guest post by Todd Lappin (Telstar Logistics)

Call it “one small step for man, and one giant leap for wannabe astronauts of all ages…”

Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11, a meticulously detailed children’s book by Brian Floca, was just named one of the Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2009 by the New York Times.

Congratulations, Brian!

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“Stabby The Narwhal” a “twisted” Dr. Seuss spoof by Jim Benton.

via The Daily What

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photos by Scott Beale

A few photos from last night’s Full of Win Happy Hour with Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh at Citizen Space to celebrate the release of the three new books based on their blogs I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog and GraphJam.

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Cory Doctorow has just released his latest novel “Makers”, “a book about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet.” Here’s where to find print versions of the book for sale and an electronic version can be downloaded for free under a Creative Commons NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Perry and Lester invent things—seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems, like the “New Work,” a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal mini-startups like Perry and Lester’s. Together, they transform the country, and Andrea Fleeks, a journo-turned-blogger, is there to document it.

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guest post by Doctor Popular

“Meanwhile”, the latest book by Oakland cartoonist Jason Shiga, is a series of tubes… wait, scratch that… his book uses a series of tubes to allow the reader to determine choices like “should the main character have vanilla or chocolate ice cream?” and “should the main character travel back in time or just detonate the doomsday device now?”. Although Shiga’s stories are all clever, Meanwhile’s “choose your own adventure” mechanic works particularly well with the story’s time travel element.

photo by Jason Shiga

The above interview with Jason was filmed at this year’s Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco. Meanwhile, originally self published in 2001, will be coming out as a full color book by Amulet Publishing in spring of 2010. Shiga has also published most of his books on his site ShigaBooks.com for free. I recommend (in order of awesomeness):

Bookhunter (2007)

Meanwhile… (2001)

Fleep (002)

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Nick Douglas recently made an appearance on The Martha Stewart Show to talk about his new book “Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less”.

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Dom Sagolla, who was one of the original members of the team that built Twitter, has a new book out, 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form. The book focuses on helping people get the most of out writing messages for Twitter, Facebook and other social media that involves short form communication.

The advent of Twitter and other social networking sites, as well as the popularity of text messaging, have made short-form communication an everyday reality. But expressing yourself clearly in short bursts-particularly in the 140-character limit of Twitter-takes special writing skill.

In 140 Characters, Twitter co-creator Dom Sagolla covers all the basics of great short-form writing, including the importance of communicating with simplicity, honesty, and humor. For marketers and business owners, social media is an increasingly important avenue for promoting a business-this is the first writing guide specifically dedicated to communicating with the succinctness and clarity that the Internet age demands.

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Our friends at I Can Has Cheezburger? have just released three new books:

How to Take Over Teh Wurld: A LOLcat Guide 2 Winning, a new compendium of LOLcat images that is a follow-up to last year’s I Can Has Cheezburger? book.

In I Can Has Cheezburger?, Professor Happycat brought LOLcats to the wurld. Nao he has gone back to his lair for 200 all-new LOLcats that give all aspiring kittehs the lessons they need to take over teh world (or at least their hoomins).

Graph Out Loud: Music. Movies. Graphs. Awesome., based on the website GraphJam that humorously explains music and pop culture in the form of graphs and pie charts.

GraphJam.com was founded in February 2008 with one mission: to rescue pie charts, Venn diagrams, decision trees, and other graphs from the terminal boredom of the office. Instead of using Excel and PowerPoint to report third- quarter sales or graph capital expenditures versus amortization, GraphJam.com users applied those tools to Jay-Z’s song “99 Problems” and Yoda’s advice to Luke Skywalker. The result is a thriving community with millions of web visitors whose creativity has produced thousands of graphs and a hilarious new interpretation of pop culture.

Fail Nation: A Visual Romp Through the World of Epic Fails, based on the website FAIL Blog which features photos and videos of epic failures.

From the underbelly of the nuts behind hit websites failblog.org and icanhascheezburger.com comes FAIL Nation, your silent guide and handler to the not-even-close-to-perfect nation of FAIL, chock-full of irrelevant tips and useless suggestions about why to shop, who to eat, and when to see. So fasten your exit and check for the nearest seatbelt—your FAIL plane departs now.

Speaking of FAIL, the FAILpocalypse is coming this Tuesday, October 13th at Mr. Smith’s in San Francisco, where copies of all three books will be on hand.

Join Tim and Chad for another specfailular celebration of fail.

This time, we’ve joined forces with the masters of FAIL, the crew from Failblog, to make this the ultimate FAILparty for all you junkies of teh FAIL.

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Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day is a new book by our good friends Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor, that chronicles the history of punk rock music in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Outside of New York and London, California’s Bay Area claims the oldest continuous punk-rock scene in the world.

Gimme Something Better brings this outrageous and influential punk scene to life, from the notorious final performance of the Sex Pistols, to Jello Biafra’s bid for mayor, the rise of Maximum RocknRoll magazine, and the East Bay pop-punk sound that sold millions around the globe. Throngs of punks, including members of the Dead Kennedys, Avengers, Flipper, MDC, Green Day, Rancid, NOFX, and AFI, tell their own stories in this definitive account, from the innovative art-damage of San Francisco’s Fab Mab in North Beach, to the still vibrant all-ages DIY ethos of Berkeley’s Gilman Street. Compiled by longtime Bay Area journalists Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor, Gimme Something Better chronicles more than two decades of punk music, progressive politics, social consciousness, and divine decadence, told by the people who made it happen.

photo by unknown

Litquake and Porchlight are hosting a book release party, Journey to the End of the Bay: Punk Rockers Spill Their Guts, on Monday, October 12th at Broadway Studios (the old On Broadway) in San Francisco.

The Litquake literary festival and Porchlight storytelling collaborate for true tales of punk-rock anarchy and excess. This huge tribute to the Bay Area punk scene features stories and music all night long, in the legendary On Broadway space, which helped give birth to punk rock on the West Coast.

Other events include an author talk and book signing at Booksmith in San Francisco on Tuesday, October 13th, a punk rock show at 924 Gilman in Berkeley on Saturday, October 17th and an author talk and book signing at Powell’s Books in Portland on Monday, October 19th.

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Photojojo, a wondeful newsletter featuring photography tips and projects, has just released a new book “Photojojo! The Book, Insanely Great Photo Projects and DIY Ideas”, written by Amit Gupta and Kelly Jensen.

Get out of a photo rut, construct a photo mural, make a photo chandelier, create (temporary) photo tattoos, attach a camera to your dog, break the ice at parties with your camera, make a tripod from a bottlecap, craft your own snow globes and photo ornaments, sew a photo messenger bag, wallet, and laptop sleeve …and much, much more! phew.

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photo by Scott Beale

I really love the sign at the Montana Avenue Branch of the Santa Monica Public Library, makes me want to go in there and find out more about this whole book thing I’ve been hearing about.

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Within 48 hours of the incredible dust storm that turned Sydney, Australia orange last week, Derek Powazek had published Strange Light, a magazine featuring beautiful photos of this rare event. The 40 page magazine is available for $6.

Strange light fell over Australia on 23 September 2009. An unexpected dust storm blanketed New South Wales and Queensland, turning everything an eerie shade of amber. At its peak, the storm swept up 140,000 tons of soil per hour. In spite of the worst dust storm in 70 years, intrepid photographers ventured outside to document what was happening to their homes, neighborhoods, and country. This is what they saw.

Derek describes the process of how he published the magazine using the print-on-demand service MagCloud. His project was recently featured in TIME Magazine.

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xkcd: volume 0, the first xkcd book has just been published by BreadPig and xkcd creator Randall Munroe will be going on a book tour, making stops in New York on September 19th, San Francisco (111 Minna Gallery) on September 21st (a fundraiser for EFF) and Mountain View on September 22nd.

xkcd: volume 0 is the first xkcd book! It features selections from the first 600 comics, including various author and fan favorites. It was lovingly assembled from high-resolution original scans of the comics (the mouseover text is discreetly included), and features a lot of doodles, notes, and puzzles in the margins.

Proceeds from the sale of the xkcd book will go to Room to Read, a San Francisco based non-profit that builds schools and libraries in the developing world.

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Gary Vaynerchuk made a guest appearance on Jake and Amir to help them learn how to make CollegeHumor “Crush It!” and go big.

Gary’s new book “Crush It!” comes out on October 13th and is currently available for pre-order.

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photo of Green Day at DNA Lounge by John Adams

“A Disorderly House” is a new book featuring five years photos by John Adams documenting San Francisco’s legendary club DNA Lounge. Proceeds from the sale of the book go to the DNA Lounge Legal Defense Fund to help their battle with the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) which is trying to shut down the DNA Lounge.

For more than five years, John Adams has photographed events at the DNA Lounge, chronicling many national and local acts such as Green Day, New Model Army, The Birthday Massacre, and Halou.

Over 150 full color photos from 70 events fill this book, which contains a behind the scenes look at the flier creation process of R. Black, a special backstage section, and coverage of the Hubba Hubba Review burlesque show.

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“Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less”, a new book by Nick Douglas featuring a collection of “the Funniest Tweets of All Time”, has just been published.

Sometimes, what happens on Twitter shouldn’t stay on Twitter.

Twitter Wit is the first ever compilation of Twitter aphorisms and witticisms, celebrating a medium that has enabled millions of users to broadcast their lives and quips within Twitter’s 140-character limit, thus reinventing wordplay in the tradition of Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde. This collection includes hundreds of the most memorable and hilarious tweets to date, demonstrating that inside every moment is a joke waiting to be written.

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Tasty Flesh made a great Zombie parody of Violet Blue’s “The Smart Girl’s Guide” book series.

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Gahan Wilson: Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons is a beautiful 3 volume, hard cover set being published by Fantagraphics Books in October featuring a half century of cartoons by Gahan Wilson, a master of dark humor.

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Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg just wrote a new book “Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters”, about the history of blogging and its impact on society.

In Say Everything, Scott Rosenberg chronicles blogging’s unplanned rise and improbable triumph, tracing its impact on politics, business, the media, and our personal lives. He offers close-ups of innovators such as Blogger founder Evan Williams, investigative journalist Josh Marshall, exhibitionist diarist Justin Hall, software visionary Dave Winer, “mommyblogger” Heather Armstrong, and many others.

As part of the research for his book, Scott made a video where he attempts to find out Who Was The First Blogger?.

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The San Jose Museum of Art has a new exhibition “Todd Schorr: American Surreal” that is a retrospective of the amazing work by Los Angeles based surrealist painter Todd Schorr. The show runs from June 20th through September 16th.

Schorr is a leading figure in Southern California’s cartoon-based movement, dubbed “Pop Surrealism,” which embraces low-brow culture and a ribald graphic style indebted to pop sources such as Mad magazine. Schorr’s astonishing, highly polished realism, (inspired by Bosch, Brueghel and Dali), sets him apart from his best-known peers such as Camille Rose Garcia, Gary Baseman, and Mark Ryden. The exhibition, curated by SJMA’s Senior Scholar and Curator of Collections Susan Landauer, is accompanied by a book published by Last Gasp, San Francisco.

On Thursday, July 16th the San Jose Museum of Art is hosting “Todd Schorr Surreal Night”, a panel discussion and book signing with Todd Schorr sponsored by Hi-Fructose.

The exhibition is conjunction with the release of American Surreal: The Art of Todd Schorr, a new book by Last Gasp that also serves as a catalog for the show.

This is the latest collection of paintings by one of contemporary surrealism’s most influential artists. American Surreal picks up where Dreamland, Schorr’s previous bestselling collection of mind-bending paintings, left off. The viewer can look forward to countless hours of eye bulging investigative thought while examining the impeccably rendered subject matter that has become the hallmark of Schorr’s outrageous vision.

One of the seminal figures in what has come to be known as the Lowbrow or Pop Surrealism art movement, Schorr has continually and systematically set the bar ever higher in his quest to bring classic old master painting technique to his pop-culture-infused subject matter. This latest collection continues that journey culminating with the epic masterpiece Ape Worship, included in this volume. Schorr’s paintings are the subject of museum retrospectives in 2009 and 2010, and are highly prized and coveted by collectors the world over. American Surreal is sure to satisfy those with an overly-developed visual appetite.

San Jose Museum of Art has a series of video interviews with Todd about his work.

The Parade of the Damned, 2004

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