Big Secret Pizza Party

Ex-Libris: a short history

So I was just reading something that led me to search for the book Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, since I've never read it.   When I found it on Google Books, I noticed that the book had been scanned with the page that included the bookplate of the original owner.

As we can see, this edition of the book was published in 1916, in New York.  I guess little Emma Ward Woolfolk could have acquired this book at any time - when it was published, or at a thrift store last week - but according to Google Books, they scan volumes that have been sitting around in libraries for awhile, so I'm assuming she got it around the time when it was published, since personalized bookplates are much less common then they were back then.

*sidenote - I google Emma Ward Woolfolk, and found a reference to a 1936 marriage of a person with that name to Dr. John Alexander, the 17th president of The American Association for Thoracic Surgery (whatever that is).   I have no idea if it was the same person, but how cool would it be if it were?

Anyway, back to the bookplates.  Ex-libris or 'bookplates' are small prints or labels designed to be pasted into books to indicate their owner. ("ex-libris" literally means "from books", and is taken to mean "from the library of" when on a bookplate).

I'm sort of a bibliophile myself, and I actually had many books when I was younger that I pasted my own bookplates into.  I still have some, but others are long gone - maybe in a library somewhere, or a goodwill, or someone's attic - and I thought it was pretty cool that years later, someone might see those bookplates and wonder who I was. 

Unfortunately, my bookplates weren't custom made, so they wouldn't really tell anyone that much about me, beyond the rough timeframe of when I owned the book, and that I was a child, from my handwriting. 

Originally, bookplates were custom made for the library owner, depicting crests, mottos, and other clues that might tell you a little bit about who the person was.    Wikipedia told me that the first marks of book ownership go as far back as Egypt in the 1300's, and bookplates as we know them now (with images and names) originated in Germany sometime in the 1500's. 

(This ex-libris was made by Albrecht Dürer before 1503. The text ‘sibi et amicis’ means ‘belonging to him and his friends’, a reminder of the pleasure of sharing one’s treasures with friends, and also of the rarity and value of books at that time.)

Ex-libris became more common in France in the 1700's, replacing the more expensive practice of gold-stamping the book's binding with a personalized mark or crest.  (though that sounds pretty awesome).   For a long time, family crests were commonly depicted on these bookplates, since even people who couldn't read would recognize them - and since most people who would have a personal library would also have a family crest.  

*source: an excellent history of ex-libris can be found here.

Around the late 1800's, people started to get into collecting ex-libris, which in turn sparked a renewed interest in using bookplates for personal libraries (which explains little Emma's bookplate).   A lot of new books were being pulped to make new paper at this time, which made it easier for people to remove and form large ex-libris collections. 

There are loads of ex-libris collectors societies  and a few cool blogs about them.  Here are a few of my favorite bookplates that I've seen online:  

Now I'm kind of thinking about getting some custom bookplates made up, and documenting my personal library now - which will hopefully one day have a room of it's own.

oh, and PS: here's an awesome map of Kensington Gardens that was also in the Peter Pan book. 

and me at the Round Pond, making friends with some swans.

I can haz cute laptopz?

Noticed this yesterday - every time I looked a video of a cute animal on YouTube, I got the same ad for the new Vivienne Tam exterior-ed HP Laptop. 

 

I have to say, I think it's pretty good targeting - girls looking at cute animals on the interwebz are definitely the people who would buy this computer.   And thanks to keyword targeting, they can be found pretty easily (although I'm not sure about the one in Japanese....)

Andre the Giant has a Posse

This whole kerfuffle over Shepard Fairey and the AP photo of Obama that 'inspired' his now-famous posters of our new prezzy is really taking me back to the old days. 

In the early 1990's, when I was in jr. high / high school in Rhode Island,  Shepard Fairey was at RISD , distributing his Andre the Giant has a Posse stickers to all of the skaters in Providence.     They looked like this:

(there's a movie about the sticker campaign now - supposedly the sticker campaign was all about rebellion against corporate logos, but I guess a new corporate logo was created in the process! Rad!)

These were plastered all over my school - lockers, walls, people's cars, skateboards - everywhere (In addition to every street sign on the east side of Providence).   Obviously, the administration thought were were all sick little weirdos who had joined a cult that worshipped abnormally sized professional wrestlers of the 1980's, so they banned these stickers and any Andre the Giant related tagging (we were so suburbancore!) from our halls.   I remember an occasion where one teacher caught a friend of mine who had a backpack full of the stickers, and reacted as though he had zipped open a backpack full of crack.  He was speechless at the sheer amount of contraband in that Jansport.

Needless to say, Rhode Island is fairly textbook when it comes to juvenile delinquency, so I guess the emergence of this sticker-fueled cult gave the teachers something to talk about at the water cooler.

I also had this t-shirt, which I got at a skate shop in Providence called Lunasea.  I somehow evaded teacher radar, even though it did have a picture of Andre on it.  Must have been the Posse part they didn't like.

After wearing it for over a decade, I got it signed by Shepard Fairey at an appearance by him at Kid Robot in Santa Monica.  I realized I probably shouldn't wear it anymore after doing this, so I retired it.   He seemed pretty surprised to see it himself.    It's from before he allegedly got sued by the wrestling people for using Andre the Giant's name,  so that's why it says Giant instead of OBEY. 

I have to say, from a stylistic perspective,  I'm not really a huge Shepard Fairey fan.  I like seeing the Andre the Giant stuff more for nostalgic reasons than anything else, because it reminds me of home and what was probably the most carefree era I'll ever have in my life. 

Because of all this Obama stuff, Shepard Fairey is now a household name, and has mainstream awareness beyond street art fans.  I thought of him as pretty famous before the Obama posters, but now I realize that it was only a smallish group of people who had heard of him.   I mean, my mom ordered the limited edition Shepard Fairey Obama sticker from moveon.org for god's sake, even though she was pretty quick to chuck out any Andre the Giant stickers that I left laying around when I was 13.

put it on your trapper keeper.

So it's funny that all this dirt is being stirred up around this AP photo, because that's pretty much been Shepard Fairey's MO for awhile now.   I'm not really going to get into it here, but you can read a fairly comprehensive, and somewhat angrily written, synopsis of all the pre-existing graphics that Fairey has "adapted" over the years right here.  

While it might be ranty ravey, you can't really argue with all the stuff that he's borrowed without credit, and like I've said before, if you acknowlege the source, you will usually be excused for a lot more borrowing than if you don't.   If I had to have an opinion about it, I guess I'd say Shepard Fairey is really good at re-appropriating images and dispersing them again in popular culture, which I suppose is sort of the definition of a pop artist. 

(pretty sure James Rosenquist borrowed the JFK image from somewhere else...)

A lot people (or the few people who have ever shown interest in this) might argue that, saying that people like Andy Warhol or James Rosenquist were true artists because they re-painted or re-drew the things they saw rather than running them through some photoshop filters, but I don't think you can differentiate intention based on artistic tool.   I think it's the message you send or feeling you evoke by using images that makes art art - and you can do this using original or pre-existing images.  And clearly, Shepard Fairey's work evokes a lot of feelings, especially of late. 

Anyway, there isn't much point to this post besides reliving my youth for a few paragraphs.  But it was fun.  So much fun that I made a mood board based on it!




Dylan McKay drug rugs should totally come back in style.  Who's with me?

the most important philosphical question of our time: Is Display Dead?

I just went write sort of a comment-soliloquy on Noah's blog, and I wanted to clarify some of my views on online display ads, so people don't think I'm in love with them and want to marry them.

I guess my main issue with all the "display ads don't work and are dying omg" talk is that it's such a generalization.  I think they work in some senses, and they don't in others, and I think that what "work" even means depends on your goals for a brand or campaign.  So "they don't work" really isn't ever going to be true in a definitive sense. 

How you talk to people online depends completely on who they are.   We can't apply the same rules to all audiences online, no matter how much we love formulas wrapped up in a neat little bow.   We tend to live in a world of industry averages, and people forget that there are audiences for whom properly targeted and integrated advertising is actually content to them - like fanboys and gamers, for instance.  

This was a point I made over on Noah's thing: 

Display ads are essentially the online equivalent of OOH or print ads - sure, there are much better ways to talk to people, but these vehicles perform a lowest-common denominator function: blips on consumers' mental radar. It's obviously important to build relationships with consumers, but the thing is that probably only a small percentage of a brand's consumers actually want to have that relationship.

Advertising might not make us jump up and run to the store, but our brain subliminally recalls the things we've seen in relation to a certain category when we're making decisions.    Not saying this is the best way to talk to people, I'm just saying that people need to apply the same consumer POV to online display ads as they do to the other display media that consumers encounter and don't really register.  

The industry response to the Apple ad on NYT.com was interesting, because the ad completely flies in the face of what most interweb people believe about bringing brands online - that you shouldn't simply replicate your TV ad in a different box.    Maybe it was because it was for Apple, or  because they matched they headline typeface, or because it was fricking enormous.    The interactivity between the top and bottom unit certainly wasn't new, and it didn't even beckon you to play with it, like a lot of Nike ads do.  The only cool about it, really, is that the NYT.com roadblock unit they created is now exclusive to Apple.   

The thing is, there are a lot of really creative, not-at-all standard units that have been done.  The problem is, brands are limited in terms of where they can run these, and they're pretty expensive.  In terms of industry buzz, they might be useful for like, a day,  but they usually have to be supplemented with standard units to get the reach that brands want.   So I don't think that a shift toward this type of creative alone will solve things.

Anyway, this is all sort of rambly, so here's my last schizophrenic thoughts:

I think a good step away from display ads that seem oddly placed and easy to ignore are  longer term, higher SOV buys on sites where the community that you're trying to reach lives.  People aren't dumb - most are grateful to brands who continually support and subsidize the content they love.  And I don't just mean big monster sites - blogs and niche social networks should be supported here too, whether through ad units or otherwise.  (and I totally know that a lot of brands already do this, bot obviously there are a lot who don't, or no one would be talking about this).

A good digital marketing mix is just that - a mix.   Focus should be on strategic site partnerships that add value to readers' experience on the site, and social media outreach to niche communities, with search as the baseline, and display ads when and where appropriate.   It all depends on what you're trying to do.  (there are a scant few agencies who actually even do social media outreach well, which is amazing to me).

uhh...that's it. feel free to rip me a new one, if you care that much.