Stuart’s Bookshelf: A monthly column dedicated to the finer publications influencing the work of Melbourne design practitioner, Stuart Geddes.

So I thought it best to get this off my chest early in the piece. This edition of Stuart’s Bookshelf is about the shame of having books sitting on your shelf that you haven’t read. Well, really it’s about me having books on my shelf that I haven’t read. I just hope I’m not alone. But here’s my promise – in the next edition I’ll include one of these again, and I’ll have read it.

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Letter to Robin Kinross
Andy de Fiets

This one is the most pathetic. Look at it, it’s a pamphlet–it’s 24 pages long! And it’s still just sitting there in its plastic sleeve. But the worst bit is, the whole idea is so close to my heart. Robin Kinross is one of my publishing heroes too, and Andy de Fiets has done the opposite of my silent professional crush, he’s written Robin a letter, asking for and (boldly) giving advice. Maybe I don’t yet want to know how it went.

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The Badder Meinhoff Affair
Erin Cosgrove

I have a couple of artifacts like this. It’s a novel, but it’s also an artwork. As in, it comes from the world of contemporary art, not contemporary literature, and I think that’s why I keep stalling. I love the idea in an art context, but I have too much respect for writers to completely buy into it. I think about what appalling writers designers generally are, and I just hope it’s not going to be the same. Also there’s a spelling mistake on the first page.

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Eating Animals
Jonathan Safran Foer

This one I just chickened out on. I love Jonathan Safran Foer. The handsome, talented, younger-than-me and thrice published Jonathan Safran Foer. I’m even in the rare camp that believes that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a finer book than Everything is Illuminated. I saw this in the bookstore and just immediately bought it. Didn’t even read the back. Then someone told me that it’s an Incredibly Convincing and Persuasive Argument for Vegetarianism. Which I respect. I’m just not sure I’m up for that right now. And I know the power Jonathan has over me.

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Anthony Froshaug: Typography & texts / Documents of a life
Robin Kinross (Editor)

It’s a bad day for my love of Robin Kinross. But to be honest, I’ve dipped into this one, and I’m very glad I own it. Unlike Andy de Fiets’s letter, this one isn’t about my shyness in the face of one of my heroes. Froshaug was clearly a big influence on Kinross, and this time it’s about allowing space to fully appreciate his work. This set of books was an epic undertaking, an exhaustive account of Froshaug’s life and work. Since I bought it, I haven’t had a long enough holiday to dedicate to reading it.

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Book design of graphic designers in Japan
Mikado Koyanagi

This one I have more of a straightforward excuse for. I can’t read Japanese. Normally I hate design books that give you no context, that are 99 and a half percent pictures. But the content of this little book is just so painfully beautiful that I couldn’t bring myself to not buy it. It collects Japanese book design work from the 50s to the 70s, from the most famous designers of the day. And, well, if I haven’t sold it for you, have a look over here for some internal shots.

Introducing Stuart’s Bookshelf: A monthly column dedicated to the finer publications influencing the work of Melbourne design practitioner, Stuart Geddes.

You can tell a lot about someone by looking at their bookshelf. What am I doing? I’m a shy person, and private. This is way too exposing… but I promised, so, on my bookshelf this month, from left to right, is:

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The Old Man and the Sea
By Ernest Hemingway

Of all that he wrote, this is the book that won Hemingway the Nobel prize for literature. A good friend gave me this beautiful edition.

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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Book 1
By Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill

Alan Moore is arguably the most influential writer in comics. He broke the mould with Watchmen in the ’80s, and has been at it ever since. League is, I think, his best work, and according to him, it’s going to be the only comic he’ll work on from now. Just whatever you do, don’t watch the dreadful film that was made, seemingly without regard to the source material.

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Dot Dot Dot
Edited by Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt (Dexter Sinister)

This is issue 15 of a journal I’ve been reading for a few years now. It hovers around art and design and I find it as much of an education as my time at University.

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The Psychic Soviet
By Ian Svenonius

This is the best book ever written about Rock and Roll. Ever. I wrote about it once before–over here.

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The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty
By Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey is the funniest, smartest, and most insightful art writer I’ve ever read. This book starts with him describing himself daydreaming through a discussion panel he was on in the late 1980s when he realises a question had been directed at him, something along the lines of, “What will be the issue of the Nineties?” He reflexively answers, “Beauty”, to a stunned, eye-rolling silence. This was at a time when the mere utterance of the word in relation to art was verboten. Hickey, the iconoclast, went on to write these three essays that question what happened to beauty in art in the 20th century, and is partly responsible for its reintroduction to the art lexicon.