Eleanor mentioned this and it sounded interesting. Much like she said, the characters were really great but the ending was lackluster. The story takes place in the town Kalimpong during the Indian-Nepali insurgency in the late 1980s with a lot of post-colonial, first-world/third-world themes. Overall the meshing of history and fiction is rather seamless.

The fact was that one was left empty-handed. There was no system to soothe the unfairness of things; justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure of so-called civilization. For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness, for these crimes the guilty would never pay. There was no religion and no government that would relieve the hell.

Today part of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Hatch Show Print is also the oldest operating letterpress shop in the US. This books takes a look at the history of the shop with lots of samples of posters from the early circus days through the rise of country music to their contemporary work. It’s a very handsome book.

The CMHF has a shop of monoprints created by Jim Sherraden. He starting reprinting old woodblocks and began experimenting with layering multiple images. They also sell reprints of old posters, like this amazing Johnny Cash print from 1980 and this Airstream advertisement from 1959. This one might be my favorite though:

Another working title for this book was How to be a graphic designer without losing your shirt, and that one actually reads a bit more accurate than this one. This is more about good business practices for finding a job, being freelance, and setting up & running a studio than the more philosophical practices I thought I might find here. It’s still useful for starting designers in terms of understanding the industry and potential employers a little more, though those looking for more specific info on pricing and legal info may be better served by the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook.

The design is really attractive, but it was interesting when I would read at night under moderate (not bright) incandescent light, the combination of the less-than-black Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk, cyan accent colors, and the off-white paper made everything swim a little. Made me wonder if part of Shaughnessy’s process included checking the design under different lighting conditions.

I really like how the footnotes are placed in side margins rather than at the end of the page (though the cyan numbers were easy to miss in my night-time lighting) and how margins shift to accommodate them, thoughtfully with the content of the text. The blocks of text feel more dynamic than those that rely on a traditional, strict grid. Yet in reading the text, the design is still natural and fluid.

Mr Pullman may call this a “stepping-stone,” but I call it an all-out tease. It’s a short story and some objects and an intro that explains it all… well, a little bit. The story is just long enough to drum up some excitement and then it ends. At the very least it relieved any notion that continuing the story might lead down disappointing and uninteresting paths.

I wasn’t intending on reading this so soon after finishing the series, but I noticed the nice, hardcover 10th anniversary editions of His Dark Materials and then spotted a hardcover version of this one for sale (powell’s has a few more, fyi). It was impossible not to crack it open at the earliest opportunity.