Books
Dispatches from the Gateways to Death Valley
Two rural communities have ominously declared themselves the "Gateway to Death Valley" — Baker, California and Beatty, Nevada — each isolated as the last stop before miles of harsh landscape.
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Portraits of America's New Nomads
There is a loose tribe living at nature's margins in the United States, slaughtering goats raised by hand at Idaho's Lost River and picking cherries growing wild in California's Marble Mountain Wilderness.
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Cuba, Then and Now, in Pictures and Words
LONDON — On display in a vitrine at the Victoria and Albert Museum here is a large, black-and-white photo-print depicting the suit of armor Christopher Columbus wore during his journeys to what Europeans came to call “the New World.”
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Drugs, Guns, Photographs: Taking Shots with William S. Burroughs
Writer William S. Burroughs took thousands of photographs from the 1950s to 1970s, but it's likely you've not seen many as even he didn't treat them like an art, but a mode of disrupting time.
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The Existential Adventures of a Daredevil Escape Artist
Years before NYC-based artist and writer Paul Pope was garnering Eisner Awards for an intricate, boundary-challenging Batman series, he was making a name for himself working at a Japanese comics publisher. At night, however, Pope was crafting the story of how a circus’s sinewy escape artist earns hi
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“Reckless sympathy, scorn”: Paul Violi’s Last Poems
Paul Violi’s poetry has rarely been taken as seriously as it should be. Probably that’s because he never took the spirit of seriousness as seriously as many people do, especially when it comes to poetry. His erudition never wears an academic gown.
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Photographing the Desert Where the Mountains Float
Given just the right optical conditions, a mountain can appear to hover above the Earth. Photographer Mike Osborne sought to capture that effect, and other fascinations of the landscape of the Great Basin Desert between Utah and Nevada, where the real world becomes alien.
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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
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.
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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
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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