Books
Typography in the Wild
In the same tradition as birdwatching manuals, a recently published book is targeted at turning even the most oblivious of urban wanderers into typography spotters.
Books
Books
How Soon Is Now? A Precarious Environment Roots in Art
News of the dramatic remapping of the Arctic ice in the upcoming 10th edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World is only one of the many alarm bells clanging out the message that we live on a changing planet. With that urgency has come an upsurge in environmentally minded art, and a new b
Books
The Lost Beauty of Book Endpapers
Bookbinding developed gradually, with the availability of materials and prevailing tastes dictating the details. One of the more overlooked aspects of book design was the creation of endpapers, when what was long a blank space or slice of vellum was replaced by exuberant patterns.
Books
A Photographic Survey of America's Public Libraries
Walking into my local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, it looks more or less like any other: computers to the left, children’s section to the right, non-fiction dead ahead. It’s only when I go upstairs to the already small fiction section that I see something abnormal: more shelves are empty t
Books
Growing Up in the Shadow of the Art World
In 1972, at the age of fourteen, Gabrielle Selz was attending a party following the third wedding of her father, the art historian and UC Berkeley professor Peter Selz, when a naked woman she had never seen before climbed into Selz’s lap and began to roll a joint. As she did so, other wedding guests
Books
Dali, Warhol, and Pollock: This Is Your Life
A new graphic biography series launched last month with books that follow the lives of Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Salvador Dalí in text and illustration.
Books
Genet Redux: On Chris Tysh’s 'Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic'
Chris Tysh’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic is, as the title suggests, a revision, or better yet, a re-sounding, a twenty-first century echo of Jean Genet’s transgressive and groundbreaking debut novel Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, which he drafted in prison in 1942 and framed as a kind of playful, metafi
Books
Maira Kalman's Empathetic Portraits
The girl stands awkwardly, her arms crossed over her stomach. Below them she wears high-waisted shorts, wrinkled through with creases and rolled at the bottom; above them she wears a frilly top. And above that, her deeply furrowed brow, mirrored by the part in her neatly done hair.
Books
Photographs of the Everyday in an Isolated Village
The village of Pikin Slee in the South American nation of Suriname is incredibly remote. But the details of the place caught photographer Viviane Sassen's eye, and she decided it was worth the journey to document.
Books
At the Morgan, a Master's Minuscule Manuscripts
The Morgan Library & Museum over the last few years has added some small wonders to its collections, and now for the first time a sampling of these miniature books is on public view. Opened last month, Miracles in Miniature: The Art of the Master of Claude de France celebrates one of the last greats
Books
In Photographs of an Abandoned Town, a Post-Apocalyptic Puzzle
A silhouette of a ballerina is fading on an abandoned semi truck, a sign for Lover's Lane warns of "falling rocks" and "high water." And not a person is around. What is this strange and desolate landscape?
Books
Bookbinding the Dead: Harvard Confirms 19th-Century Book Bound in Human Skin
After having deadly disappointment earlier this year when it was revealed two of the three books at Harvard University believed to be bound in human skin were both sheepskin, the third has been confirmed as being hominid-made.