Book of the Day > Jonas Mekas: A Dance with Fred Astaire. Published by Anthology Editions. "A Dance with Fred Astaire covers the 94 years Jonas Mekas has spent weaving himself inextricably into the fabric of postwar culture, featuring a dizzying cast of cultural icons both underground and mainstream. Told in Mekas’ warm prose style and illustrated with rare personal materials, this is a revealing visual autobiography of a genuine culture hero."

Book of the Day > American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam, Bananas, and Jell-O. Published by Process Media. "American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam, Bananas, and Jell-O is a deeply researched and entertaining survey of twentieth century American food. Connecting cultural, social, and geopolitical aspects, author Christina Ward (Preservation: The Art & Science of Canning , Fermentation, and Dehydration, Process 2017) uses her expertise to tell the fascinating and often infuriating story of American culinary culture. Readers will learn of the role bananas played in the Iran-Contra scandal, how Sigmund Freud's nephew decided Carmen Miranda would wear fruit on her head, and how Puritans built an empire on pineapples. American food history is rife with crackpots, do-gooders, con men, and scientists all trying to build a better America-while some were getting rich in the process. Loaded with full-color images, Ward pulls recipes and images from her vast collection of cookbooks and a wide swath of historical advertisements to show the influence of corporations on our food trends. Though easy to mock, once you learn the true history, you will never look at Jell-O the same way again! American Advertising Cookbooks, How Corporations Taught Us To Love Bananas, Spam, and Jell-O features full-color images and essays uncovering the origins of popular foods."

Book of the Day > Alina Szapocznikow: Human Landscapes. Published by Walther Konig in conjunction with an exhibit at The Hepworth Wakefield. "Alina Szapocznikow (1926–1973) created an extensive and expressive oeuvre, in which she was intensively concerned with the human body, right up to her untimely death. In her sculptures, photographs and drawings she divided female bodies in particular into fragments such as lips, breasts, stomachs and limbs, to put them back together again in new ways and to integrate them as traces in her work. Her own body often found its way into the work in the form of casts. Having previously worked with classical materials such as bronze, she began to experiment with new materials such as polyester after arriving in Paris and mixing with the circle of Nouveaux Réalistes artists. With this she revolutionised the expressive possibilities of sculpture. This catalogue traces this artistic development by means of work from between 1954 and 1973, from early figurative sculptures to the ‘awkward objects’ which are strongly influenced by surrealism and pop art."