Charles Apple

Here’s a fundraiser for the dear old Society for News Design — one that nearly made me cheer out loud for its cleverness and visual spectacle.

It’s a 15-month calendar, featuring artwork donated by top editorial illustrators from around the world. A sample (including dummy text):

That illustration is by James Yang. Other incredibly talented folks contributing art will be Martin Gee, Andrea Levy, Federico Jordan, Andrew Skwish and Sam Hundley. Among others.

The calendar itself is being assembled and designed by famed redesign consultant/former Virginian-Pilot deputy managing editor Deborah Withey, who now works out of her Cheese + Pickles Studio in Wales.

For $10, you can buy a date to put on the calendar. [Um...Does this mean that dozens of us can buy up various dates and have them labeled as "Robb Schneider's birthday"?]

You can preorder one now for $20. The calendar will “start” with Oct. 1, so presumably, they’ll ship by then.

All proceeds will go to a great cause: The SND Foundation, which funds training grants, scholarships and sending student members to the annual workshop.

Read more about the project here.

This is a follo to last year’s foundation fund-raiser, a deck of cards illustrated by SND members. Decks are still available, I’m told.

You can buy the John Williams-composed theme music used by NBC during its Olympic coverage.

It’s called “Summon the Heroes” and is available on the CD of the same name that was released in 1996 for the Summer Games that year in Atlanta:

The music with which NBC’s telecasts usually begin is the title track, No. 1 on the disc. The music you perhaps hear most often, though  — “Bugler’s Dream”/”Olympic Fanfare and Theme” — is track three.

I remember the first part from watching the Olympics on TV as a kid, so I assumed it had been around forever. But the liner notes say it was written for the 1968 Winter Games in Grenoble. The latter “Fanfare and Theme” was written for the Los Angeles Summer Games in 1984.

And yes, both of these — plus “Summon the Heroes” — were written by Williams, who also brought us the music for Star Wars, E.T., Jaws and the Indiana Jones movies.

You can buy the CD new from Amazon for just $7.99. Or you can buy individual tracks in MP3 format for 99 cents each. Find it here.

I was delighted this weekend to find this little beauty in the discount section of my local Barnes & Noble this weekend:

That’s a wonderful collection of notable headlines from the somewhat dodgy but always interesting New York Post.

Published in 2007, the book listed at just under $15 — which, I’d argue, is a bargain at that price. But as you can see from the price tag in the lower right, Barnes & Noble is selling the book for just over a third of that.

The book is full of some of the Post’s most memorable headlines and cover treatments:

Some, frankly, are covers I suspect we all wish we had designed:

Others are covers that stretch the boundaries of good taste:

Some are notable purely due to their importance to the history of politics:

A few of the pages have the stories behind them explained. Like this fiasco from the 2004 election:

At least the Post had the good sense to come back the next day, admit they were wrong and laugh about it.

This one caught my eye — it certainly strikes me differently than it would have, three months ago:

Jerry Nachman, editor of the Post at the time, called this one “the most libel-proof headline ever.”

And, of course, the book’s namesake: Recognized universally as one of the greatest newspaper headlines of all time:

The only negative about the book: it’s all in black-and-white.

Order Headless Body in Topless Bar from Amazon for $5.83. Or, if you have a Barnes & Noble membership, buy it online from B&N for $3.99.