Ruxpin the black circle

Ultramarine

Jolly nice to find my cover for Mariette Navarro’s Ultramarine on Casual Optimist’s Book Covers of Note. Other roundups are available: Literary Hub’s 13 Best Book Covers of March, PRINT’s 20 of the Best Book Covers for March 2025, and Spine’s Book Covers We Love. Am I missing any?

Bookmarks

Like a monkey with a miniature cymbal, I’ve been mindlessly tapping that little bookmark button on my instagram feed for so long, I forgot the images actually end up somewhere. So last week I had a delve into this scrapbook abyss, and oh the joy! So much stuff I’d completely forgotten had caught my eye. It’s especially lovely when otherwise disparate items find themselves nicely sequenced together. For example, this cluster is too good to live on my own private grid, so I’m sharing it here.

Dookie

Thirtieth anniversary edition of Green Day’s Dookie is being released on obscure, obsolete and inconvenient formats – including toothbrush, wax cylinder and Teddy Ruxpin. Yeah it’s a gimmick, but given that half the people who buy vinyls don’t even have record players, sure, why not, physical media is physical media.

Also

1. In this week’s Things I Don’t Understand Or Need: the new Ableton Move. I totally get the tactile appeal of synths – we are the generation that grew up watching people twiddle colourful knobs on spaceships and now it’s our go but the future arrived and it’s all flat and glass and boring. Let us twiddle.
2. Had a jolly nice time doing this Classic Paperbacks puzzle from Princeton Architectural Press. That’s right, the way I relax when not putting book covers together is … putting book covers together.
3. The White House briefing room has been taunting us with hilarious kerning and three upside-down Hs since 2007 and it must be stopped. End this madness.