Obviously, I bought these 1950s issues of »Country Fair« because I fell in love with their splendid cover illustrations. But also the magazine’s content is worth mentioning: lessons on how to shoot pheasants, articles on beekeeping and ads for harvesting machinery add up to an interesting reading. The genius behind the striking magazine covers is named John Hanna. He was an Australian who arrived in London in 1947, making his living as a commercial artist and cartoonist there until 1962. During his time in London he created over 50 covers for Country Fair, so the chances are quite good to hunt down some of them on Ebay!

We´re just back from the press proof of the second issue of Œ magazine. It´s printed at printing house Heenemann and we´re very satisfied with what we saw. We can´t wait until it returns from the bookbinder! The images show contributions by Yves Borgwardt, Rachel de Joode, Jette Stolte and Jan Mielke,  for a copy and a list of all contributors check out www.oe-magazine.de. The issue will be out on November 18th.

This weekend, I visited the book fair in Leipzig. Besides presenting an overwhelming amount of literary novelties, the fair is also dedicated to book art. At the yearly exhibition »Best Book Design From All Over The World« arranged by Stiftung Buchkunst you can admire really beautiful books. Great layout, fantastic material choices (especially the Asian people know how to work with paper), sophisticated bindings and other extra details lifted my spirits. 14 books were rewarded, check out the winners here!

The Bonniers Cook Book from 1960 is the Swedish Holy Grail of cooking – everybody’s granny had it. It is a culinary and visual treasure and you can spend a lot of time learning how to modernize your kitchen (to a middle of the 20th century standard), interpreting diagrams about how to blend sauces and admiring table decorations. I even discovered a piece of Rörstrand chinaware I have at home! The cover art is by Bo Lassen, unfortunately I do not know other works by him.