I made a pact with myself at the beginning of the month that during my stint as guest editor over at Coudal.com I would not post duplicate entries either on this site or at Industrial Brand. However, today’s entry breaks rank and has been posted on all three.
One of the freshest and exciting books to capture the world’s imagination in the past decade was Yann Martel’s Booker prizewinning novel Life of Pi. Since October, The Times and Canongate Books have been running an international call for submissions for a new …

A posting on Coudal’s Fresh Signals caught my eye and imagination this afternoon. It was regarding Alphabet 26, a simplified English alphabet system designed by American type designer Bradbury Thompson in 1950. The underlying concept is a sound one: “it is misleading for a letter, or for any graphic symbol, to have two different designs.” Of the 26 letters in the English alphabet, 19 use different symbols for uppercase and lowercase while the other 6 use similar ones. Bradley eliminated what he deemed the extraneous symbols and created the system …

One of my wife’s colleagues, who is working as a teacher in Dubai stumbled upon this image in a 1972 British text book entitled “America”. He writes, “When I first saw the picture I almost dropped the book in disbelief. One of my students, after seeing the publication date, said: ‘How teacher? Is it magic?’”.
Not magic, but it is amazing how such an innocent watercolour illustration could inherit so much horror and historical importance to turn it at once into a globally understood icon.

The *ahem* Bradgelina paparazzi angle of this story still has me leery to post this but the whole “life imitating art imitating life” on multiple levels was just too much not to. Plus, the Sonic Youth “Goo” album cover is sweet. The play by play from WFMU:
A paparazzi photo of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in the back seat of a car from 2005, Raymond Pettibon’s artwork for Sonic Youth’s album “Goo” from 1990, which is based on a paparazzi photo of David and Maureen Smith (two people named Mr. …