字幕表 動画を再生する
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Hi.
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(Laughter)
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I did that for two reasons.
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First of all, I wanted to give you
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a good visual first impression.
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But the main reason I did it is that
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that's what happens to me when I'm forced to wear
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a Lady Gaga skanky mic.
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(Laughter)
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I'm used to a stationary mic.
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It's the sensible shoe of public address.
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(Laughter)
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But you clamp this thing on my head, and something happens.
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I just become skanky.
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(Laughter) So I'm sorry about that.
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And I'm already off-message.
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(Laughter)
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Ladies and gentlemen,
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I have devoted the past 25 years of my life
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to designing books.
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("Yes, BOOKS. You know, the bound volumes with ink on paper.
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You cannot turn them off with a switch.
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Tell your kids.")
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It all sort of started as a benign mistake,
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like penicillin. (Laughter)
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What I really wanted
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was to be a graphic designer
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at one of the big design firms in New York City.
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But upon arrival there,
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in the fall of 1986, and doing a lot of interviews,
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I found that the only thing I was offered
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was to be Assistant to the Art Director at Alfred A. Knopf,
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a book publisher.
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Now I was stupid,
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but not so stupid that I turned it down.
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I had absolutely no idea
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what I was about to become part of,
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and I was incredibly lucky.
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Soon, it had occurred to me what my job was.
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My job was to ask this question:
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"What do the stories look like?"
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Because that is what Knopf is.
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It is the story factory, one of the very best in the world.
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We bring stories to the public.
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The stories can be anything,
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and some of them are actually true.
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But they all have one thing in common:
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They all need to look like something.
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They all need a face.
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Why? To give you a first impression
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of what you are about to get into.
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A book designer gives form to content,
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but also
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manages a very careful balance between the two.
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Now, the first day
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of my graphic design training at Penn State University,
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the teacher, Lanny Sommese, came into the room
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and he drew a picture of an apple on the blackboard,
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and wrote the word "Apple" underneath,
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and he said, "OK. Lesson one. Listen up."
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And he covered up the picture and he said,
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"You either say this," and then he covered up the word,
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"or you show this.
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But you don't do this."
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Because this is treating your audience like a moron.
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(Laughter)
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And they deserve better.
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And lo and behold, soon enough,
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I was able to put this theory to the test
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on two books that I was working on for Knopf.
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The first was Katharine Hepburn's memoirs,
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and the second was a biography of Marlene Dietrich.
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Now the Hepburn book
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was written in a very conversational style,
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it was like she was sitting across a table telling it all to you.
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The Dietrich book was an observation
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by her daughter; it was a biography.
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So the Hepburn story is words
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and the Dietrich story is pictures, and so we did this.
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So there you are.
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Pure content and pure form, side by side.
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No fighting, ladies.
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("What's a Jurassic Park?")
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Now, what is the story here?
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Someone
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is re-engineering dinosaurs
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by extracting their DNA
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from prehistoric amber.
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Genius!
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(Laughter)
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Now, luckily for me,
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I live and work in New York City,
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where there are plenty of dinosaurs.
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(Laughter)
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So,
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I went to the Museum of Natural History,
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and I checked out the bones, and I went to the gift shop,
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and I bought a book.
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And I was particularly taken with this page of the book,
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and more specifically the lower right-hand corner.
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Now I took this diagram,
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and I put it in a Photostat machine,
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(Laughter)
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and I took a piece of tracing paper,
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and I taped it over the Photostat
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with a piece of Scotch tape -- stop me if I'm going too fast --
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(Laughter) --
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and then I took a Rapidograph pen --
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explain it to the youngsters --
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(Laughter)
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and I just started to reconstitute the dinosaur.
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I had no idea what I was doing,
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I had no idea where I was going,
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but at some point, I stopped --
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when to keep going would seem like I was going too far.
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And what I ended up with was a graphic representation
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of us seeing this animal coming into being.
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We're in the middle of the process.
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And then I just threw some typography on it.
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Very basic stuff,
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slightly suggestive of public park signage.
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(Laughter)
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Everybody in house loved it,
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and so off it goes to the author.
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And even back then,
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Michael was on the cutting edge.
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("Michael Crichton responds by fax:")
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("Wow! Fucking Fantastic Jacket")
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(Laughter) (Applause)
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That was a relief to see that pour out of the machine.
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(Laughter)
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I miss Michael.
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And sure enough, somebody from MCA Universal
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calls our legal department to see if they can
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maybe look into buying the rights to the image,
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just in case they might want to use it.
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Well, they used it.
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(Laughter) (Applause)
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And I was thrilled.
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We all know it was an amazing movie,
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and it was so interesting to see it
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go out into the culture and become this phenomenon
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and to see all the different permutations of it.
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But not too long ago,
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I came upon this on the Web.
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No, that is not me.
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But whoever it is,
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I can't help but thinking they woke up one day like,
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"Oh my God, that wasn't there last night. Ooooohh!
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I was so wasted."
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(Laughter)
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But if you think about it, from my head
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to my hands to his leg.
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(Laughter)
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That's a responsibility.
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And it's a responsibility that I don't take lightly.
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The book designer's responsibility is threefold:
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to the reader, to the publisher and, most of all, to the author.
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I want you to look at the author's book
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and say, "Wow! I need to read that."
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David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers,
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and the title essay
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in this collection is about his trip to a nudist colony.
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And the reason he went is because
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he had a fear of his body image,
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and he wanted to explore what was underlying that.
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For me, it was simply an excuse to design a book
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that you could literally take the pants off of.
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But when you do,
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you don't get what you expect.
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You get something that goes much deeper than that.
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And David especially loved this design
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because at book signings, which he does a lot of,
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he could take a magic marker and do this.
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(Laughter)
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Hello!
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(Laughter)
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Augusten Burroughs wrote a memoir
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called ["Dry"], and it's about his time in rehab.
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In his 20s, he was a hotshot ad executive,
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and as Mad Men has told us, a raging alcoholic.
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He did not think so, however,
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but his coworkers did an intervention and they said,
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"You are going to rehab, or you will be fired and you will die."
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Now to me, this was always going to be a typographic solution,
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what I would call the opposite of Type 101.
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What does that mean?
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Usually on the first day of Introduction to Typography,
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you get the assignment of, select a word
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and make it look like what it says it is. So that's Type 101, right?
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Very simple stuff.
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This is going to be the opposite of that.
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I want this book to look like it's lying to you,
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desperately and hopelessly, the way an alcoholic would.
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The answer was the most low-tech thing you can imagine.
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I set up the type, I printed it out on an Epson printer
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with water-soluble ink, taped it to the wall
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and threw a bucket of water at it. Presto!
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Then when we went to press,
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the printer put a spot gloss on the ink
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and it really looked like it was running.
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Not long after it came out, Augusten was waylaid in an airport
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and he was hiding out in the bookstore
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spying on who was buying his books.
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And this woman came up to it,
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and she squinted, and she took it to the register,
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and she said to the man behind the counter, "This one's ruined."
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(Laughter)
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And the guy behind the counter said, "I know, lady. They all came in that way."
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(Laughter)
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Now, that's a good printing job.
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A book cover
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is a distillation.
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It is a haiku,
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if you will, of the story.
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This particular story
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by Osama Tezuka
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is his epic life of the Buddha,
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and it's eight volumes in all. But the best thing is
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when it's on your shelf, you get a shelf life
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of the Buddha, moving from one age to the next.
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All of these solutions
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derive their origins from the text of the book,
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but once the book designer has read the text,
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then he has to be an interpreter
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and a translator.
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This story was a real puzzle.
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This is what it's about.
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("Intrigue and murder among 16th century Ottoman court painters.")
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(Laughter)
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All right, so I got a collection of the paintings together
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and I looked at them and I deconstructed them
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and I put them back together.
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And so, here's the design, right?
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And so here's the front and the spine, and it's flat.
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But the real story starts when you wrap it around a book and put it on the shelf.
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Ahh! We come upon them,
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the clandestine lovers. Let's draw them out.
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Huhh! They've been discovered by the sultan.
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He will not be pleased.
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Huhh! And now the sultan is in danger.
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And now, we have to open it up
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to find out what's going to happen next.
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Try experiencing that on a Kindle.
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(Laughter)
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Don't get me started.
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Seriously.
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Much is to be gained by eBooks:
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ease, convenience, portability.
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But something is definitely lost: tradition,
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a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness --
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a little bit of humanity.
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Do you know what John Updike used to do