Owen Books

I purchased this book after reading a review in a local paper. The authors live near my town and that also influenced my decision as well as my love of pirates and stories. I wasn't disappointed as I found it to be of great historical interest as well as a wonderful book of art and lore. I highly recommend it to the lover of pirate lore as well as those interested in treasure maps and such.

Taking the course from Tom Owen-Towle entitled "Love Meets the Dragons" made my last year of seminary the equivalent of a ministerial finishing school. Tom is experienced, energetic, and ebullient. He is not a dragon-slayer, but rather a dragon-trainer, a bright-spirited knight.

Very well written book from a great graphologis

This is a strange book - it is a very long narrative poem, some of which is based on "Lavina" by George Sand. It is a familiar love story - falling in love and losing love has been told in tales forever. But not in poetry such as this. It's an interesting read, just to see how the writer manages to make a poem of this length flow together into a story.
I recommend it highly.

I enjoyed this great collection of golf stories. One would have to buy dozens of books to have access to these wonderfully written pieces otherwise. Conveniently organized into different categories for easy reference. This book takes you back into some of golf's greatest historical writing as well as a taste of some of the best contemporary work. I'd strongly recommend adding this gem to your library.

I've had this book for a while, and used just about every trick on my friends. From melting screens to fake error messages to mice that won't stand still, this little gem has them all. Very easy to use...fun to read. A little bit of history since this works only on the older, pre OSX macs.

So many cute, useful and lovely items made from yarn scraps, from little to large. Great variety. Many of the patterns would be perfect for Holiday Boutiques. This is a good addition to any crocheters library.

This is from Tony Saroop's excellent review of the play:

Mishima's "sensibility is closer to and retains elements of an archaic, pagan, 'pre-Christian' sensibility, a sensibility we have completely lost touch with, but which Sade seems to have tapped into and evoked out of his inner self. . . .

"I think this is why Western scientific scholarship, with its naive belief in the efficacy of rational discourse, a form of discourse which does little more than generate disagreement, has not and never could give us a full and satisfactory explanation of the Sadeian mystery, which is also the deep, repressed mystery of ourselves. There is something in Sade which rises above the rational, something that only poetry can comprehend, and which Mishima has attempted to evoke [with] great poetic beauty."

I got this wonderful book in 1992 and I've recently re-read it and I still think it is the best survey of magazine design. Magazines (and newspapers) are rather unique in their design because the words and the visuals are so tightly connected. Other areas of print design can be taught in design schools but to adequately cover publication design schools would have to employ sub-editors and other wordsmiths, not a very practical solution! Bill Owen's book is not a how-to manual but a good solid history in words and thankfully plenty of covers and spreads.

This design history starts in the early years of the last century but to my mind the story really comes alive in America during the Thirties and Forties. Great titles like Fortune, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, Vanity Fair and others had publishers who realised the importance of strong visuals and having a good Art Editor. During the Fifties and Sixties a whole raft of talent was creating stunning looking magazines. My favorites were Otto Storch on McCalls (the things he could do with Baskerville Old Face were just amazing) Herb Lubalin and his rather short run on the Saturday Evening Post in 1961 and Willi Fleckhaus on Twen (a stunning looking German monthly that made a design virtue of black pages and a condensed typeface called Schmalfette Grotesk. A German book devoted to this very influential title is 'Twen, revision of a legend' by Michael Koetzle, ISBN 3781404382).

The text has plenty of spreads (in color) and in the latter part of the book the pages are filled with these and long captions. The survey ends about the late Eighties so it does not cover a lot of the contemporary US and European publications. Editorial design in so many of these, it seems to me, is a bit of a free-for-all because it is so easy create something using the latest software.

If you are interested in the history of magazine design over the last few decades Owen's book is the one to get. A book that covers the history of one corner of the magazine business, the weekly news titles, that I found fascinating is 'Kiosk: A history of photojournalism' by Robert LeBeck (ISBN 388243791X) and I particularly liked it because it has hundreds of spreads, rather than just individual photos, from the great weeklies like Life, Stern, Paris Match, Picture Post and others.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

If you are a fan of number coincidences, or believe in any form of numerology then this is a book to drool over. It consists of page after page of relationships between numbers and events. Owen O'Shea has an amazing ability to identify curious combinations of numbers. To give you some idea of the unusual relationships that he is discovered, here is a list of the chapter titles:

*) Digit curiosities
*) The 9/11 atrocities
*) The professor speaks on the U. S. and Ireland
*) Curiosities in armed conflicts
*) Number and word palindromes
*) The U. S. - Iraq war
*) The number of the beast
*) Curios of the Lusitania and other curious matters
*) Wordplay and other curiosities
*) New coincidences on Lincoln and Kennedy
*) Dart and card curiosities
*) The professor gives some number patterns
*) The King James Bible and some currency conversions
*) The professor at the university

I was amazed at some of the coincidences, wondering how O'Shea managed to find them. It appears that he has a very accurate sense for these relationships, as some are quite obscure. When reading the book, there were few, "Now, why didn't I think of that?" moments. However, there were many times when my thought was, "I would have never thought of that."

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.