Reading Matters

Hand Job: A Catalog of Type
The Princeton Architectural Press [papress.com] have been making some interesting publishing choices of late, particularly those of the non-architectural kind. Hand Job is an investigation into hand-drawn typography and recent trends away from mechanical typesetting. If that sounds a bit dry the physical publication is anything but. What you get is a lovingly crafted catalogue of modern day illustrators happy to play with type. The book is curated by Michael Perry [midwestisbest.com], a Brooklyn based designer, and features the work of 55 different designers and illustrators, big and small such as Travis Stearns [iammintcondition.com], Adrian Johnson [adrianjohnson.co.uk], Matilda Tristram [lovelycat.co.uk], Adam Hayes [mrahayes.co.uk] and loads more. You can get your grubby mitts on a copy by visiting [papress.com/handjob] or your friendly neighbourhood design bookshop.

Nico
You may have noticed a shipment of bulky silver ‘book like’ magazines appearing in stores around London town. This is Nico magazine [nicomagazine.com] and is your first stop should you wish to catch up on this year’s Colophon2007 event, held in Luxembourg earlier this year. We’ve already talked about Colophon loads on Boicozine, mainly because we did a spot of ‘live blogging’ [see boicozine/colophon] from Colophon via MagCulture [magculture.com/blog], but this really is the definitive magazine companion to the event. There are interviews with most of the lead speakers by Andrew Losowsky, one of the event curators and it’s published by Mike Koedinger [mikekoedinger.com] whose team pull off the whole thing so seamlessly. That’s just a small part of this lush publication though, there’s loads more to check out and this is only issue one (which I guess means Mr Magazine [mrmagazine.wordpress.com] will be making sure he has his copy).