More than any conflict before it, World War I was a visual battle. Propaganda proliferated across the fronts, and magazines, newspapers, photography, early films, and even fashion and children’s books were involved in a rally of imagery on a large scale.
Books
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New York’s Beloved, Independent, Union-Busting Bookstore
On the Books, written and drawn by Greg Farrell and released by Microcosm Publishing, is a firsthand comics account of contract negotiations at the Strand in 2012 — or, as the book’s subtitle puts it, “A Graphic Tale of Working Woes at NYC’s Strand Bookstore.”
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Taxidermy Sculptors Strut Their Stuff
Robert Marbury’s Taxidermy Art could easily be divided into a couple of books, both larger than this volume. Integrated, as they are here, these subjects make for a disjointed but nevertheless visually and intellectually stimulating read.
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New Scans of the Voynich Manuscript, a Medieval Book No One Can Read
The Voynich Manuscript is one of the most obsessed-over historical enigmas. A medieval book dating from the late 15th or 16th century, its strange, flowing script has never been deciphered, its origins never determined.
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Spotting Style in a More Bike-Friendly New York
When I became a bike rider back in the late 1970s, the very notion of New York Bike Style — now the title of a book by Sam Polcer (Prestel, 2014) — seemed like a contradiction in terms.
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Belief, Reason, and the Origins of the World in a Striking Series of 19th-Century Illustrations
Galileo and other troublemakers aside, science and religion didn’t have such a complete falling out until the 19th century.
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Drawing the Dark Journeys of Drifters
For a digest of comics stories and intricate, free-standing illustrative work called The Lonesome Go, St. Louis artist and writer Tim Lane profiles familiar, typically unshaven folk: bar flies, train-hopping drifters, biker types.
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Lunar Mountains and Divine Spheres: 1,000 Years of Illustrating Outer Space
In a new book called Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, published this month by Abrams, Michael Benson examines over a thousand years of mapping the great beyond.
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Cats, Cans, and More Curiosities from Toy Camera History
The colorful history of toy cameras, those affordable film cameras in plastic boxes, is being celebrated in a new book.
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Pensive Portraits Behind the Office Doors of 50 Therapists
“In contrast to other medical specialists’ offices with their practical equipment of examining tables and rolling tools, the therapist’s work space has few obvious demands beyond seating for clinician and patient,” psychiatrist and photographer Sebastian Zimmermann writes in an introduction to Fifty Shrinks.
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New Art Book Plays with Scale
Big Art/Small Art by Tristan Manco, out later this month from Thames & Hudson, is an attempt to see what size means to art in the 21st century.
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Picturing the Transfigurations of Fashion
“Fashion” can be characterized as many things: a business, a craft, a lifestyle. At its core, though, it’s a visual culture that embodies one very important quality: transfiguration.
