the right to write.

the right to write.

26 have had a longstanding relationship with International PEN, an admirable pressure group which supports suppressed writers all over the world. This year, we launched the 26:50 project to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of PEN’s Writers in Prison committee.

PEN had already linked 50 writers with 50 campaigning years. We took the next step by randomly pairing each of the PEN writers with a writer from 26. The brief? Write 50 words, no more, no less, inspired by the life and work of your writer.

My subject was the Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur (right), the year 1974. That’s when her first novel The Dog and the Long Winter came out, and when she first went to prison – for protesting about the torture and execution of two journalists (she was working as a TV producer at the time). She spent 59 days in jail and then fled to France, returning to Iran after the Islamic Revolution in 1980. However, it was a case of ‘meet the new boss, just like the old boss’. Once back on home soil, she was immediately arrested and incarcerated for four and a half years without trial or charge.

She continued working on her third novel Women Without Men after her release, but its frank depiction of women’s sexuality didn’t go down too well... she was rearrested in 1989, and at that point decided it might be wise to quit the country for the US. She hasn’t been back since, and all her books have been banned in Iran.

My fifty words should be out any day now on 26-50.tumblr.com. If you check in now, you can read how other 26 members have responded to their writers. One effort a day is being published until 18 April.

PG tips.

PG tips.

Picked these beauties up in my local Oxfam shop last weekend. The reason I couldn’t resist them was twofold... PG Wodehouse and Penguin Classics. These are 1962 reprints, by which time Penguin had ditched the strict three-part horizontal typographic layout of their original offerings and gone vertical, incorporating simple illustrations. These sketches by Geoffrey Salter are perfect – economic yet evocative, a near match for Wodehouse’s easy, mellifluous writing. I have most of the great man’s canon in some form or other, but I’m always on the look out for more of these orange and white gems.

poster rationalisation.

poster rationalisation.

I’m grappling with my sixth Royal Mail Yearbook at the moment, and it’s taking me down the usual interesting avenues – obscure places I’d never go in the course of my usual business writing. I don’t think I’m giving anything away to reveal that one of the chapters is on King George V stamps. He was a near-obsessive philatelist who amassed a priceless collection which now belongs to the Crown. There’s a great story about the king paying a record £1,450 for a rare Mauritius 2d blue in 1904. One of his secretaries remarked that he’d read about ‘some damned fool’ who’d blown a fortune on a single stamp. Without skipping a beat, George replied, ‘I am that damned fool’.

But to get to the point... George also set up the British Postal Museum and Archive, which houses some real graphic treasures. Don’t worry, I’m not just talking stamps here, but all kinds of printed ephemera, including some achingly cool posters. These gems from the 1930s were recently picked up and released by zeitgeisty London greeting card specialists Umpen Editions. And you can see why… the designer-illustrators of the era were superb – witty, stylish and attention grabbing. Pat Keeley (top – a promotional poster for the famous Auden-scripted ‘Night Mail’ film) and Tom Eckersley (below – get the bubblewrap out, quick), as well as Hans Schleger (aka Zero) and Edward McKnight Kauffer were quite brilliant, and have a retro quality that’s bang on trend.

had we but word enough and time.

had we but word enough and time.

OK, I’ll come clean, numbers are not my forté. To me, they’re just confusing marks best left to bookkeepers and accountants. Actually, I’m beginning to think I suffer from a mild form of number dyslexia, often transposing digits and being perennially useless with PIN numbers and phone numbers. So Word Clock, by the ingenious digital designer Simon Heys (currently working at the Times), is a welcome antidote to the number fascism of time. It’s a rather beautiful screen saver (for Mac, PC or iPhone), which tells you the time in written out words, which change… well… every second. You can set it as a full screen of words or a rather elegant spiral, you can change the colours or the typeface. It’s wonderfully mesmerising watching time click by in words. And you can get hold of one for yourself right here.

a flash in the pancake.

a flash in the pancake.

LP Hartley never spoke a truer word when he said “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” I’ve just finished my annual wielding of frying pan and pancake batter in readiness for, well, not celebrating Lent. The children insist on it. Each year I dig out this trusty little gem of a cook book – by now practically a Kings family heirloom – to mug up on the recipe. And it never disappoints. Look at that cover, truly from a bygone age, and long before Delia was even weighing up her career options. It never fails to bring a small lump to the throat remembering all the stupendous cakes we made. It was the Sixties by the way, not the Fifties, if some of you were rudely wondering. And that’s a lot of cakes. At a cover price of 1s 6d, I think we’ve safely had our money’s worth, and who knows, when the boys have grown up, they might be clamouring for the recipe on Pancake Day too.

it’s going bananas.

it’s going bananas.

Response to the totalcontent monkey mailer has been phenomenal, and we’ve not even started sending out to the list of juicy prospects we’ve put together. Through the power of twitter and facebook, the posters were picked up by the popular design blogs acejet170 and formfiftyfive, and we’ve been getting over 500 hits a day on the web site. As well as wonderfully positive comments, we've been inundated with requests for posters from far and wide, so the studio currently looks more like a Royal Mail sorting office than the usual oasis of writerly calm. A gallery has even been in touch asking if they can exhibit our monkeys. Deborah is questioning whether stuffing orange tubes is in her job description, and my tongue is protesting at all the stamp licking. We got a rubber stamp of one of Rob’s monkeys made up, which we think works pretty well on our NB:Studio designed address stickers.

totalcontent’s monkey business.

totalcontent’s monkey business.

At last. After several false starts and many months in the making, here'stotalcontent’s very first mailshot. It's a series of three A2 posters designed byRichard Scholey and Simon Morrow at Elmwood, with the illustrated chimps provided by Rob Ball of the Partners. Jim had hours of fun coming up with suitable misquotes from Shakespeare, which had to be close enough to be familiar, but surreal enough to be funny. The idea is based on the ‘infinite monkey theorem’, which suggests that given an infinite amount of time a group of randomly typing monkeys would produce the complete works of Shakespeare. 

The sign-off copy at the bottom reads: 

‘If they stuck at it forever, a thousand typewriting monkeys would eventually tap out the complete works of Shakespeare. But if you haven’t got time to monkey around for copy, better call Jim Davies on 01926 812286.’ 

The letters are keys culled from an ancient typewriter, while the sign-off is set in a suitable typewriter font. 

Many thanks to everyone involved for making this happen. If you want one for your studio wall please email us here and we’ll mail you some hot-off-the-press monkeys.

a chimp off the old block.

a chimp off the old block.

Finally. totalcontent’s very first mailer is drying off at the printers as we speak. It was designed by the good people at Elmwood, and features illustrations of monkeys by the highly talented Rob Ball of the Partners. Of course we’ll reveal all as soon as we get our hands on them, but in the meantime, here’s one of Rob’s excellent simian creations. Hope I wasn’t too much of a pain-in-the-arse client.

new work – G-tech.

new work – G-tech.

Jim has been working with The Liquid Way on a series of six press ads for G-Tech hard drives. They’re a line of tough, good-looking, Mac-friendly drives aimed fairly and squarely at the creative community – photographers, musicians, filmmakers, designers, animators – so-called ‘prosumers’. 

Each ad features a different creative type, telling their story and how various G-Tech drives have become central to the way they work, keeping their precious moments of inspiration safe, backed-up and accessible. Space was tight, so the knack was to get their character and working processes across as economically as possible. The first (pictured) stars the highly rated conceptual photographer Tim Flach, who specialises in fine art portraits of horses, and goes to the ends of the Earth to find them.