Chronicle Books Blog

Excitement is building around here for a book we’re making with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (which more of you may know as the de Young and the Legion of Honor). It’s a reproduction of a turn of the (last) century book called Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower and it is Just. So. Gorgeous! Here’s a little sneak peak of the cover to give you an idea—

We’re in the midst of sourcing and testing all these great cover materials and textures right now—the blue and white floral pattern is printed directly onto the book’s hardcover case, which is made of this great rich soft textured paper, and the white flowers are embossed so they raise up and almost seem to float above the surface of the book’s cover. The band with the title and image is a removable paper strip called a J-wrap, and when you take if off the original French title block is underneath.

Both museums are gearing up for the amazing fact that part of the collection of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay is coming to the de Young this summer and fall (read more about that coolness here) with concomitant shows Impressionist Paris and Japanesque at the Legion at the same time. Prints from the original book—by Henri Rivière, a French artist very much influenced by Japanese art in general and Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji in particular—will be on display at both those Legion of Honor shows. So our team has been to’ing and fro’ing out to the museum all this spring to visit the original in the Achenbach collection and get everything just right.

Chronicle staff and museum staff reviewing plates from the original book and discussing how best we can reproduce them.

This book is going to be so pretty I can hardly stand it! To show you what I mean, here are a couple of images from the interior, just to amuse bouche you a little bit…

The book isn’t coming out until this fall—but you can preorder it here.

Bridget Watson Payne
Art+Design Editorial

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If you and your partner are considering adding a little one to the mix, you may be in the market for a recipe or two to get things cooking! Kim Hahn, author of Cooking to Conceive says, “The research on how your diet affects your chances of getting pregnant is still in its early stages, but with each new study published it becomes increasingly clear that the foods you choose to eat can have an effect on your fertility.”

Get started with this yummy recipe high in both calcium and lycopene – two ingredients recommended for conception.

Kale and White Bean Ragout with Parmesan Polenta

Calcium-rich dinosaur kale, also known as Lacinato kale, and white beans join kalamata olives and lycopene-rich tomatoes in this flavorful dish. If you buy organic canned beans, you can reserve the fiber-rich liquid and add it to the dish. Because this dish contains salty ingredients, you probably won’t need to add additional salt.

Serves 4 to 6

Parmesan Polenta
1/2 teaspoon (2.5 ml) salt
1 cup (240 ml) stone-ground cornmeal (polenta)*
1/3 cup (80 ml) grated Parmesan cheese
Freshly ground pepper

Ragout
1 bunch (8 to 12 ounces or 227 to 336 grams) dinosaur kale*
2 tablespoons (30 ml) olive oil
1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
1 can (28 ounces or 800 grams) whole peeled tomatoes*
2 cans (14.5 ounces or 425 grams each) cannellini beans (white kidney beans), not drained*
3/4 to 1 cup (178 to 240 ml) chicken or vegetable broth
1/2 teaspoon (2.5 ml) ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon (2.5 ml) smoked paprika
2 teaspoons (10 ml) fresh lemon juice
3 tablespoons (45 ml) chopped pitted kalamata olives
Pepper

1. To make the polenta: Bring 4 1/2 cups (1.1 liters) water and the salt to a boil in a medium saucepan over high heat. Whisk in the polenta, reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer, stirring occasionally, until polenta is thick and no longer grainy, 25 to 30 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the cheese; add salt and pepper to taste. Cover and keep warm.

2. To make the ragout: Tear the kale leaves from the stems and tough center ribs. Rinse the leaves well and cut into 1/4-inch (6mm) ribbons (discard the ribs and stems).

3. heat the oil in a large pot or dutch oven over medium heat. add the onion and garlic and cook until the onion is softened but not browned, about 5 minutes. add the tomatoes, including the juices, using a fork to break up the tomatoes into small chunks. add the beans, including their liquid, 3/4 cup (178 ml) broth, and the kale, cumin, and paprika. Bring to a simmer and cook, uncovered, until the kale is tender, about 15 minutes, adding more broth if the ragout begins to look dry. stir in the lemon juice and olives. add pepper to taste. spoon the polenta onto plates and top with ragout.

Happy Cooking!

Resolve: The National Infertility Association is celebrating National Infertility Awareness Week, April 24-May 1, joining millions of women and men fighting the disease of infertility. For more information, visit: resolve.org.

Nancy Deane
Senior Marketing Manager

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If you’re a parent, we need your help.

Here at the Lifestyle Headquarters we’re developing a book on parenting time-savers, money-savers, and sanity-savers. It’s from the authors of How to Have Your Second Child First and it’s aimed at parents of kids from birth to age four.

As a parent, it’s likely you have a whole lot of tricks up your sleeve to help you get through each day: small things that make a big difference. They may be new discoveries (if you put the Cheerios down low, your kid can now get them himself!) or things that have now become second nature in your house (naming each of her teeth helps keep her interested in brushing them). Either way, it’s time to pass them on to other parents! Submit your best tips. We’ll pick 25 lucky winners to win a free copy of How to Have Your Second Child First. We’ll announce the winners on June 15.

Do it today while it’s fresh in your sleep-deprived mind!

Jodi Warshaw
Executive Editor

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Carina Nebula Star-forming Pillars and Herbig-Haro Objects with Jets. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)

My interest in astronomy dates back to the comet Hale-Bopp. I was a freshman in college, and for nearly all of that March I walked across campus with my eyes on the comet’s streak in the sky. Even on the brightest afternoon, Hale-Bopp’s head and two tails were visible.

For a few months that spring, I wanted to be an astronomer. Having a professor who discovered supernovae helped, too. And then my worlds collided: I took a Shakespeare course, and realized that I more easily remembered Hamlet’s “I am too much in the sun” than the speed at which light travels, or how many astronomical units the Earth is from Mars.

Literature prevailed, but thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, I’ve been able to keep an eye on deep space. On Saturday, the telescope celebrated its 20th anniversary.

Credit: NASA

Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990. Since then, the telescope has captured more than half a million images of 30,000 celestial objects, some as far as 10 billion light-years away.

The sombrero galaxy in infrared light. Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

One of the benefits to Hubble’s space-based position is its unencumbered view. Unlike land-based telescopes, it doesn’t contend with refraction and some distortion caused by earth’s atmosphere. One of my favorite Hubble images is actually a team effort with two other telescopes: The W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory. The brightest objects in this image are stars—everything else, galaxies.

Galaxy Cluster MACS J0717. Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, C. Ma, H. Ebeling, and E. Barrett (University of Hawaii/IfA), et al., and STScI.

Hubble has captured nebulae towers three-light years tall, galaxies on collision courses, and stars in various stages of their turbulent lives. It has helped astronomers to better understand the properties of black holes, dark energy (and how it effects the universe’s expansion rate), and dark matter (which may be galaxies’ unseen scaffolding). Hubble has even captured candid moments in our own solar system, like when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter. In February 2009, the telescope captured four of Saturn’s moons in transit.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgment: M.H. Wong (STScI/UC Berkeley) and C. Go (Philippines)

Which brings me to a book I recently worked on here at Chronicle, The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Weird Junior Edition. For one of the entries on space, I interviewed Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at SETI Institute and a self-proclaimed alien hunter. Seth scours the sky for extra-terrestrial life with the use of extremely powerful radio telescopes. He says that SETI’s telescopes could pick up a cell phone ringing… on Jupiter.

And then there is Hamlet. (After all, it was that play—and others—that exerted quite the gravitational pull on me.) I revisited it this weekend, and saw that the very first line, “Who’s there?” echoes Seth’s work at SETI and Hubble’s twenty-year journey.

To Hamlet, the earth is “a sterile promontory”—“the air… this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestic roof fretted with golden fire.” Everything appears to him “foul” and “pestilent.” He has lost all his mirth. In Hamlet’s mind’s eye, man, the world, the entire “paragon of animals,” are nothing more than a “quintessence of dust.”

Star Cluster NGC 2074 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Credit: NASA, ESA and M. Livio (STScl).

Hamlet doesn’t have a Hubble to free him from the prison that is Denmark and his own head, to turn his attention past the “overhanging firmament” that just reinforces his ceaseless frets. We do. I like knowing that Hubble does some cosmic seeing for us. It captures visions of our universe’s history so that astronomers can make informed predictions about its future. The Hubble Space Telescope is all about the expansive view. It shows us that our understanding of space and experience doesn’t have to be limited, or limiting.

So, for me, Hubble’s legacy is what has been beamed back to us in pictures of potential.

Perhaps within the galaxies Hubble has snapped are planets orbiting suns—planets with their own Hamlets and their own stories. For the past 20 years, we’ve had the chance to view the complex cosmic patchwork of what lurks in deep space. Now we know that there is always more to be seen—always more to consider. Like Seth at SETI, I like to imagine that there is other intelligent life in space—that there are beings looking toward our own Milky Way and hoping that, someday, they just might catch a glimpse of us.

Naomi Kirsten
Assistant Editor

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The micro-blogging of Twitter can be a very helpful and insightful tool if you want it to be. It’s increasingly a place for people with common interests to find community news, share ideas and find inspiration. These days you can use Twitter to get news updates and suggestions from your local bookstore, or your favorite crafty designer or entertainer (local or not). You can even follow us, Chronicle Books, our staff, authors and see our favorites.

If you’re into fashion, cooking, pop culture, etc. you can build a list of people twittering about these things, and your Twitter feed will be curated to these interests. I follow a slew of designers, illustrators and creative agencies, which may be of interest to you if you’re into design. Here are a few we recommend:

Design Observer. Simply a must have for anyone on Twitter and serious about design. We love the site and the Twitter feed doesn’t disappoint with a great mix of news and coverage of design heavyweights.

Design:related. Their “bio” reads, “where design meets inspiration,” and they stay true to this. Their tweets cover a broad range of design and creative projects around the world from videos to student posters to design in everyday life.

Barry Madden. A prolific twitterer who somehow doesn’t let quantity affect the quality of his posts. He seems to have something to share about design or photography every five minutes, but it’s always interesting, smart, and often useful.

Julia Rothman. We love her illustration work and her website Book by Its Cover. Her Twitter posts are full of inspiring finds such as books, art shows, new designs, articles and online interviews. And she includes some personal notes and observations, rendering her a lovely real person and talented curator to follow.

She’s also been twittering and blogging about the making of her Exquisite Book. It’s very fun to see the concept and cover options come together.

These are just four examples of great design inspired twittering. If you twitter, give us your link and tell us your favorites in the comments section. The days of reading about what everyone had for lunch are gone—unless you’re a foodie and that’s your inspiration. Twitter is easily curated to your interests. Design is only a sliver, albeit a pretty active one.

Suzanne LaGasa
Designer

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