FROM THE PUBLISHER

“It’s not against any religion to want to dispose of a pigeon.”
Tom Lehrer, from “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”

“They’re rats with wings.”
Woody Allen, from Stardust Memories

No one is certain when pigeon-loathing began, but the anti-pigeon phenomenon has by now insinuated itself into every medium of popular culture. Whether in film, television, music, or advertising, pigeon eradication has become an accepted way to tug at a person’s funny bone. With Canceled Flight: 101 Tried and True Pigeon Killin’ Methods, A.V. Jones has created an Anarchist Cookbook of comic relief for the worldwide pigeon-hating population.

Conjured from Jones’ twisted brain, 101 surefire methods for speeding a pigeon’s journey to the grave are laid out for even the novice pigeon-despiser with lists of required materials and step-by-step guidelines. Every method has been brilliantly illustrated with the help of more than eighty-five of today’s hottest street-inspired painters, illustrators, designers, and photographers. Whether visualized in the pre- or post-death stages or at termination, each piece faithfully represents Jones’ methodology with incredible energy and originality in “The Butcher,” a Dalek Space Monkey picks up a cleaver to “chop, chop, chop till he can’t chop no more,” and Struggle, Inc’s “The Permanent Press” illustrates how two scorching hot irons can make a toasty pigeon sandwich in no time flat. An exhaustive compilation of execution, Canceled Flight is sure to provide the pigeon-killing technique perfect for you.

Canceled Flight features some of the hottest young artists working today including Peter Sutherland, Ryan McGinness, Richard Colman, Derrick Hodgson, kozyndan, David Choe, Dustin Amery Hostetler, Jon Burgerman, and Nago Richardis, among others.

Canceled Flight- The show and the book.

Paula Scher commented in her introduction to *Make it Bigger,* that one of the worst things about doing a monograph of your life’s work is that people will assume that you are finished. From the title of his forthcoming book, *Chip Kidd: Book One: Work: 1986-2006,* it looks like renowned book designer and author Chip Kidd is doing his best to show people that he has only just begun. For any other designer, calling the collection of your life’s work “Book One” might be a bit presumptuous. This is only fitting for Mr. Kidd, since he is so prolific and seems to continually reinvent himself.

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You might find the book “You are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination” by Katharine Harmon interesting to read–and to look at. For those of you who don’t love to read long books (like me), think of it as a picture book with captions. (I was interested the whole way through.)

The author has collected a variety of maps from 100 years ago until present time, and organized them by theme. I call them “maps,” but they’re really pieces of art and personal expression. Some were created to be humorous, others to be creatively informative or anecdotal, others to be editorial illustrations, yet others to simply be beautiful art. Each page had so much to say. Through reading this book, I gained a renewed understanding of the large amount of information that is spatial. Geography isn’t just a boring class you had to take in school–it’s all around us, and you make geographic decisions every day.

I would recommend this book.

I wouldn’t have picked up this book if it wasn’t for the optional session that I will be attending at this years HOW Conference. Ken Barber from House Industries will be leading a session on hand lettering. Since I will be doing reviews of this session among many others on our HOW Conference Blog, I thought I should do a little research. I ordered *House Industries* and read it from beginning to end, even though it tempts you to just look at the outrageous printing and flamboyant graphics.

I can’t say that I have a ton in common with the guys at House Industries. I have never liked thrasher metal, used many grunge fonts or been a huge fan of the hot rod aesthetic. Despite this fact, or maybe because of this, I really gained a great deal from this book. Actually, I can’t think of a time that I have used a House font aside from designing the AIGA Nebraska Bowl-a-Rama poster (This event started as House-a-Rama when the boys from House came down and did a presentation in a bowling alley in Omaha). That event was even mentioned in the book, showing the initial poster that they illustrated and designed.

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It seems that we have created a very hostile environment for ourselves. The house that we live in is filled with materials – carpet, paint, wood finishes – that fill the air with mutagenic materials and toxic gases. The cars that we drive emit noxious fumes and require non-renewable resources for their operation, and even the computer you are reading this on is made with materials that are harmful to the people who manufacture them and use them – not to mention the harm that is done to the environment once it is disposed of.

Many of the things that we take for granted are really quite silly when you look at them closely. We plop down houses, designed and built with no regard for their orientation to the sun, on land that has been stripped of trees that may have shaded the houses, or bodies of water that could be used to guide water runoff. Those houses are then surrounded by a foreign grass species that is forced to grow with dangerous chemicals, and then cut down with polluting machinery.

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