The Hypothetical Library

Jennifer L. Knox

Introduction

This week The Hypothetical Library is featuring its first guest designer, the magnificent poet, Jennifer L. Knox. Jennifer is a designer in the sense that she has a black Sharpie marker, glue stick, and a preexisting book to deface.

As a wedding present for her friends, she did an impromptu adaptation of Mark Bittman’s beloved cookbook How To Cook Everything. By adaptation I mean it is Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything, with his name scratched out and  “Jennifer L. Knox” written above it wherever possible throughout the book. The main (only) difference between the original and the adapted books is Jennifer’s hilarious new introduction.

There is probably nothing more unfunny than talking about what makes something funny, so I’m not going to even attempt that. What I will say is that at a poetry reading some time ago, Ms. Knox’s piece was so funny that I spat out the beer I was drinking midsip. As a result, I now refuse to drink liquids when hearing or reading her work.

I will have a much longer introduction and biography for Jennifer on her next post which is coming soon—a hypothetical young adult series called Jr. Detective Tales #19: Perplexed By A Porpoise. That book follows in the YA tradition of Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and the films of David Lynch. Perplexed By A Porpoise will also feature the considerable talents of artist Elizabeth Zechel, who will handle the cover art.

Warnings/disclaimers:

 

Like all good cookbook introductions, Jennifer’s involves dirty language, animal cruelty, sex acts involving The Partridge Family and then later mirrors and video cameras, crystal meth, and The Betty Crocker EZ Bake Oven™.  As such is intended for grown-ups only. 

Mark Bittman has written a wonderful award winning cookbook enjoyed by millions of people in it’s 10 years of publication. It is copyrighted by the fine publisher Wiley, with one of the most big-hearted, and friendly legal departments in all of America. Their sense of humor and understanding of parody is well known if not legendary. I imagine they are far to busy with contracts and the like to pursue litigation against a small blog that makes absolutely no profit from its own efforts. If you happen to meet or know one of their legal team, buy them a drink, pat them on the back, say “good job,” and please don’t give them this web site address.

Jennifer would also like to apologize for what she said about Mr. Bittman’s recipe for meatloaf. She concedes that it is in fact delicious.
 

Jennifer's website, "Take Off Your Pants and Relax" can be viewed here. You can buy her amazingly hilarious Drunk By Noon here from Bloof Books.

The Cover

 

HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING by Mark Bittman Jennifer L. Knox—Introduction

(Please click on the images for an easier reading experience.)

  

The adjusted flap, spine, and front matter

  

Next week: Nick Abadzis

Miscellaneous hypothetica

Update 4/20/10

In my 8 plus years of book design I’ve never actually seen a stranger with a book whose cover I designed—until this morning. The book was The Age of Sinatra from softskull press. David Ohle’s sequel to his legendary postmodern novel Motorman. It was gratifying to see my book cover “out in the wild” but even more gratifying to see a young woman in her mid 20’s reading David Ohle.

 

The past week was and eventful one for two contributors to The Hypothetical Library—Lydia Millet, and Colum McCann. Lydia was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Colum was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Lydia Millet

Lydia’s most recent book Love in Infant Monkeys, is a wonderful collection of stories that’s over arching theme is the interplay of animals, humans and everything in between. I highly recommend you go out and get this brilliant collection—the opening story Sexing the Pheasant is reason enough. Imagine being privy to pop star Madonna’s internal monologue as she considers the pheasant she just shot in the English country side “(Good work, self!)”.

In honor of Lydia’s nomination I thought I would show a sort of process—before/after of the main turtle image from the cover for Apocalypse Animals. Of all of the covers I’ve done to date for The Hypothetical Library, this was the most labor intensive, and fun. 

 

 

Colum McCann

For Colum I’ve decided to go back in time a little. In my very first entry I said “Colum is someone I have wanted to work with for years and now I get my wish.” That was not exactly true, Colum and I have worked together before—sort of. When Colum was finishing up the manuscript for his amazing novel Dancer back in 2002, he contacted me because he needed an image for the interior of the book. The main character Rudolf Nureyev had drawn a picture of lips on a napkin, and Colum wanted an image to accompany the text. “It should look like a drawing, by someone who can’t draw” He needed it that day and did some quick “drawings” using my left hand and my computer. Here is the final result.

 

I was never very happy with it, mainly because it does look like it was drawn on a computer. In honor of Colum’s recent success I’ve decided after 8 years, to revise the image. The drawing below is the 3rd of 14 napkin sketches, again done with my left hand but this time with a pen. If you have a copy of Dancer, I encourage you to print this out and place it on page 208.

 

I shouldn't have to say this but if you have yet to read anything by either Lydia Millet or Colum McCann, what are you waiting for? Go to your local bookstore, or go here or here. You won't be sorry.

 

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

On a completely separate non-hypothetical note I'd like to announce the relaunch of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund website, and design. It's a project that I have worked on and off for about 2 years now. The CBLDF is a free speech organization that defends comic book creators, retailers, and libraries from forces that would prefer you not see or read things they deem unacceptable. The CBLDF has been fighting the good fight for over 20 years, and it was very gratifying for me to contribute in some small way to their effort. Take a look and maybe consider sending them some financial support. 

 

One note of designer irony/karma—I actually asked that the logo on the website be made "bigger" than it is now. It's that very request that makes me groan when an advertising client asks the same thing of me. But it's—you know—different when I ask. Right?

Hypothetically yours,

Charlie

Gabrielle Bell

Introduction

This is a very special entry of The Hypothetical Library for two reasons. One being that Gabrielle Bell’s 2002 début collection, When I’m Old and Other Stories, was the first book I ever designed. And second, because this entry is a kind of hypothetical, hypothetical book cover. 

Let me explain.

Gabrielle has her own blog—Lucky—where she posts her stories in progress. Her work ranges from straightforward autobiography to a kind of skewed magical realism.

As of this posting Gabrielle has just completed her most recent story, manifestation. In this piece, Gabrielle recounts how she offered to adapt Valerie Solanas’s S.C.U.M. Manifesto for a feminist comics anthology, only to immediately regret the offer the next day. The story continues as she attempts to address the commitment, and struggles with the adaptation. Through the magic of comics many cultural figure make cameos: Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Colbert, Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey (who plugs Gabrielle’s other book in the story What My Mother Taught Me), Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas, and Gabrielle’s mother.

By the end of manifestation, Gabrielle has done the adaptation and devotes several panels to the manifesto’s visualization.  This, however, is only for the purpose of her larger story. The actual, complete adaptation from beginning to end doesn’t exist—and this is where the Hypothetical Library comes in. Consider the panels from Gabrielle’s story as the flap copy. With it, you get a sense of how the final complete adaptation might look were she to ever actually do it.

A hypothetical cover for a hypothetical adaptation of an actual book. 

As I mentioned above, I worked with Gabrielle at the start of her cartooning career. Over the years I’ve watched her considerable talents grow, and become more nuanced and focused. She is a cartoonist who has never taken a step backwards. Her work always gets better and better with every effort. If you haven’t yet had the chance, please go and read manifestation. I think it is a perfect showcase for her strengths as a storyteller and her recurring themes: the humor, confusion, and exhaustion of daily life.

I should point out that Gabrielle and I do not in any way advocate the beliefs put forth in the S.C.U.M. Manifesto. But it is a cultural object and—as far as we are concerned—available for comment. In the end, Gabrielle’s story isn’t really about Valerie Solanas or the S.C.U.M. Manifesto.  It’s about procrastination, confronting a difficult topic, and having a task you really don’t want to do while the eyes of several people are on you waiting for results—kind of like having a blog.

We hope you enjoy this strange hypothetical, hypothetical cover, and let me recommend that you visit Gabrielle’s blog Lucky. Spend some time there and enjoy her non-hypothetical work.

The Cover

 

 

The S.C.U.M. Manifesto—The hypothetical flap copy (link)

  

The promotional quote—Gabrielle's mother

"I'll tell you one thing, Val was a piece of work, but she was right about some things."

Biography

Gabrielle Bell is the author of three books. When I’m Old and Other Stories presents a selection of work from her self-published series The Book of... Her second book, Lucky, collects stories from her ongoing minicomic series of the same name, of which the third issue  won a 2003 Ignatz Award for Most Outstanding Minicomic. Her most recent collection, Cecil and Jordan in New York Stories, gathers strips from several anthologies, including Kramer’s Ergot, Mome, and Drawn and Quarterly Showcase. Gabrielle has appeared in two volumes of the Best American Comics series, and has been selected again for the 2010 edition.

Film maker Michel Gondry adapted the title story of Cecil and Jordan, retitled as Interior Design, for the movie anthology Tôkyô!. Gabrielle directed the film inside the film for Interior Design. 

For a more comprehensive biography, please go here.

Brian Evenson

Introduction

One of the most unsettling but rewarding reading experiences I’ve ever had was with Brian Evenson’s novel Last Days. In his book, a detective named Mr. Kline is coerced into solving a murder that occurred on the compound of a religious cult that, as the back cover copy says, “...takes literally the New Testament idea that you should cut off your hand if it offends you”. Explaining the details of what follows would ruin the experience of the descent you will enjoy as you read it. You will find yourself compelled to follow Kline as he tumbles deeper into the madness that he seems incapable of extracting himself from. 

Beyond the physical horror described by Evenson, the thing that I think disturbed me most lies in the desire his characters have for you to understand their motives. Throughout Last Days, and much of Evenson’s other stories, his characters, while doing unspeakable things, want you to acknowledge why they are doing them. You find yourself implicated by listening to what they tell you. Like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, they are not asking forgiveness exactly—they want you to understand. It’s this combination of amoral rawness, calm disengagement, and insanity that makes Evenson’s writing so compelling.

Evenson’s characters move through circumstance rather than place. His cannibals, prophets, and ex-husbands roam unspecific but still familiar landscapes. Objects, rooms, and cities function as a backdrop for the fates of his characters to play out in. But the psychological and emotional horror of Evenson’s work are rounded off by his humor. As in the work of Samuel Beckett the pathos is often tempered with a good joke. 

Apocalypse is another reoccurring theme in Evenson’s stories. Whether pre, post or during the end of things as we know it, he uses it as a stage to reveal the darker instincts of human nature. His offering for the Hypothetical Library is in keeping with that theme. 

In his hypothetical novel Immobility, Evenson introduces us to Horkai, a former “fixer” of things, released into a dying world, broken and wandering in a haze. Like Klien in Last Days, and his character Arnaud from the story Fugue State, confusion and disarray confound his every movement. It’s this state of fogginess that resonates with the reader. On some level you identify with Evenson’s characters—moving through the world and somehow sensing that you don’t quite understand what it is you’re supposed to do. 

Unfortunately we’ll never find out how Horkai fares, because his full story doesn’t exist. It’s like he was never thawed from suspended animation, or that the injections administered by a “friend” are keeping him from full coherence. 

The Cover

  
 

IMMOBILITY—The hypothetical flap copy

Before the Kollaps, Detective Josef Horkai was the one they called in whenever an investigation hit a wall, the guy who barreled his way into a room full of hostages and barreled back out with nobody dead but the man holding the gun. He’s still pretty certain that he’s the best, even if now there are very few other people still alive to compete with, even if the rules of the game have completely changed.

Only problem is he’s been exposed to something that’s slowly killing him. His hair has fallen out, his teeth are all but gone, his legs are already all but useless, and he can feel the feeling slowly seeping out of his fingers. Which is why they’ve kept him frozen, held in suspended animation until they figure out what’s wrong with him. Only as it turns out it’s not all the way suspended. He can feel time oozing slowly past, has a vague sense of the world going on without him. How many years have gone by? How many decades?

And then suddenly someone claiming to be a friend thaws him out, tells him he’s needed. Something crucial has been stolen—though with the pain in his head its hard for him to keep straight what and why. He’s got to get it back or something bad—what was it again?—is going to happen. And he’s got to get it back so they can freeze him again before his own time runs out.

Is he dreaming? Or is he really awake, paralyzed from the waist down, being carried around on the back of an “assistant” who he never remembers meeting before? Why do the injections mean to help him seem to be making things worse? And why does he increasingly feel like he’s being asked not to solve a crime but to commit one?

The promotional quote—Jeff VanderMeer

“Immobility is a shock to the system. It makes you wonder why you ever read any other noir. The style is brilliant, becoming strangely less concrete the more we find out, as if the words are somehow disintegrating with the character. The inversion by novel’s end, the so-called twist, is perhaps the most perfect and natural I’ve ever read—so good that no matter how hard you try to figure it out ahead of time, you’ll fail. Immobility confirms Evenson’s ability to colonize your brain much like the best visionaries, from J.G. Ballard on down.”

Jeff VanderMeer—Author of Finch

Biography

Brian Evenson has written several works of fiction including the books Altmann’s Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds, Prophets and Brothers, Father of Lies, Contagion and Other Stories, Dark Property: An Affliction, The Wavering Knife, for which he was awarded IHG Award for best story collection, and The Open Curtain. His most recent novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009, and along with the story collection Fugue State, was on Time Out New York’s list of top books of 2009.

Evenson has worked as a translator of several French writers including Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and his own work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Slovenian. He is the director of Brown University’s Literary Arts Program, and is also the recipient of an O. Henry Prize and an NEA fellowship.

For a more complete guide of Evenson’s work please visit http://www.brianevenson.com. 

His work is best enjoyed at night while laying in bed before you go to sleep. Trust me.

Next week: Gabrielle Bell