Rick Jacobson Illustration

Raptors zombified

2014-10-03T12:14:00.000-07:00

The Work of Frank Frazetta

2014-04-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

On May 9, 2010, the art world lost a great legend.
If you were lucky enough to grow up as a young boy in the 1970′s, than you would remember the bigger than life artwork of comic artist Frank Frazetta, who recently died at the age of 82. His work and style were instantly recognized: Massive muscles, swords and axes, busty and scantly clad women, legions of the damned, and battle… lots of battle. His work was the epitomy of the Heavy Metal movement of the 1970′s and rock bands like Molly Hatchet.
As boys, we grew up desiring the physique and the call to battle. I remember having a poster of Fire and Ice on my wall. It was “fantasy” art, but not the kind of fantasy you would typically attribute to young adolescent boys. I’m talking about The Call of grand adventure in far off lands. At least that is what I remember.
Whether, it was a enormous barbarian on horseback or a pencil sketch of Tarzan, the work of Frank Frazetta was world-renown and instantly recognizable. He contributions will be greatly missed, but his legacy will be here for a long time.

2014-03-24T19:13:00.001-07:00

http://www.workbook.com/portfolios/rick_jacobson

Fruit drop

2014-03-03T05:58:00.000-08:00

20 Iconic Weapons From the Most Legendary Gunslingers in Film

2014-01-22T08:30:00.000-08:00

Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan -

Even for people who are vehemently anti-gun, there’s something fun about seeing how filmmakers and writers imagine weapons of the future, regardless of how unrealistic they are. Federico Mauro, an Italian art director, has taken it upon himself to make them real.
Mauro is an award-winning commercial director, but in his free time, he hones his rendering skills with projects like this one: Famous Guns, a collection of guns used by classic film characters. “There’s an iconic legacy between an object and a famous person,” he told Gizmodo over email, “be it real or imaginary.”
His collection includes plenty of actual guns (like Samuel Jackson’s 9mm pistol from Pulp Fiction), but the best ones are the fictional weapons. They range from District 9‘s Arc Generator to Rick Deckard’s Blaster pistol from Blade Runner, and the Ghostbusters Proton Pack even makes an appearance, too. Check ‘em out below.

http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/07/20-iconic-weapons-from-the-most-legendary-gunslingers-in-film/

Van Gogh's Yellow

2013-12-16T08:30:00.000-08:00

by johnandann@theartistsroad

It is well known that the rise of Impressionism was due in part to the new developments in paint chemistry which created brighter, more stable colors previously unavailable for oil painting.


View of Arles with Irises by Vincent van Gogh, oil painting.

One of the artists who embraced and experimented with the new color technology was Vincent van Gogh. The brilliance of some of van Gogh's most famous fine art oil paintings are due to his use of these newly available vivid industrial pigments. These pigments begin to show up in his work after his move from Holland to France. Unfortunately, the chemists of the time did not have the tools to perform accelerated aging tests to determine the lightfastness over time of their new creations.
One of the colors, Chrome Yellow, is not only toxic, but is now also known to darken under exposure to the ultraviolet rays in sunlight. As less toxic alternatives to Chrome Yellow were finally developed in the mid-1900s, artists tended to switch to them. But, for a critical period of time, the brilliant color that Chrome Yellow provided was an important tool in van Gogh's and other artists' palettes. It was perhaps most famously used in some of van Gogh's Sunflower paintings. Researchers have found that some, but not all, paintings containing chrome yellow suffer from the severe browning that exposure to sunlight can cause.
To understand how paintings age and how best to preserve them for the future, researchers conducted an in-depth study of the browning seen in some of Van Gogh's work painted with Chrome Yellow. Scientists from four countries performed the study. They began by collecting samples from three historic chrome yellow paint tubes and artificially aging the paint for 500 hours using an ultraviolet lamp. They also took samples from two van Gogh paintings, View of Arles with Irises and Bank of the Seine. The paint from the tubes darkened to a chocolate brown after exposure to the UV light.
Using an X-ray beam that is one hundred times thinner than a human hair, the scientists were able to analyze the darkened chrome yellow at the very surface of the two paintings as well, just below the varnish. Their analyses discovered that the chromium in the pigment gained electrons from the UV light, effectively reducing Chromium (VI) to Chromium (III), turning bright yellow to brown.
Of great interest was the finding from the microscopic X-ray beam that the darkening was most prominent where chemical compounds containing barium and sulphur were. This may prove why some of Van Gogh's paintings seem to be especially susceptible to the darkening, as it is speculated that he sometimes blended white (containing barium and sulphur) with his yellow paint. The next phase of the research will be the most important of all in trying to understand if there is any hope to revert pigments to the original state in paintings where the darkening is already taking place.
In yet another blending of science and art, we are able to look backwards to understand more about the lives and the works of the great masters. "I am not aware of a similarly big effort ever having been made for the chemistry of an oil painting." - Joris Dik, Professor at Delft Technical University. (More information is available from the Journal of Analytical Chemistry.)

Please join us on The Artist's Road for more interesting and informative stories. We believe that more artists in the world is a good thing!
--John and Ann

She Nearly Threw Her Grandpa’s Scrapbook Away. Til She Opened It And… WHOA!

2013-12-16T06:36:00.002-08:00

A Redditor discovered this scrapbook in her family’s home. It was musty, plain and almost falling to pieces. To most people, it may look like just a piece of junk that could be thrown away during a round of spring cleaning. She had a feeling it was special… and it ended up being absolutely priceless. Her great-grandfather was a cartoonist for Walt Disney, and inside of that scrapbook was some of the coolest sketches we’ve ever seen.

It didn’t seem like much on the outside…

But on the inside, this scrapbook was filled to the brim with vintage Walt Disney cartoons.

Some of them you may not even recognize, aside from one delightful little mouse.

This book is a piece of history, containing some of the earliest versions of a favorite cartoon character we know today.

We don’t support hoarding, but if you see a tattered book in your family’s attic, you might just want to take a peek before you throw it away. It could contain priceless Disney gold!

New work Black Berry with Splash

2013-11-24T09:07:00.000-08:00

Found in the Trash: A Box of Otherworldly Notes

2013-11-12T09:00:00.000-08:00

In "Nostalgia"

You know why the internet is awesome? Because you can share the experience of someone discovering a mysterious treasure. Reddit user TramStopDan documented and shared his recent experience of unlocking and discovering the contents of a box which his friend found discarded on the street next to the trash. When he managed to open it, Dan found a mind-boggling collection of posters, illustrations, text, maps technical drawings and personal belongings.

Speculating on the original owner of the case, Dan writes: “Clearly something happened to this guy that was very memorable. It measures roughly 29″ by 38″ and almost all the drawings are very large… It appears that he was making a diorama/tabletop display. (Why? I have no idea). There are numbered parts and instructions/explanations.”

So let’s take a peak at what he found…

Pretty normal so far…

Text on a poster with corrections and a few eyebrow-raisers to quote, such as, “…but after 12 years it developed that this picture of an obvious other-world invasion…”

‘Fairly small maps, hand-drawn on a clear-ish plastic-like material.’

They all have a hole in the middle, to be overlaid on something else.

Hmmm…

Getting weirder… (or cooler) …

And as Dan puts it, “begin the crazy”…

“Now things start to get a little odd. It seams that the artist saw something in Tampa, FL in 1977 that changed him … This appears to be an early sketch of the event”.

“An obvious blending of the religious and the extraterrestrial…”

One Reddit commenter had this theory to add:
Apparently the guy went slightly insane over finding extraterrestrials in the bible. He was obsessed with “living creatures” described in Ezekiel 10 that are described as having four faces: “the first face was the face of a cherub, and the second face was the face of a man, and the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.” I guess he really wanted for that to be an alien encounter.

Also found in the briefcase was this technical drawing that looks like a patent application, quite large and very detailed. Dan looked but could not find any registered patent of this design.

So there’s your daily dose of “what the heck am I looking at?!”

Don’t Give It Away for Free!

2013-11-06T05:45:00.005-08:00

by Jillian Steinhauer

Detail of Jessica Hische’s shouldiworkforfree.com flowchart (screenshot by the author, © Jessica Hische)

Last week, a New York Times opinion piece fired up my Facebook newsfeed. Titled “Slaves of the Internet, Unite!” and penned by Tim Kreider, the piece pleads with writers not to indulge in that pervasive and pernicious cultural habit: writing for free.
Kreider’s op-ed is funny, smart, and over-the-top, which occasionally leads to some stretching of his argument. (He compares his situation with that of his sister the pulmonologist, saying no one asks her to perform a free lobectomy in her spare time, but I’m not quite sure I buy the comparison.) It also leads to gems that any writer struggling to eke out a living will savor:

This is partly a side effect of our information economy, in which “paying for things” is a quaint, discredited old 20th-century custom, like calling people after having sex with them. The first time I ever heard the word “content” used in its current context, I understood that all my artist friends and I — henceforth, “content providers” — were essentially extinct.

And this:

Not getting paid for things in your 20s is glumly expected, even sort of cool; not getting paid in your 40s, when your back is starting to hurt and you are still sleeping on a futon, considerably less so. Let’s call the first 20 years of my career a gift. Now I am 46, and would like a bed.

Kreider ends with a rallying cry asking other writers not to give it away for free, so as to help lift the boat for all of us, or however that metaphor goes.
When I read Kreider’s piece, part of me immediately wanted to trumpet his message everywhere; another part of me admitted all too readily that the issue is complicated. In this day and age, writing for free brings with it real benefits, the most obvious of which is the chance to write for money; that’s how mine and I’m sure countless other careers started.
People tend to blame the internet for the downfall of the livable writing wage, which I think is probably accurate. People also tend to laud the internet for bringing a greater number and wider range of voices into the cultural conversation, which I think is probably accurate as well. But writing — like art — still has a major diversity problem, as well as a gender one. We remain far from the utopian democratization proposed by the evangelists of Web 2.0.
One aspect of the diversity-in-writing discussion that I’ve found noticeably absent is any mention of class, most likely because you’d need real, hard data to understand the economic backgrounds of working writers. But I venture to guess that if you did have the results, you’d find a whole lot of people who come from middle- and upper-class backgrounds and not so many from lower.
Choosing writing as a profession is an economic risk. Having a safety net, like a family you’re pretty sure won’t let you don’t end up homeless, helps. Easy access to education also helps, both emotionally (confidence) and materially (contacts, connections). A sense of entitlement definitely doesn’t hurt. A recent opinion piece in the Guardian by Chris Arnade, a Wall Street banker–turned–photographer, was overly simplistic but made a solid point:

I am able to take risks as an artist because I have money. … we rarely hear the stories of the poor as told by them. If they are told, it is by other artists who come into the neighborhood and interpret what they see.

Paying writers — and artists, and musicians, and photojournalists, etc. — matters, for a myriad of reasons. One of the strongest is that, without it, we’ll never really achieve that long-overdue democratization. Not until we find a way to make these creative pursuits viable professions.

http://hyperallergic.com/90638/dont-give-it-away-for-free/

Treat Your Imagination to Daniel Merriam’s Fantasy Surrealism

2013-06-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

Daniel Merriam was born on February 1, 1963 in a small town in Maine, USA. He was one of seven artistic children and so was surrounded by creative pursuits as a child. He began exploring his artistic skills by drawing cartoons for his high school paper and went on to become a professional architectural designer. His architectural illustrations won many awards and inspired Merriam to take up painting as a full-time career. It was a move that has brought value to the genre of modern surrealism, as Merriam’s art exhibits an aspect of curiosity that was previously lacking in the movement. Fantastic creatures frolic in his art works while pensive humanoids express the inner world of the artist in silent mime, asking nothing of the viewer but that they travel into Merriam’s fantasy world and delight in his alternate reality.
Unlike many surrealist works, Merriam’s art isn’t a reflection of society, suffering or the emotional angst of the artist. Instead his paintings portray opinions of emotion, history and nature that are based purely in the realm of curiosity. There is a sense of child-like romanticism in the beauty of his fantasy realms that is balanced with a maturity of technical skill. This is the work of an artist who has dedicated his time and energy to the pursuit of form as an expression of ideas and imagination.
Daniel Merriam has published two books of his fantasy surrealist paintings, The Impetus of Dreams and The Eye of a Dreamer. You can find out more about these books and see more watercolor paintings by Daniel Merriam on his website. Try out these links for online art galleries that sell prints of Merriam’s art, or join his Facebook page for updates from the artist.

http://mayhemandmuse.com/treat-your-imagination-to-daniel-merriams-fantasy-surrealism/

Quentin Blake at 80: the illustrator's magical art

2012-12-16T14:38:00.006-08:00

The scratchy, angular work of the illustrator Quentin Blake – who celebrates his 80th birthday on 16 December – is instantly recognisable. But, Jenny Uglow argues, he is still a master of the unexpected

Quention Blake's Mrs Armitage: 'Bumpers? Who needs them?' Photograph: © Quentin Blake

Crouching in a bookshop, at small-child height, in front of the picture books, I found myself laughing at familiar scenes. Here is Mrs Armitage in her rickety car, with great weights descending "kerplunk" as she hurtles along: "Bumpers? Who needs them?" Here is Mr Magnolia, with his sisters and parakeets and mice, and rhymes any two-year-old can bellow, "BOOT", "HOOT", "ROOTY-TOOT". Here is Angela Sprocket, with a pocket for everything, even the kitchen sink, and the magical Green Ship, steering into the eye of the storm. All are creations of Quentin Blake. Words come to mind: exuberant, chaotic, comic – joyous.

Beyond the Page
by Quentin Blake

On a table nearby are books for older children, in which Blake's drawings illuminate other people's texts. He may be benign, but he has a mercurial wit, a cartoonist's eye for the telling gesture, a spiky morality, a gleeful touch of anarchy. He can do smelliness well, such as the matted beard and clouds of stench in David Walliams's Mr Stink. And his long collaboration with Roald Dahl showed that he can do nastiness too: the horrible Twits, the grumpy grandmas and beastly aunts, the frightening Grand High Witch with her evil drool, the gloating red-tongued wolf of Revolting Rhymes. Yet any darkness is filtered by humour. For years now, children have seen these characters as he drew them, from the BFG in his sandals and Willy Wonka in his hat to Matilda with her tower of books.
Blake's scratchy, knobbly, angular style may be immediately recognisable, but he is still a master of the unexpected. Celebrating his 80th birthday on 16 December, he is tetchily pleased that his new exhibition at the Marlborough Fine Art Gallery isn't a retrospective – as if he were a grand old man at the end of his career – but a show of new, intriguing, thought-provoking work. When the gallery invited him to make etchings and lithographs, he grasped the chance, even though – or perhaps because – these were unfamiliar media. Eventually, he produced mysterious etchings of women and birds and jewel-tinted humanoid insects; lithographs of girls with dogs; strange, disembodied heads of women floating in water, like archaic fragments from the depths; bouncing, vividly coloured, nude Sporting Women; and haunting drawings of Companions and Characters in Search of a Story. All the sequences are, he feels, "like illustration pulled inside out". Instead of pictures supporting a text, viewers provide their own narratives. The effect is unsettling, taking us to some edge, a borderland of metamorphosis.
As Blake describes it, there has always been something provisional, rather than planned, about his working life. At the end of a short video about drawing, made some time ago, he said that whenever he delivered a book, his publisher always asked if he had any ideas about what he would do next. "Well, of course I don't have any ideas – in fact I'm convinced I will never have any ideas. But I have to try, and I think about things I would like to draw. I organised an exhibition called Magic Pencil, and there you could buy a 'magic pencil' – and I bought lots of them – of course they're not magic really, they just draw in lots of different colours – and I thought, if I drew something with them, I might find something that will make a book in the end."
I suspect that, secretly, he probably does have a magic pencil. Like Hogarth, he defies the limits of the visual by evoking sound: saucepans crash, birds screech, flutes toot. His hairy monsters, weird animals, knowing children and baffled adults threaten to leap off the paper. Noses point, arms flap, legs twist at impossible angles. In Mrs Armitage on Wheels he deliberately gave his heroine a scarf to blow in the wind, to impart the feeling of movement, the breath of air. Movement, freedom, escape are of the essence. And in every case, the open line and feeling of improvisation allow readers space to let their own imagination work on how characters might look and behave.
A certain liberty pervades the very way he works. His studio, the front room of his Earls Court flat, has an air of potential, as if the paper and colours and pots of pencils, the boxes and books, the notes propped on the mantelpiece, the drawers crammed with sketches, will get to work by themselves. Standing amid all this, beaming, like a slighter, slimmer version of Phiz's drawings of the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby, Blake is enthusiastically precise about the exact make of his crayons, the quality of paper, yet hesitant about his own new work. He can be taken aback by what emerges as he draws. "If I try to think about it," he says, "there seem sometimes to have been periods of a sort of absent-mindedness when ideas think of themselves."
Companions XI Photograph: © Quentin Blake/Marlborough Fine Art The air of spontaneity floats, one realises, above a lifetime of patience, graft and long-practised skills. He has the artist's demanding perfectionism, an obsessive need to "get things right". For his illustrations, he produces a sequence of roughs, working out the look of the characters, the best moments for depiction, the disposition of the page. Are the characters consistent? Does the action carry on from page to page? Next he places the sketches on the lightbox, with a sheet of watercolour paper above, and reworks them in ink, never as exact copies but transcriptions in another form. Even then he re-draws twice, three times, four, five. He likes odd tools – the random scratches of the quill, the fluid sweeps of the bamboo pen. Both are ancient tools, and both are slightly unpredictable. "You get a more adventurous feel from a scratch pen," he says, remembering how a woman in France sent him a feather from a vulture's wing, that he sharpened into a quill – "rather splendid". When he applies colour, he doesn't care if the watercolour escapes the lines: "It makes it feel as if there is something happening."
Blake has drawn ever since he can remember, certainly from the age of five. As the general view was that no one could make a living as a cartoonist or an artist, he read English at Cambridge, did his National Service and studied for a teaching diploma, and then took life classes at Chelsea School of Art. For 20 years he taught at the Royal College of Art. But during all that time he kept drawing, sending work to Punch when he was 16. In 1960, he illustrated his first children's book, A Drink of Water, written by his friend John Yeoman, moving from simple comedy to book illustration because he wanted to take drawing beyond the world of jokes into a realm that could embrace narrative and where he could control the sequence and design. Since then he has illustrated about 300 books, from nursery rhymes to the Folio Society's Don Quixote.
He was among a new wave of British illustrators who began work in the 1950s and 60s, an extraordinary flowering, benefiting from the greater availability of four-colour half-tone printing. The brilliant artists of that generation, each with their distinctive signature, still seem fresh. It's extraordinary to find that Shirley Hughes, Judith Kerr and Peter Firmin are in their 80s, while Raymond Briggs, Helen Oxenbury, David McKee and Tony Ross were all born, like Blake, in the 1930s. A galaxy of later stars have followed and authors and illustrators have often formed notable partnerships: Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, Allan and Janet Ahlberg, Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, and, of course, Dahl and Blake.
Blake is passionately committed to his art, a generous promoter of younger talent and a prime mover in the House of Illustration, now working on establishing a permanent gallery. As the first children's laureate, 1999-2001, Blake encouraged all children to draw and paint, and he remains a tireless supporter of the annual Big Draw. I have seen him hold an audience of 1,200 spellbound, with children perched on adults' shoulders, just by drawing on an overhead projector, talking quietly: a nose, a line, a zig-zag, a big curve, a few more lines, and there is a crocodile balancing upside-down. He makes us feel we can all have a go. Introducing the translation of Daniel Pennac's bracingly funny The Rights of the Reader, he speaks out against the British taste for tests and targets, as well as the constraining grid of French "dry respect for art and letters". Behind both, he wonders, "is there a sort of fear of the rich, fluid diversity of the material", of the administrator's loss of control? "How satisfying, by contrast, the reassurance of a well-ticked box."
As head of illustration at the RCA, he must have been a great teacher. Scholarly yet fluent, he writes engagingly about the traditions of his art. For the Hayward Gallery touring exhibition In All Directions, for example, he traced illustrators of travel from Giandomenico Tiepolo to Honoré Daumier to Edward Ardizzone and John Burningham, with detours into Japanese and Indian art. In the BBC's Great Lives series he championed George Cruikshank, who drew the original Fagin and the Artful Dodger. He is entranced by moments of experiment, like the first showing of Degas's bronze La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, when Parisians fled offended: "A sort of exploratory skirmish along the borders of the artificial and the real," full of inner tension and energy, a metaphor for courage.
His first independent book, Patrick, published in 1968, was a story of art – in that case music – turning dull, monochrome lives into vibrant colour. (It was also a canny fight against being confined to black and white illustrations – to make its point, it had to be printed in colour.) In recent years, often working with the Nightingale Project in Kensington, he has expressed this optimistic belief in the transformative power of art in his work for hospitals and health centres. These have included jubilant images of older people cavorting, playing music and swinging in trees, for a residential ward; simple scenes of walking in the rain or feeding the birds for patients with eating disorders – the balm of the ordinary; and colourful, teetering circus folk for a mental health ward for older people, a reminder that however odd they look, older people still have "skills honed over the years, still fluent and functioning". For a centre for children and young people, he created Planet Zog, where stalk-eyed creatures stick out spotty tongues and green consultants scribble notes: not with any solemnly therapeutic aim, but just showing people "in strange situations which they are more or less coping with". It must be brilliant to have those pictures on the walls, a friend said recently. "Whatever they show, they're so life-affirming. How could you look at them and not smile?"
Sporting Women II. Photograph: © Quentin Blake/Marlborough Fine Art For a maternity hospital in Angers, where the mood is more celebratory – though tension is there, nonetheless – Blake adopted a swimming theme, with rococo swirls of seaweed. This was not merely a reminder of the amniotic fluid or the way that newborn babies swim naturally, but a way of imparting movement and freedom, the feeling, while in labour, that "something is just around the corner". But Blake is not one for glib consolation or empty promises. His drawings of solitary figures and couples in the Marlborough Gallery exhibition are ruthless in their scrutiny, as well as compassionate. Some figures clutch small objects: a purse, a pair of glasses, a piece of paper. Exposed and anxious, they are unsmiling, and sometimes hostile. He has an affinity with lost souls, as well as a sense of fun. Michael Rosen, who has worked with Blake on many books, including the moving Sad Book, agrees: "I think there is a theme running through much of his work of isolated people going about some kind of slightly fantastical matter of sorting things out – Mr Magnolia, Mrs Armitage. As adults, we may well read loneliness, sadness into these but we don't know if the egocentric child reader reads these partner-less, childless people as extrapolations of themselves, in the mode of grappling with only having one shoe or disappearing cockatoos and so on. They are, more often than not, a child's dilemma blown up big."
Not all dilemmas can be solved, but Blake knows this too. His real interest, he says, is in the possibility of metaphor: "Cockatoos is also about adults not understanding children, The Green Ship about time, and of course Zagazoo is pure diagrammatic metaphor." The great thing is to keep on, thinking through the ideas, working on those drawings, trusting that "something may happen". In the past decade, as he explains in his recent book, Beyond the Page, his art has moved into public spaces, on to walls and beyond, growing first into banners and then into drawings five storeys high, wrapped around the scaffolding at St Pancras in London, and exploding on to stamps, tea-towels, wallpaper, cards. Perfectly right then that in the new exhibition he looks forward, not back, as a more decorous artist might in his 80th year. Who knows, after all, what Quentin Blake may do next?
• Quentin Blake: New Lithographs and Drawings is at Marlborough Fine Art Gallery, London W1, until 11 January 2013; Quentin Blake 2012 is at Chris Beetles Gallery, London SW1, from 9 December to 5 January 2013.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/14/quentin-blake-illustrations-80th-birthday

Turning a page on books: Inside the evolving publishing industry

2012-12-11T08:38:00.002-08:00

Eva Salinas, Special to Financial Post

Peter J. Thompson/National Post Toronto Women's Bookstore owner and director Victoria Moreno has worked seven days a week without a salary, only to see the shop close down.

The audience at Bryan Prince Bookseller, in the Westdale neighbourhood of Hamilton, Ont., has spilled into the next room. It’s a windy Thursday evening in November and although the residential area is mostly quietening down, the night is just getting started at the bookshop.
Several people crowd the doorway, peering in where one of the founders of McMaster University’s medical school, Dr. C. Barber Mueller, is presenting his new book, Excalibur. Just another full house celebrating books.
“You don’t hear of many good, positive stories about the print side [of publishing] and bookstores, but things are going well for us,” said Tracey Higgins, co-owner of the shop, where the walls are floor to ceiling with books.
If this weeknight reading is any indication, the popularity of books isn’t in doubt.

Online Strides

Where the Internet was once seen as a threat to the publishing world, Matt Williams, vice-president of publishing operations for House of Anansi Press, said digital platforms are now the biggest opportunities for the industry. Here are examples of innovation already online:
Pop Sandbox Productions and Publishing (popsandbox.com)
The publisher of KENK: A Graphic Portrait (about prolific bicycle thief Igor Kenk), is proof publishing, multimedia and interactive elements do go together. Their project The Next Day is both a printed graphic novel and an online interactive documentary.

The 49th Shelf (49thshelf.com)
A Canadian book-marketing site to “help mitigate the loss of putting books in front of people,” Mr. Williams said. The self-proclaimed “interactive, virtual library” is a partnership between the Association of Canadian Publishers and the Canadian Publishers’ Council, sponsored in part by the federal Department of Canadian Heritage.
BookNet Canada (booknetcanada.ca)
This non-profit site, also partially funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage, is a response to the change in technology used by the industry. The site gathers and shares industry data, offers retailers and publishers the tools to sell and promote books online and generally is home to a wealth of information for publishing in the digital era.

Instead, it’s the evolving ways books are promoted, sold and consumed that has those in the publishing industry scrambling to ensure growth and, for some, survival.
The opening of big-box retailers and an increasing use of online sites for reading and shopping in the past two decades has sent smaller businesses back to the drawing board.
Now, recent announcements of a game-changing merger between publishing giants Random House and Penguin, the filing for bankruptcy protection by B.C.’s Douglas & McIntyre and yet another closure of a beloved local shop (the 40-year-old Toronto Women’s Bookstore), have again raised fears of industry troubles.
This time, however, many smaller players are countering in a much more positive way.
“I can almost foresee a rebirth of Canadian publishing coming out of this,” said Cynthia Good, director of Humber College’s Creative Book Publishing program and former president of Penguin Books Canada.
“I find this to be a very creative time and full of artistic possibilities … There will be new kinds of partnerships, one can imagine publishers could partner with new kinds of media or a gaming company or a bookstore,” she said.
Partnerships have helped set Bryan Prince Bookseller apart in Hamilton. The shop hosts monthly readings for the Hamilton Poetry Centre and consequently stocks a substantial poetry section that turns over well, Ms. Higgins said. The shop also co-hosts community events with A Different Drummer Books, a Burlington, Ont. retailer, bringing in big-draw authors including Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje and Lloyd Robertson, sharing expenses and sales.
“We have cross-over in our customers, we have cross-over in the authors we want to bring in and there’s more than enough room for us both to survive. It’s mutually beneficial to work together and help each other thrive,” Ms. Higgins said.
A willingness to partner is just one of several strategies used by Ian Elliot, owner of A Different Drummer Books. Bringing in special orders from around the world and catering to the local education market, including orders for libraries and schools, is also a significant part of the business, he said.

Toronto-based Second Story Press, a small publishing house dedicated to “feminist-inspired” adult and young adult books, similarly targets the education market as a key part of its growth strategy. For more than 20 years, the publisher has been supplying books in dozens of languages, in more than 50 countries, including in the Brazilian and Indonesian school systems.
Despite sometimes worrisome industry trends, company co-founder Margie Wolfe said it has been a successful year for the publishing house, especially in its effort to diversify its customer base — book sales in the United States have actually gone up.
“I don’t believe one strategy fits all,” she said, “We’ve had nice spurts in growth in the U.S., we continue to do well internationally, books this year we’ve sold out in weeks and we’ve gone back to press. I’m optimistic for small publishing in Canada.”
Second Story Press has also embraced the advantages of online marketing. Recently, it hosted a one-hour webinar for 1,100 librarians across North America. “I didn’t even know what that was five years ago,” Ms. Wolfe said. In addition to sending a few hundred review copies to newspapers each year, bloggers are also approaching the company. And, where the publishing house used to organize events and publicity for authors, writers will now do a lot of their own promotion on social media and personal websites.
House of Anansi Press is one of the Canadian publishing industry’s biggest success stories, in large part because of the opportunities the online world gave the once small company. Matt Williams, vice-president of publishing operations for Anansi, said the growth in online sales has only strengthened the company.
“Amazon has been a huge account for us, chapters.ca has been huge,” he said. “These are sales opportunities that did not exist even three, four years ago. Now, 15% to 17% of our business is ebook sales. … We can publish a book around the world overnight, via digital. Publishers put writers together with readers [online]. That is a huge opportunity,” he said.
In 10 years, Anansi has grown to a staff of 28 and sales of about $6-million a year, from three employees and barely $500,000 in sales.
The recent merger announcement and frequent closure of bookstores do worry Mr. Williams, however, as he points to the inevitable loss of jobs.
“Publishers were positioned to be able to take advantage of the changing formats like digital. Bookstores have been a little left in the cold over the years, especially independents,” he said.
An announcement by the Canadian Booksellers Association in October that the organization would be absorbed by the Retail Council of Canada due to “economic pressures” is another sign of the diminishing strength of booksellers across the country.
The Toronto Women’s Bookstore in the city’s Annex neighbourhood is the latest industry casualty. Victoria Moreno bought the shop just two years ago, worked mostly seven days a week without taking a salary, invested in a café and patio space, started music and children’s programs, and hosted countless readings and artist workshops. In theory, the shop had gone from a not-for-profit to a for-profit model under her watch, but in reality, it was far from it.
“This has been charity work here, there’s been no profit,” Ms. Moreno said just weeks before the shop closed its doors for good on Nov. 30. She spent the shop’s last weeks selling the cafe equipment, packing and returning any remaining inventory and trying to find a new tenant for the Harbord Street location.
Selling textbooks was once the shop’s bread and butter, Ms. Moreno said, but students are now finding resources online. That, combined with the area’s slow foot traffic and a support network that isn’t as active, spelled the shop’s demise.
“When I announced it, people were up in arms saying ‘the community, the community.’… But the honest truth is people were not coming in,” she said.
“It’s horrible when any bookstore has to fold; it’s bad for readers, it’s bad for publishers,” Ms. Wolfe at Second Story Press said.
“But we have a really broad and diverse industry that’s operating within this country. And while the media keeps talking ‘doom and gloom,’ we publishers keep publishing.”

Canadian National Reading Campaign Prepares for Fall Launch

2012-07-16T08:33:00.000-07:00

Author Marcelo Suarez-Orozco speaking at the reading summit in Vancouver in May.

Ruth Skinner

By Leigh Anne Williams

This fall, Canadians will see the launch of a national reading campaign in their newspapers, magazines, on television and in bus shelters. The public awareness campaign will focus on the importance of reading and the joy of it.

The central message is that reading is a great pleasure, says Patsy Aldana, publisher of Groundwood Books who co-founded the campaign and with Annick Press director Rick Wilks.

The publicity campaign is only the first element in a plan unveiled and discussed at a summit attended by about 130 educators, publishers, librarians, educators, writers, parents and students in Vancouver in early May. It was developed and shaped by input at two previous summits in Montreal in 2011 and in Toronto in 2009.

“The ultimate goal of the National Reading Campaign” according to its website, “is to create a strategy that will promote reading amongst all Canadians; Reflecting the value of reading as a tool for democracy and civic engagement, as a means to equalize the playing field for all Canadians, as a way for Canadians to learn about themselves, and as a vehicle for joy.”

While the campaign will aim to encourage reading among all sectors of Canadian society, special attention will be paid to aboriginal people and new immigrants in Canada. “Of course, children are crucially essential in all of this,” Aldana adds, “because if you are turning children out of schools who don’t want to read, then you really are jeopardizing the future of reading,”

Indeed, there is evidence that reading may be being endangered by education systems that intend to promote it. A survey of 240,000 children in grades 3 and 6 in Ontario reported in 2011 that 50% of the students said they liked to read. That is down from 75% of grade 3 students and 65% of grade six students in 1999. The drop is alarming, says Aldana, and cause to re-examine the way reading is being taught to children.

Prominent scholar and author Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, who has been named dean of education at UCLA, spoke at the Vancouver summit. He suggested that while tests help schools see what they are not succeeding at teaching, the heavy emphasis on testing and test scores in many schools and education systems is killing the joy of learning for students. While there may be no way to eliminate testing, he recommends giving students more time and space to enjoy learning.

Aldana added that the organizers of the campaign are interested in discussing current teacher training and new ways that that they could promote reading, such as giving students more time for free reading and choice about the books they read. Books on the curriculum deserve some careful examination as well. “Kids in Ontario are still reading The Chrysalids,” she said. “It’s a fine commercial book from the '40s, but what on earth is it still doing on the curriculum in Grade 8 in Ontario? It has zero relevance.” Educators such as the Canadian deans of education have been very receptive to the campaign so far, Aldana said.

Although the campaign is not directly advocating for public libraries, part of its message is that “public libraries are at the heart of our reading society,” she added.

Another priority identified was a need for Canadian research on reading, which Aldana said will be a major activity funded on a project by project basis. The National Reading Campaign is being established as a not-for-profit organization, which will employ a secretariat of one person. The campaign is seeking funding, but most of it will come from private sources rather than government, she said.

The publishing community is already completely onside, Aldana noted. “The ACP [Association of Canadian Publishers] and the CPC [Canadian Publisher’s Council] are both supporting us in substantial ways – with money and with time.”

Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing to Partner With Mobile Commons for Young Adult Text Campaign to Debut at Comic-Con San Diego

2012-07-13T13:31:00.001-07:00

NEW YORK, July 12, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing has partnered with Mobile Commons to offer Young Adult readers and fans an exciting new mobile program to engage with authors through text messaging. Simon & Schuster will debut the program for fans of Young Adult literature at Comic-Con San Diego later this week with a text-based sweepstakes that offers readers the opportunity to win prizes during the convention, and to continue communicating with authors via text long after Comic-Con ends.
Scott Westerfeld, the New York Times bestselling author of the Uglies and Leviathan series, will launch the text messaging channel with his readers at Comic-Con this week. Fans can simply text SCOTT to a special shortcode to enter for the chance to have coffee with Scott. Following the conference, these readers will get text messages from Scott about his books, as well as other opportunities to meet him. Readers and fans will have the opportunity to respond directly to him with information about themselves or their thoughts on characters and content.

"The best thing about spaces like Comic-Con is getting to meet fans of my work. This sweepstakes is a fun way to pick one reader to talk to in depth," says Scott Westerfeld. "I look forward to meeting the winner!"

In addition, S&S will raffle off other prizes like the exclusive The Blessed guitar from New York Times bestselling author Tonya Hurley. Readers can text BLESSED to a special shortcode to enter to win this sweepstakes.

"We are so excited to embark on this promotional campaign with Mobile Commons. Their platform is at the forefront of marketing technology and will allow us to connect much more easily with our readers, delivering the content they want directly to their phones," says Mara Anastas, Vice President, Deputy Publisher of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. "Teens already spend so much time on their phones now. This is another vehicle for us to reach this audience."

"Simon & Schuster is revolutionizing how authors communicate with their fans," said Jed Alpert, CEO and Co-founder of Mobile Commons. "We know how great the opportunity is for brands to establish effective relationships with their customers via text messaging. This program will offer young adults an unprecedented connection with their favorite authors—and provide Simon & Schuster with the metrics to learn more about their most avid customers."

Texting is widely recognized as the preferred mode of communication for young adults, with the typical American teen sending 60 texts per day. Mobile Commons' pioneering platform allows brands to develop innovative mobile messaging campaigns to engage teens (and adults) in a new way. The Simon & Schuster author campaigns will use the consumer relationship tools on the Mobile Commons user dashboard, which include message editing, data segmenting, targeting, URL tracking, QR codes, and MMS (multimedia messaging). Simon & Schuster will also use the platform's real-time analytics and reporting to help them better personalize their communications with their teen readers.
Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, one of the leading children's book publishers in the world, is comprised of the following imprints: Aladdin, Atheneum Books for Young Readers, Beach Lane Books, Libros para ninos, Little Simon®, Little Simon Inspirations™, Margaret K. McElderry Books, Paula Wiseman Books, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, Simon Pulse, and Simon Spotlight®. While maintaining an extensive award-winning backlist, the division continues to publish acclaimed and bestselling books for children of all ages. In addition to numerous Caldecott, Newbery, and National Book Award winners, Simon & Schuster publishes such high-profile properties and series as Eloise, Olivia, Raggedy Ann & Andy™, Henry & Mudge®, The Hardy Boys®, Nancy Drew®, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Nickelodeon's® Dora the Explorer®, and SpongeBob SquarePants. For more information about Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, visit our website at http://kids.simonandschuster.com.

Simon & Schuster, a part of the CBS Corporation, is a global leader in the field of general interest publishing, dedicated to providing the best in fiction and nonfiction for consumers of all ages, across all printed, electronic, and audio formats. Its divisions include Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, Simon & Schuster Audio, Simon & Schuster Digital, and international companies in Australia, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com.

Finalists Announced for the 2012 Canadian Children's Book Centre Awards

2012-07-06T12:47:00.003-07:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Toronto (June 19, 2012) ― The Canadian Children’s Book Centre (CCBC) is pleased to announce the finalists for its seven major children’s book awards – the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, Prix TD de littérature canadienne pour l’enfance et la jeunesse, Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction, Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People, John Spray Mystery Award and the inaugural Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy.