"This is Where We Live": A City Made of Books in Stop Motion to Celebrate UK Publisher 4th Estate's 25th Birthday

Check out this amazing video that Apt Studio made to celebrate British book publisher 4th Estate's 25th birthday.  It's stop motion and Apt Studio used more than 1000 books to create this book city.

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

Welcome to our city - to our world - of books. This is where we live.

A film for 4th Estate Publishers' 25th Anniversary. Produced by Apt Studio and Asylum Films.

The film was produced in stop-motion over 3 weeks in Autumn 2008. Each scene was shot on a home-made dolly by an insane bunch of animators; you can see time-lapse films of each sequence being prepared and shot in our other films.

(via TrendLand)

The Penguin Books Color Code

Vintage Penguin books all had the same iconic design (two bands of color on the top and bottom and a white band in the middle with the book's title and author in black), but they came in an array of colors.  The colors were not, however, purely for aesthetic purposes; each color represented a different genre or subject matter.  Here's what the different colors mean:

Red = Drama
Orange = Fiction
Yellow = Miscellaneous
Green = Crime Fiction
Dark Blue = Autobiographies
Purple = Essays
Cerise = Travel and Adventure
Grey = World Affairs

Here are some vintage Penguins (and Pelicans--but that's a story for a different day) from abebooks, and a video that explains the colors.

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The Young Adult Novels of Moonrise Kingdom

Ever attentive to every design detail, film director Wes Anderson created a set of six fictional young adult novels, each with its own distinctive style, for Moonrise Kingdom.  They belonged to the main character Suzy Bishop, a 12-year old girl who loves reading.  When she runs away from home, she packs her suitcase with a bunch of library books.  I think most people who were once bookish kids can relate to this impractical but unavoidable choice!  In fact, I still can't help myself from over-packing books when I travel.  These books are super reminiscent of the tatty, plastic-covered books with cheesy/creepy illustrated covers that I would get from my local public library as a child.  I can still hear the crinkle of the cellophane covers and feel the intense excitement about reading a new or favorite book from the library.  Also check out the wonderful video at the bottom of this post, which gives summaries and even animated scenes for each of these fictional novels.  Wes Anderson did an extraordinary job of capturing the content, style, and design of the young adult novels of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.  These books really remind me of real books that I read as a kid.  

Cover Envy: The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

We all know we're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but we also can't really help it, whether or not we're conscious of the role that book covers (or spines or titles) have in our choices about what to pick up at the bookstore.  I would buy the UK Picador edition of The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton, which comes out in early July, for its cover alone.  It's a photograph of a dollhouse version of a seventeenth-century bourgeois Dutch canal house, with a hand-lettered title in Delft blue.  Sold.  Even better, however, the book's content is right up my alley as well.  It's about an eighteen year old Dutch girl moving to Amsterdam in 1686 to live with her new husband, who has given her a dollhouse version of their home as a wedding gift.  

Burton was probably inspired by a visit to Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, where this late seventeenth-century dollhouse, or cabinet house, is one of the most popular works on view.  Like the fiction dollhouse in The Miniaturist, this dollhouse was owned by a woman, not a child, and it was probably a replica of Petronella Oortman's (the owner) actual house.  These Dutch dollhouses were extraordinarily intricate and costly, and were not intended to be playthings for children.  They are sometimes called "cabinet houses," because, unlike dollhouses today, they were built into pieces of furniture that, when closed, looked like normal, if very elegant, cabinets.

The cover is reminiscent of the cover of the hardback US edition of Dara Horn's In the Image, a 2002 novel that takes place partially in Amsterdam, and uses a close-up photo of Petronella Oortman's dollhouse for its cover.

The dollhouse on the cover of The Miniaturist was completely handmade for the cover!  Watch this delightful video showing the making of the design of this great cover,  read this post about how designer Katie Tooke came up with the concept for the cover, and check out some close-ups of the miniatures here.