Cease & Desist: Inspired by the Music of They Might Be Giants, as illustrated by Todd Alcott

This gets a post because it is a book-shaped object, because it's a really neat thing, and because I "read" it and want to keep track of that. But it's not generally available and it's a coffee-table book if anything. So I'll try to keep this pithy.

Cease & Desist collects almost a hundred images made by the screenwriter and graphic designer Todd Alcott, all based on the lyrics, imagery, and ideas of the band They Might Be Giants. Apparently, he has some connection to the band -- maybe just that he knew a guy who knew a guy, or that they both were on the Internet doing creative stuff -- and started doing these images, some of which got posted to the band's official Tumblr account.

In fact, you can see a lot of this book there now. All the fake ads and book covers and magazines and random street ads that seem to be from 1963? That's all Alcott's work. In the book, it's often even more contextualized -- not just the cover of a fake book, but that fake book on a table, with the cover slightly curled and a pair of glasses in the foreground. The book is vaguely organized, but it's really just a nicely-designed package of those images.

Alcott is good at this stuff: both the technical making-pictures-convincingly-old-looking and the clever picking-the-right-image-and-song-to-mash-up stuff. Obviously, you do need to know the band's work to "get" most of the jokes -- turning lyrics into cover lines on a magazine doesn't work if you don't realize they're song lyrics.

If you don't know They Might Be Giants, this is not a book for you. And that's good, because I don't think you can get it at this point: it was part of a big annual package that closed last fall, part of our new direct-artist-support world a la Patreon and Indiegogo.

Alcott does similar stuff for other bands. Bands (he said, peering over his glasses as if in disdain) that you may find somewhat more familiar. These live in his Etsy shop, where you can buy posters of them for the walls of your groovy 20th century pad.

Anyway, this book is fun and very inside baseball. But I've been listening to TMBG since they showed up on late-night MTV randomly around 1982, so it's right up my alley. And maybe some of Alcott's other stuff will strike a similar chord for you.