Monthly Archives: June 2014

An Unboxing of “The Fifty Year Sword”

(This post was originally published in my standard blog.)

I’m a big fan of books. Not just the stories, but the book construction as well. From bindings, paper choice, typeset, typography, layout, it’s all interesting to me.

Mark Z. Danielewski is most famous for House of Leaves, an inventive experimental work of layered stories and typographic morphing of most everything we think of as the printed page.

In this video I do a short review of House of Leaves for those who are not familiar with the work (and to allow those familiar with it to berate and chastise me for “getting it wrong” I suspect) and then do an unboxing of his latest work The Fifty Year Sword, which comes in a unique box and exhibits some of the same traits found in House of Leaves.

I hope you enjoy, and I hope those trying to make a purchase decision on this book are aided in their decision making.

 Buy to help support this site…

previewRic Bretschneider
June 24th, 2014 9:30PM

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Judgement…

OK, it sounds a bit harsh, but it’s really all about love.

I love books. Not just the reading of them, although that’s kind of the real point. I love the composition of books.  Their look, smell, feel, and often sound. I stop short of tasting them, at least most of the time.

Typographers, book binders, designers, and even authors spend a lot of time making books not only satisfying to read, but lovely to behold. Something to cherish on the shelf as much as in the mind. To have and to hold.

So that’s what this blog is about. Short love letters to the beauty of books. And maybe a few stings to opportunities not met.

But just a few.

I judge.

And I do hope you’ll enjoy, and if you want to, please contribute! You can judge too.

-Ric Bretschneider
June 24th, 2014 8:15PM