Joshua Glenn, a Boston-based writer, publisher, and semiotician. He is co-author of Significant Objects, published by Fantagraphics, and Unbored, the kids’ field guide to serious fun coming from Bloomsbury this fall. He edits the website HiLobrow, which as HiLoBooks is now publishing classics — by Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others — from what he calls science fiction’s Radium Age.
About Love: Three Stories by Anton Chekhov, illustrated by Seth. Three interlinked stories about hunters who are stuck in a hut during a snowstorm. Joshua: “Seth is not only great at illustrating, he’s also great at decorating books. It’s a beautiful pleasure to hold this book.” Seth also illustrated two books that Joshua co-wrote: The Idler’s Glossary and The Wage Slave’s Glossary.
Vela Quadrant Task Force. A long-running webcomic. Kevin: “The art in it looks like folk art painting. There’s a kind of cramped feeling to it. There’s an offbeat, slightly skewed sensibility … there’s something outsider about it.”
Finish This Book. Joshua: “It’s a very neat book kids. The author, Keri Smith, pretends that she’s found a bunch of scattered pages in a park that she’s assembled. There is a mystery involved, and you have to figure out what this manual was. And in order to do that, you have a bunch of creative exercises on each page.”
The People of the Ruins, by Edward Shanks. The fifth book in the Radium Age Science Fiction Series, published by Josh’s HiLoBooks. “Trapped in a London laboratory during a worker uprising in 1924, ex-artillery officer and physics instructor Jeremy Tuft awakens 150 years later — in a neo-medieval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery.”
The Yeti USB Microphone by Blue. Mark: “There are many reasons to use the Yeti microphone for podcasting instead of a USB headset. You can change the directionality with a knob. There’s a knob for the game. You can plug headphones into it and get instant monitoring of what your voice sounds like, so you can modulate your voice — it really helps to keep me from yelling into the microphone.”
