{ feuilleton }

Above: Ottoman calligraphy from a selection at the Library of Congress. Below: contemporary Arabic typography from the Experimental Typography Flickr pool.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ghubar
• Calligraphy by Mouneer Al-Shaárani
• The Journal of Ottoman Calligraphy
• Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East

Penguin is really coming up with the goods these days, living up to their reputation as a house with high standards of cover design, unlike Picador and the shabby way they treated Cormac McCarthy recently.
Ian Fleming’s Bond novels are the latest to receive a makeover with some fabulous art from illustrator Michael Gillette. 2008 is […]

Paris and Brussels are well-known centres of Art Nouveau architecture, less well-known but equally valuable is the Latvian capital of Riga whose historic centre is now a World Heritage Site. The highly distinctive building at Elizabetes Iela 10b is one of a number of buildings there designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, father of film director Sergei […]

Metamorphosis by Bridget Riley (1964).

Mademoiselle ad (1965).
From this Flickr set. Thanks to Aristan for the tip.

Hallucinations: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets From The WEA Vaults (2004).
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #3
• Design as virus #2
• Design as virus #1
• New Bridget Riley

My long and rambling post about the work of Barney Bubbles in January 2007 generated a considerable flurry of renewed interest in the great designer and ended by saying “We’re overdue a decent book-length examination of his work and his influence.” Just over a year later, here we are…. Paul Gorman was one of the […]

The Art of Illuminating As Practised in Europe from the Earliest Times by WR Symms (1860).
From the days when blocking was an art. One of a number of lavish board designs which can be found at Fromoldbooks.org.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Decorated Russian book covers
• The […]

The Boojum Press edition of the Guide (1997).
(Frame supplied by Mark Roberts.)
A few days ago we had the CD cover meme which encourages people to create cover designs for invented groups generated by random means. In a similar vein but minus the random element there’s the growing selection of books by reclusive author Constance […]

Okay, here’s a web meme I can really get behind…. I’ve never been tempted to try one of those long list affairs filled with questions such as “what was your favourite breakfast cereal when you were a child?” The CD cover meme is more my kind of thing and it goes like this:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first […]

Adonis Blue Butterfly.
Beautiful stamps for the second in a Royal Mail series intended to bring attention to endangered species. These will be issued on Tuesday and are designed by Andrew Ross using photography from the Natural History Museum. The Independent notes the irony of the Royal Mail printing these even as they’re building a […]

Atelier Elvira (1897-98).
Seeing as there’s been a run of Art Nouveau-related posts here it’s worth mentioning a location that’s familiar to students of the Jugendstil but less well-known to the world at large. August Endell’s Atelier Elvira was a Munich studio building whose exterior decoration of a very stylised dragon creature manages to be […]