Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

Saad Eskander and the Baghdad Library

From today's New York Times, the remarkable story of Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, who has kept a diary (now hosted at the website of the British Museum) of his efforts to keep the library open amid the increasing sectarian violence that ravages the city. Imagine if your day-to-day work included not only the problems of how to restore the burned and looted library to its former glory, but also devising ways to keep yourself and your employees alive amid unimaginable carnage. Take a look at what Mr. Eskander returned to after attending a conference in Rome last November:

I received bad news, as soon as I arrived to my office. In my absent, INLA was bombed twice and snipers' bullets broke several windows. Fortunately, no body was hurt. My staff withheld these information from me, when I contacted them. They claimed that they did not want me to be worried and to spoil my visit.

I spent the rest of the week trying to advise a number of my employees what to do, as they got death threats. The Sunnis, who lived in Shi'i dominated districtwere given an ultimatum to abandon their homes and the Shi'is, who lived in a Sunni dominated district, had to leave their homes. So far, two of my employees were murdered, the first worked in the Computer Department, and the second was a guard. Three of our drivers, who worked with us by contract, were murdered and three others were injured.

Read the whole thing if you can--"sobering" does not begin to describe Mr. Eskander's account of what he and his staff have to endure every day. The word "hero" gets thrown around a lot these days; this is a situation where it actually applies.

Manga from the Floating World

Here's the lowdown from the Harvard University Asia Center on their latest offering, Adam L. Kern's Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyoshi of Edo Japan:

Manga from the Floating World is the first full-length study in English of the kibyôshi, a genre of sophisticated pictorial fiction widely read in late-eighteenth-century Japan. By combining analysis of the socioeconomic and historical milieus in which the genre was produced and consumed with three annotated translations of works by major author-artist Santô Kyôden (1761–1816) that closely reproduce the experience of encountering the originals, Adam Kern offers a sustained close reading of the vibrant popular imagination of the mid-Edo period. The kibyôshi, Kern argues, became an influential form of political satire that seemed poised to transform the uniquely Edoesque brand of urban commoner culture into something more, perhaps even a national culture, until the shogunal government intervened.

Based on extensive research using primary sources in their original Edo editions, the volume is copiously illustrated with rare prints from Japanese archival collections. It serves as an introduction not only to the kibyôshi but also to the genre’s readers and critics, narratological conventions, modes of visuality, format, and relationship to the modern Japanese comicbook (manga) and to the popular literature and wit of Edo. Filled with graphic puns and caricatures, these entertaining works will appeal to the general reader as well as to the more experienced student of Japanese cultural history.

It's a beautiful, innovatively-designed volume that does justice to Kern's path-breaking research on this little-known predecessor to manga, which has experienced a steady growth in popularity even outside of Japan that shows no signs of abating.

Typesetters and book nerds take note

Some of us love music. Some of us love horses. And some of us love...fonts. And margins. And heads, sub-heads, rectos and versos. It's hard to realize the importance of decent book (or flyer, or poster, or billboard) design until you see a bad one. Try reading a manuscript in 12-point Courier and then then try it again once it's been designed by our crack team of book artists (they're like sandwich artists, except smarter, cooler, and more talented) and typeset (oftentimes by our good friends at Technologies 'N Typography) in a way that's easy on the eyes--only then will you appreciate what good design and a good font can do for you.

With that in mind, we call your attention to a film about that most ubiquitous and illustrious of fonts--Helvetica. Anyone who's been to New York City will immediately recognize it as the typeface used on the city's subway signage:

Beautiful, isn't it? Anyway, the film is called (appropriately enough) Helvetica, and it's coming out on Helvetica's 50th birthday in 2007. No, we are not affiliated with the producers, and no, we haven't been paid to say this, but as people who care about making things look good, we thought we'd share.

P.S. Please feel free to weigh in with your thoughts on other fonts, including Optima, which I love and use for all my press releases, but which is often criticized for having "awkward" punctuation (quotation marks, etc).