{"id":1556,"date":"2008-12-27T17:59:25","date_gmt":"2008-12-28T00:59:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=1556"},"modified":"2008-12-27T17:59:25","modified_gmt":"2008-12-28T00:59:25","slug":"maps-and-legends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=1556","title":{"rendered":"Maps and Legends"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My wonderful wife got me two amazing gifts this year for X-Mas. One is a USB preamp thingee that enables me to create <a href=\"http:\/\/popgeek.org\/2008\/12\/27\/matts-first-mp3\/\" target=\"_blank\">pro-am musical recordings<\/a> in the comfort of our back closet.<\/p>\n<p>The other is a copy of Michael Chabon&#8217;s new book of essays, Maps and Legends, one of those books you know you want, but you didn&#8217;t realize it yet. It&#8217;s a great read&#8211;he writes on topics from &#8220;the borderlands,&#8221; which includes comics, genre fiction, old stuff, and more.<\/p>\n<p>Even more than a great read, it&#8217;s a great looking book.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/alertnerd.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/12\/ed4594ba8fa9190e64c47f8c5d87af40.jpg\" alt=\"ed4594ba8fa9190e64c47f8c5d87af40\" title=\"ed4594ba8fa9190e64c47f8c5d87af40\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1557\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I had really forgotten the sheer joy of holding and reading an incredibly well-designed, thoughtfully crafted book. Maps and Legends has three separate dust jackets, with art from Jordan Crane. They depict cartoon images of many of the topics in the book&#8211;monsters, mythology, and the like. Each separate jacket sits atop another, creating three separate layers of artwork&#8211;in the center is a die-cut hole, and beneath the hole is the title, set in black type within a gold-leaf X on the actual sewn cover of the book.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m doing a shitty job explaining it, but from the second I opened the wrapping paper, I loved this book. Hadn&#8217;t read a word, didn&#8217;t need to. It&#8217;s a beautiful object. Fondle a copy the next time you&#8217;re in a store.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My wonderful wife got me two amazing gifts this year for X-Mas. One is a USB preamp thingee that enables me to create pro-am musical recordings in the comfort of our back closet. The other is a copy of Michael Chabon&#8217;s new book of essays, Maps and Legends, one of those books you know you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[414,114,115],"class_list":["post-1556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-books","tag-maps-and-legends","tag-michael-chabon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}