Contemporaries series from the 80s was wonderful, bright, surreal, associative covers that are instantly recognizable. And yes, I think Chip Kidd and Peter Mendelsund are brilliant. They’re great, but they can’t design everything. 

Really what I want is the covers of John McPhee. He’s written 40-ish books, and the majority of them have been published in paperback editions by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and they all look the same. I love the stark uniformity of all these McPhee titles, even more so because the topics he covers in his somehow non-boring nonfiction is so sui generis. Rural inbred pine tree people living in the inner wilds of New Jersey? The smuggling of Russian paintings? The historical attempts to control the Mississippi River? If you line up all your McPhee titles on the shelf, they are wearing their uniform, unassuming, diligent, neat, immediately identifiable. Yes, I know the front covers typically have some kind of art smear that hint at the thematic contents inside. Don’t be pedantic and ruin my point. These books look good and they look like they belong together. 

I realize that if all the new books adopted a McPhee-like minimalist approach and paranoia regarding graphic design change, the world would grow that much plainer, without all that shouting cleavage everywhere. Perhaps I would grow bored when I entered the bookstore. But I’m willing to give it a try. Someone somewhere figured out a visual language for McPhee and stuck with it through the decades. 

I should further confess that I prefer paperback editions to their more stately hardback older brothers. I find the hardbacks too nice, trying too hard to be museum quality. I have a love-hate relationship with the dust jacket. With my purported attraction to plainness, one would think I would simply throw the cover away, and yet I can’t do it. Chip Kidd once described his dust jacket work as designing grocery bags — a temporary container that’s destined to be discarded. I can’t decide if this self-evaluation is mature or nihilistic, or both. I also resent the time window variations between the hardback and the paperback editions. I realize this is a historical legacy of publishing, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and what I want, apparently, is for all books to publish first run as a mid-90s era Vintage International paperbacks. Matte cover, usually abstract, trade paperback width, paper quality just this side of feeling cheap. I never got on with mass market paperbacks, though I like the ideology. They’re too thick to hold comfortably, and there’s not enough margin to write down comments, and I am still trying to make a decent grade. I realize that by discovering my latent favorite what I might be asking for above all is to be young again. You know: back when they did things better. 

Currently, here in the Middle Ages, Fitzcarraldo Editions is close to my idea of perfection, one color for nonfiction titles, another for fiction titles. It’s simple and calming, and all of your books from that publisher can wink at each other smugly from the shelves.

But whatever you do, book designers of the future: no deckled edges. 

What I can’t live without

Product Reviews

I keep waiting for New York magazine to call and ask for my take on the “What I Can’t Live Without” column, but for some unexplained reason they never do, so I figured I would go ahead and describe those items here. 

Birkenstocks. Specifically, the Arizona: the traditional ones, the ones without a heel strap, the ones without fur, or any kind of bling. The ones with strong arch support, cork footbed, and an ugly, European disposition. They take a little while to break in. I’ve probably run through six pair over the past twenty years. I use them until the cork looks like desiccated coral, flaking off on the kitchen flooring. They don’t like getting rained on, and I think there are cork sealant products that I could apply, but I always forget. I don’t intentionally get them wet, but sometimes one is out walking the dog and an early evening thunderstorm pops up, and one is simply up the creek, as the saying goes. I like how the waffle-like indentions in the rubber soles slowly wear away with time. Perhaps this happens equally with other footwear but it’s particularly pleasant with Birkenstocks. Practical, comfortable, ugly, the ideal footwear. Plus, the sight of my uncovered toenails frightens away predators. 

Spotify. I realize that there is a long list of valid criticisms of Spotify, namely that it pays artists fractions of pennies through an algorithmically rigged application that primarily benefits the already mega-successful. But in listener terms, it’s a revelation. As a kid in the 80s and 90s it was a dream to be able to call any song forth and listen to it at that very moment. I remember driving through rural Georgia in the middle of the night in 2003 on the way to Florida to attend my own wedding when I desperately wanted to hear a new song that I’d heard perhaps twice, only in fragments, irresistibly catchy, and I scrolled through the static-y radio stations for an hour until I found it. Now you can just call it up. If it’s not on Spotify, then it’s probably on Youtube. I realize not everything is available, and I realize that this near-perfect availability is bad for the artists, but what can I do? It’s 14-year-old me’s version of the Holy Grail. Points deducted for trying to use the app while driving, always a pain. I know I should not be doing that. I should keep my eyes on the road, on what’s coming next, but sometimes you want to synchronize your commute to the perfect tune. P.S. that midnight-through-Georgia song was “Hey Ya.”

Google Docs. After a certain word count, it gets a little squirrelly, and I don’t ever do any serious formatting. But for typing words, keeping words, being able to access words on multiple machines in multiple locations, it works. What I hate about software generally is its apparent need to update frequently. Just when I am comfortable with an application, someone somewhere changes it, and it takes me forever to figure out how to replicate my cherished routine. I don’t always want a better design. I just want to live with the original mistakes because by now I am used to them. Those features are no longer mistakes but just the way the world works, the way this piece of hardware or software was put together, how one’s life panned out, and any structural improvement only creates more friction. I use Word less and less now, a shocking realization, as twenty years ago I lived in Word. Now my preferred on-the-machine word processor is the humble Notepad. Yes, that’s right. I am working on a Dell. I used to be able to afford those silver sexy laptops, but then I had children, and now I work in a Dell world. There is no formatting with Notepad, no pages, no sex appeal. But it has two fabulous attributes. It is screamingly fast, and it can be transferred to any other kind of device. (In case my child let’s me borrow their silver laptop.) No, you can’t use italics, but I overuse italics anyway, and besides one should be adding that kind of stuff later. For getting words down in an order somewhat approaching an English sentence, it’s the best freeway. Google Docs has more latency, but the access and the inherent cloud back-up makes it mostly worthwhile. I keep waiting for Google to start charging me money for storing all of those rough drafts, like an abandoned self-storage megalopolis of unfinished dreams, but I keep skating by year after year. Another quality I like is that Docs makes computer work (at least the prosaic kind I do) more independent of the actual machine. I work on my documents and my spreadsheets, and they are saved to a server somewhere, and then I access them again. I don’t want to work on the machine itself. I don’t want to customize. I am not a programmer. Some people are! I am grateful for them. But I want my toaster to make toast, and I want to be able to get to my toast wherever I am. I want to be able to burn my toast or not burn my toast, but otherwise I don’t really want a lot of toast-gradiation leeway. I don’t need predictive toasting. I just want to make the bread browner, toastier, depending on the day. I want to be able to send and receive short bits of text and add and divide various combinations of numbers in peace without having to think of how the machine works, if it’s good for human civilization, or perhaps talking behind my back to the HVAC. Occasionally I want to watch old footage of Little Feat playing “Cold Cold Cold” in Holland and send it to my friend. No, I haven’t binged that new 7-part series. There’s no time for that. I still haven’t finished all those books I bought when I was 24.

Polo Ralph Lauren Oxford-Cloth Button-down. Color: blue, the only color that matters. The perfect shirt, appropriate for any occasion, somehow perfectly sized for my arm length, torso length, progressively expanding abdomen. The perfect meridian of dressiness. Whenever I wear a different shirt, at some point in the day I regret not simply wearing the Polo. 

Icees. As a kid I used to get these all the time. I would get them at the tote-sum, my regional adjective for the convenience store. My wife’s people calls these establishments handy-ways, and routinely cringes at my use of the hickish “tote-sum.” Whatever: it’s the place where the Icee machines lived. I prefer the traditional Coca-Cola–flavored Icee above all else. I don’t go for that blue stuff. And I don’t go for slushies or slurpees or whatever ice-filled liquified candy Sonic is pushing this week. Just a Coke Icee. These days, these days of the expanding man, I only get them when I take a child to see the latest IP iteration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That cineplex has an Icee machine that actually works — another wrinkle. Growing up, traveling up into the Mississippi Delta to see my ancestors, my parents preferred stopping for a chocolate milkshake at a restaurant called the Pig Stand. They made the best milkshakes, but their milkshake machine was often broken. There is some corollary between the deliciousness of the processed beverage snack treat and the hypochondriac unreliability of the machine that makes it. It’s as if its genius can only manifest every 72 hours. More than once did we stop by the Pig Stand and leave empty bellied. Maybe what was delicious was its own brokenness. Eventually the Pig Stand followed its milkshake machine’s lead and closed permanently, leaving only the bitter aftertaste of nostalgia. Inversely related: the ubiquity of fully functional Smoothie Kings throughout the south correlates to how I find all of their products hopelessly mid. 

Voice Memos. Technology for people who hate technology or are afraid of technology or become so helpless and distracted in the face of options, in the off-chance of dopamine sparks flying. If you give me switches, I am going to flip them in an effort to see what they do and optimize the pleasure of the experience, but then I get so caught up in optimizing the potential pleasure, I never do the original task that I came to do so many moons ago. I am swamped by options. I have 18 tabs open full of articles where I have read two paragraphs each. There is always the potential next best thing if I am not sufficiently trapped or harnessed into the current thing. The voice memo is the perfect recording studio for someone like me: all you can do is record and send it to someone. Perhaps you can edit it? I haven’t figured that part out and please don’t tell me how. It’s linear. It’s got one button. If it sounds bad, you have to do it over. There is no patching available. No punching in. No tracking. I still have a microcassette recorder in my desk, which I used back in college. A great invention. Just enough technology to be useful but not enough technology to be interesting. Put that on a T-shirt. I’ll wear it under my Polo. 

Kolaches. Have you had a kolache? 

Shopping like the angels

Product Reviews,

Product Review: RocknRoller Multi-Cart, model R6RT

You have too much stuff. I have too much stuff. We don’t need any more stuff, and yet, sometimes shopping happens, so here is a product review. I recently purchased the RocknRoller Multi-Cart, model R6RT, and it’s a handy device. In general I am against buying things. I find that the anticipation of buying things overwhelming, a cascade of pleasure, but the actual owning of the things, the unboxing, the set up, the maintenance of the thing, the finding where to put the thing, the dealing with the thing because now it’s in the way of other things, the disuse of the thing, the regret that the thing grows to embody because I didn’t level up to the person I thought I was going to become when I bought the thing, and the resulting corrosion of self-esteem brought on by the thing to be altogether slightly exhausting. It’s easier just to skip the buying part entirely. And yet, man cannot live on brio alone. 

I am a part-time musician, in addition to my regular professional duties, and the calendar has started to populate with gigs again, which is my own personal barometer of where the tri-county area is vis-a-vis the pandemic. (Is this safe? Is this proper? I don’t know. Most of these potential future gigs are outside. Most people I know are fully vaccinated. It seems like we’re on the lip of nearly normal. I don’t want to be careless or callous, but I also want to play, and I’m now one year older, and I miss everyone, even the people I don’t yet know.) So, in an anticipatory burst of consumerism, I decided it was time to buy the cart. I have several friends who use the same cart and sing its praises. Does it seem silly to sing the praises of a utility cart? Perhaps. But if you are in the routine of moving large chunks of irregularly shaped equipment from your automobile across, say, a parking lot through a field to an improvised bandstand under a tree, anything that makes the foregoing less difficult is welcome. Besides, my collapsible two-wheel dolly is getting rickety. I have to position it between the pavement and my chin so that I can unfold its arthritic wheels. It’s important to use objects until they are completely worn out or otherwise so horribly annoying that even the most deranged and neurotic can justify a replacement purchase. Everyone, please welcome my new cart. 

Did I read reviews beforehand? What am I, some kind of rube? In addition to the personal testimony, I also read scads of internet reviews. To my complex shame, I love internet reviews of objects. I read the Wirecutter more intently than any reasonably balanced American adult should and take its guidance as gospel. But there’s a grain of unease that I have been developing as I click through reviews of products I might buy and some I will never buy. Just what am I doing reading all these reviews? Why do I care? Is this simply a consequence of being able to evaluate an absurd amount of consumer options? When I was younger, I just went to the store and bought what they had. There was no premonition of missing out on all the potentially better products. Now I compare. Actually, it’s even more developed: unless I do a rigorous comparison, I feel as if I am cheating myself, cheating the universe. It’s my duty to compare, to optimize, to purchase the best weed-whacker I can possibly purchase, because, goddamnit, I deserve it, and what’s more, I want to whack weeds with the best possible tool for whacking said weeds. Anything less would be uncivilized. The diligent sifting of reviews feels somehow religious. This is how the angels would shop. 

So, the cart. It’s good. It does what it’s supposed to do. It carries approximately a trunk full of stuff, stacked neatly, in one trip: an entire drumset with hardware, or a reasonably sized PA, or for those non-musicians, about six boxes of Office Depot paper. It’s black with yellow accents and looks like a metal grasshopper. Is the name, RocknRoller Mini-Cart, slightly gooby? It is. Do I feel somewhat like a goober rolling up to the gig in the wake of this conspicuous speciality contraption? I do. Do I feel just slightly like a Blues Lawyer? Yes. But is it the absolute best tool one could use for such activities? It’s pretty dang close. It accomplishes the most important strategic task for the part-time gigging musician: decreasing the number of trips from the car to the venue. Though all my gigs are local, half of my time is spent moving gear from the car or back to the car and coiling various types of cables. The actual musical performance is but a momentary breeze in between, a kiss of wind. 

What makes this cart different is that it’s convertible and extendible. It’s like a Transformer, but more practical. Its resting state is folded up, like a little four-wheeled robot. Its vertical sides fold out, so that it turns into a rigid metal U with wheels. But then, once you unscrew the spring loaded fixers underneath and push in a little metal nipple, the squared tubing telescopes out so that you can have up to 42 inches of loadable space. Bring me your stackable, heavy objects! Word to the wise on that nipple/telescoping bit, you have to push it in before collapsing, which definitely presents the opportunity to scalp your finger. Caution. The sides fold by pulling on a silver braided metal wire that’s encased in plastic. I’m sure there’s a name for this kind of metal twist cord; you’ve seen it. You pull that and the vertical sides suddenly become foldable. Another warning: once you collapse the sides, they aren’t fully secured down. The one folded on top will swing out a limited distance and pop you on the shin if you’re not ginger with it. The cart can also be converted into a more traditional two-wheeled dolly shape, though I haven’t used it as such yet. It’s too convenient as a four-wheeled cart. In fact, when I first got it, I was so enamored with its convenience I wanted to put everything on it: backpacks, the dog, my children. Should I take it to the grocery store? 

There are other models, which mainly differ in the length to which it can be extended or the robustness of its wheels. I thought briefly of getting the model with inflatable wheels, but like the fellows in the office parking lot with the trucks so tall one needs a carabiner to climb inside, that seemed overkill. I can deal with genteel wheels. 

Do I need such a cart? Is it absolutely essential? Do I deserve such a cart? Isn’t there a more productive way I could have spent those hard-earned dollars? Shouldn’t I simply have saved them? Conserved my resources for a potential unforeseen world-changing event? This is the problem with ordering packages. They often come tightly packed with regret. They are really talismans to my own spendthrift ways, mirages of improvement, artifacts of self-optimization, and reminders of my own overfed narcissism. Is all of this really necessary? 

You should try hanging out with me around Christmastime.