I've been overdosing on theatre in the last few weeks. There's a lot of good stuff on in London. I've just seen The Cherry Orchard (Old Vic), Waiting for Godot (Haymarket) and All's Well that Ends Well (National) and enjoyed them all. But the best was A Little Night Music at the Garrick, a revival of Sondheim's musical from the 1980s. Sondheim is so brilliant. He takes a film by Ingmar Bergman and turns it into a stage musical full of lovely music and joyfully clever lyrics. Loved it.   John Simmons

 

One for typophiles and magaziniacs; a new typeface called Lyon became the text face for the New York Times Magazine in June 2009. It was created by the Netherlands-based studio Atelier Carvalho Bernau and is based on designs by 16th century punch cutter Robert Granjon. It makes a refreshing addition to publishing faces and has an elegant writerly feel. No doubt we will discuss further over here.   Tim Rich

This is a revealing account of the second-oldest profession – of which many of us are proud members. Ever-since-ever, writers have been putting words in the mouths of others – from Greek choruses, to celebrity ‘autobiographies’, to chairman’s statements. Jennie began her career as a translator and editor of Russian literature but she gradually became a complicit victim of a complex interdependency with her flamboyant publisher - for whom she eventually wrote two novels, a newspaper column and numerous articles. There are many reflections on the meaning of writing for others, and the complex relationships involved. Her boss Tiger is a hugely successful and capricious diva who craves attention and uses her as an emotional and professional crutch. Her eye-watering descriptions of him reminded me of quite a few clients over the years. Tiger, while affecting a boyish ingenuousness, was actually endowed with a Machiavellian shrewdness. He could flatter, disparage, coax and intimidate, interchangeably and with consummate artistry. It’s an illuminating new take on the odd couple syndrome - manically addicted to loving and loathing each other.

Writing for clients requires a lot of listening and reading between the lines, before interpreting their ambitions in a way that appeals to their audiences. We all play a game; a delicate diplomacy often danced on the knife-edge of their insecurities and our need to get a cheque at the end. It’s a business transaction. No one is under any illusions. Our mercenary status and relative anonymity is the price we pay for making a good living out of words. As Tiger is bathing in the glory of ‘his’ second novel ghosted by Jennie she broods - Language creates us and defines us, but the stuff I was producing was a curious hybrid. I could never really trust it; it was too artificial, too much like a confidence trick. In odd melodramatic moments I thought of myself as a slave, toiling away, belonging to someone else.   Tom Lynham

Buy on Amazon: Ghosting

Heaven and Earth is such a perfect title because this show celebrates our spirituality and physicality - from the stars in our eyes to the mud between our toes. Richard’s work blurs the idiotic boundaries between creative disciplines. He is a walking artist who rearranges the world around him as he travels. This vast production at Tate Britain is so tactile and spatial I floated around in an ecstatic daze. The scales of activity are vertiginous; from prospective walks plotted on Ordnance Survey maps, to circles, spirals, squares and lines shuffled or constructed on deserts, pastures, scree slopes and peat bogs. Thirty Seven Campfires is a walk in the Sierra Tarahumara - Mexico. Walking Flowing is a 473-mile wander across France from the Loire to the Rhône. From Pass to Pass is a 12-day hike in the Zanskar Mountains of Ladakh. The photographs, hand paintings, rocks and words make a muscular language that feels squeezed out of the land. We are confronted with sheer-drops of exquisite typography - skies of sentences, vistas of lists, streams of consciousness, mountains of observations. Punctuating the immaculate graphics, walls of splattered mud and St Austell clay look as if they have been created by the weather. Rafts of scrubbed boulders and spilt slate float on the gallery floor looking so delicious you could almost eat them. Sometimes the giant words become so multi-dimensional, they develop meanings way beyond their perceived values. Writing great stories is about distilling narratives from the chaos around us, and signposting audiences through complex territories. Our job is to help clients see the familiar in unfamiliar ways, and look inside themselves to figure out where they are going, and why they are going there.   Tom Lynham

I listen to the Monocle podcasts as I walk from London Bridge to work in Shoreditch, and they provide me with a thoroughly entertaining half hour or so. A bit like the magazine itself, you can't help but wonder a little bit about who the core target audience is, given the sheer variety of the content. One segment might examine the emerging trends from the latest arms fair, the next might be about the provenance of food in their chosen destination, another might look at the latest J-pop coming out of Tokyo. But it all seems to hang together quite well in the end, thanks in no small part to the well-heeled charm of Tyler Brule and his contributing editors. Give them a try on your next train journey. Or something.   James Hogwood

Miranda writes with a dangerous beauty and alarming insights into the wonders of how on earth we talk to each other. Her stories are funny and sensual autopsies of the ridiculous expectations that make adult-hood so dysfunctionally glorious. In this dazzling collection the incidents are so slight, but her insight goes so deep. Her unravellings of tiny details and flitting happenstance light up immensely complex areas of life. She explores the fragility of relationships and the perils of faking-it. The Boy from Lam Kien describes an acquaintance between a woman and the young son of a neighbour. The boy manoeuvres his way into her house, and they play a peculiar game of territorial rights; the boy daring her to let him invade her spaces, and her fears about being home-alone with a minor in a culture where such encounters are loaded. During one excruciating mention of sleeping arrangements in her bedroom she says - He gave me a long, strange stare, and my mind bent like a spoon. Their exchanges are spun around the insatiable curiosity of a child for adult life - and the mysterious acquisitions and rituals to come. And the retrospective reflections of an adult - trying to measure the experience of childhood against the reality of being a grown up. As the boy leaves her house she says - I shut my door and listen to the sucking sound. It was the sound of Earth hurtling away from the apartment at a speed too fast to imagine.   Tom Lynham

Buy on Amazon: No One Belongs Here More Than You

I like a book that explains clearly, humorously and intelligently everything that’s wrong with our way of thinking, then gives us a plan to put it right. How about this one?   Sarah McCartney

Buy on Amazon: Out of Our Minds

This sweet little show of works on paper at the ICA is inspired by concrete poetry and text-based practices that originated in the 60s and 70s. Robert Smithson and Carl Andre are best known for their minimalist sculpture, and Vito Acconci for his performance work. The thing I had forgotten was the sheer percussive power of the typewriter. These artists used their Remingtons like hammers and chisels to carve characters deep into the page and re-discover words. The evocative quality of letter striking ribbon striking paper is a reminder of the drama of the embossed word in these times of purring laser printers. Other artists abandon comprehensibility altogether, and pound the typewriter keyboard like a deaf Beethoven to construct blocks of letters and phrases that play off each other like poignant chord structures. The excellent catalogue - ROLAND - includes a neat essay by Douglas Coupland who talks about visual and non-visual thinkers, the erotic charge he got from his earliest encounters with the words of Lichtenstein, Warhol and Jenny Holzer - and (ahhhhh) the enduring joys of Helvetica.   Tom Lynham
 

You probably already know about TED talks. But if you don't, TED stands for Technology, Education, Design, and you must check it out. TED is a wide-ranging annual conference in America that looks very broadly at subjects within these themes. The TED site is a seemingly endless mine for fascinating information about all sorts of things that just feel relevant, whether or not you were interested or looking for it in the first place. And that's probably a testament to how accessibly each presenter discusses their topic. In the past few days, I've devoured talks about the science of happiness, why our choices are never as rational as we like to think they are, and poems about vice and its consequences. The emphasis throughout is on entertainment, and the breadth of subject matter means that you're sure to find something that piques your interest.   James Hogwood

Strolling through Waterstone’s on a recent Saturday afternoon, we were virtually accosted by a man waving this book at us. Listening to him, it turned out he was in fact the author of this children’s book. I asked a few questions that revealed he was once graphics editor of The Telegraph. He waffled on a bit about four soft toy animals in search of a stolen brooch and then showed us some quite superb black and white illustrations. We were quite taken by the old fashioned storytelling and the nod towards Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. He signed a copy and I merrily trotted towards the checkout with book under my arm. My daughter Martha (9) has not stopped reading or talking about this book ever since.   John Fountain
 

Buy on Amazon: Amazing Adventures of Curd the Lion

I've just finished reading this, which, as the name suggests, is a book of other people. Each story, written by a different author, explores a different character. And whilst it's not the most consistent collection of short stories I've read, a few really zing out as intriguing studies. Some, like the affectionate "Rhoda" by Jonathan Safran Foer, simply capture a tone of voice especially well. Others, like "J Johnson" by Nick Hornby and Posy Simmonds, tell reported histories of sorts. But for me the stand-out piece is "Jordan Wellington Lint" by comic artist Chris Ware, who tells his story of a boy from birth to adolescence as much through typography and infographics as he does his signature cute-yet-melancholy  drawing style. It's a lovely example of what you can achieve with an extreme economy of language, too.   James Hogwood

Buy on Amazon: Book of Other People
 

Part of the reason why the period between 1918 and 1945 retains such a grip on our collective imaginations is that the answer to the question 'How could it happen?' appears to be both unsatisfactory and unlikely. How often do you see a fully-functioning state - defeated in war yes, but still with the full apparatus of a nation - implode in slow motion? Evans, in the first of his trilogy on Nazi Germany shows us how. The causes lay not so much in the post-WW1 settlement, but in the very birth of Germany as a modern nation - it's militaristic culture, a fear of socialist revolution, a sense of destiny even. It is, as you would expect from one of the world's leading historians, rigorously scholarly, but with its erudition lightly worn and prose that reads like a thriller. A very necessary book.   Rishi Dastidar
 

Buy on Amazon: Coming of the Third Reich

Wonderfully detailed story of how O&M came to be. The man himself comes over as a likable, occasionally brilliant, egomaniac. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the history of advertising. Some useful stuff on writing but if you've read "The Unpublished.." or "Ogilvy on.." then you've seen it before.   Roger Horberry

Buy on Amazon: The King of Madison Avenue

Here's an idiosyncratic free download for all 26ers of a secret Luddite persuasion. It's called Typewriter and it allows you the exact functionality that an old typewriter would – one font, no delete key or backspacing, no nasty modern stuff of any sort. Not even any Tippex solution. Why bother? It's amazing how it makes you concentrate. If you feel that you've turned into a lazy cut and paste monkey, there's nothing like Typewriter to make you re-engage with the words on the page, er, screen. It will be the first time you've felt an adrenaline surge in front of your keyboard for ages. Although the first mistake will drive you mad, enjoy anyway...   Martin Lee


 

Wallpaper magazine, in conjunction with St Bride Library and industry organisation Type, recently asked designers to redesign 'tart cards'. The invited each contributor "to find the tart hiding in every type and create their own graphic numbers". The result was a collection of cards heavy with design innuendo and crass sexual allusion. Fortunately, one designer – Mike Dempsey – saw past the opportunity for brainless graphic masturbation that dehumanises people and put the entire issue of prostitution in a wider context. Read his letter and graphic response here.   Tim Rich