We’re very pleased to announce that copies of Four Minutes to Midnight issues eight and nine are now available for purchase at the beautiful Drawn & Quarterly bookstore in the Mile End, Montreal (211 Bernard West). D & Q’s work has always been an incredible inspiration and we’re honoured to be featured in their local collection.
Four Minutes to Midnight is now accepting poetry, prose and visual art submissions for its tenth issue, due out this fall. The zine has come a long way since its humble photocopied beginnings and to mark this journey we’ll be pulling out all the stops for Issue 10. We’re aiming to double the page count, increase the print run and even include a full-colour section. It’s going to be one beautiful little brick of a book.
The theme this time around revolves around the concept of RADICAL BEAUTY/SUBVERSIVE BEAUTY, interpreted however you please. We want to move away from the criticism, cynicism and self-effacing irony towards something more celebratory and empowering. The time feels ripe for it.
The typographic fugue has been a central part of Four Minutes to Midnight since the start. Loosely based on the exquisite corpse surrealist technique, the idea is to collaboratively generate a body of text that acts as an abstract poetic dialogue/narrative that is featured in the issue while also determining its overall “texture” and structure.
Please don’t be shy, inspire yourself from others, and add to the comments thread below. We’ll start from the last line from issue nine’s fugue:
“In the shape of a kiss, the agitation continues…”
Hel Grotesk Gothiq Typeface. 2006.
This typeface was born as the bastard love child of Helvetica Neue and Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch during a tryst they had one sad, desperate night. The calligrapher seduced the industry leader with her curves, elegant vocabulary and hand skills. But the affair was not to last, and though their union was never recounted (Helvetica being one to bury the past), the hidden story of that night lives on in Hel Grotesk Gothiq.
I designed Hel as a critique of the supposed neutrality and authority of Helvetica and the stylistic reappropriations of Blackletter typefaces in contemporary design. A subversive typeface steeped in history and irony.
FREE download of Hel Grotesk Gothiq (OTF).
Hel is an all-caps typeface, and can prove a little difficult to work with on her own. However, her hefty-size and shape works perfectly paired with lowercase Helvetica Neue Black (she’s her daddy’s little girl…).
The very interesting Things Magazine website features an amazing gallery of vintage Pelican Book covers from the 1930s to 1980s. According to the Penguin website the Pelican imprint was launched in 1937 to “cover serious contemporary issues and represented the first new and original books to be published by Penguin… The series was weighted towards History, Sociology, Economics and Politics and continued the ‘good books cheap’ philosophy of Penguin.”
The extensive gallery is an amazing historical and aesthetic archive. The 1960s collection is particularly revealing of the revolutionary nature (both technological and cultural) of the times.
Also worth checking out is David Pearson Design‘s recent work for Penguin, especially the Great Ideas series (direct links here, here, and here) . Mmmm… debossed type on uncoated paper stock. Beautiful…
