Daily Book Graphics #1000

As of Daily Book Graphics #1000, I have posted 1,749 images, 1,081 of them book covers.

I haven’t noted any of the milestones in the Daily Book Graphics Project, but somehow hitting 1000 posts seems significant. I started this project on February 21st in 2009 with the intention of doing it for a year. The idea for DBG was borrowed from my friend Michael Kelleher who started his Aimless Reading Project (on his Pearlblossom Highway blog) in early 2009. He was, and still is, going through his library alphabetically and writing something about each book. My idea was to go through the books I owned and scan the graphics and covers I found interesting. I wanted to liberate these images from the shelf. However, digging through books every day and scanning multiple images takes a lot of time so I pretty quickly started to focus on covers. It didn’t take long for me to run out of my own books so I began buying more from thrift stores and charity book sales. The thrill of the hunt is one of the driving forces behind this project. I also feel strongly that everything I post as part of the project is from a book that I physically encounter. I think that if I were to collect images from the web it would be a very different project. I try not to spend more than a dollar per book, but if I find something amazing, or by a designer I collect (Rudolph deHarak, John + Mary Condon) I may go as high as $5.

Doing this for the last three years has been an education in graphic design. Not that I wasn’t fairly well educated to start with, but I think my eye has become much more sensitive. I didn't intend to have the project focus on a particular era, the concentration on 1950 to 1980 emerged somewhat organically as I sorted out what I felt was worth posting. Luckily, the time spent soaking in the mid-century aesthetic led directly to me designing the faux books (under the Secondary Occupants/Collected & Observed project umbrella), that are now an important part of my art practice.

So thanks to everyone who follows the blog and the Flickr feed, I have no plans to stop any time soon. And thanks to all the like-minded book bloggers and Flickr posters, collectively we are building an incredible graphic design archive. 

So here is the actual DBG #1000, it’s my favorite kind of thing, a spare modernist design for a book about an esoteric natural history subject.

©1968 / Not sure about the design credit, but the illustrations are by Ernst Wälti.