Book of the day > minä perhonen textile 1995-2005. Published by Bunka Publishing Bureau. “minä perhonen (which means 'I am a butterfly' in Finnish) is an internationally acclaimed fashion brand led by Akira Minagawa. They produce their original fabrics cooperating with both Japanese and international fabric makers, as well as ardently working on developing new materials or techniques. Their effort has evolved into a series of exceptionally beautiful and elegant textile designs, all of which are reproduced with clear photos in this big volume. All the 250 designs are categorized into Textiles, Stitches, and Prints. This creative sourcebook is indispensable for all textile designers and anyone who loves fashion.” @mina_perhonen

Book of the day > My Lagos by Robin Hammond (@hammond_robin ). Published by Editions Bessard (@editionsbessard ). Limited to an edition of 600 copies, Robin Hammond’s series of portraits of Lagosians embrace the diversity of Africa’s most populous city. Each book’s dust jacket is a Nollywood poster bought in Lagos – each has been folded by hand. From the photographer: “Each book is unique in this way, and the reader gets to take home his or her own piece of Lagos. Intimacy and exclusion, love and hate, laughter and insult regularly rub shoulders on Lagos’s streets. It’s a complex place. I was trying to grasp, through my camera, life in this massive metropolitan area of more than 20 million people. Located in West Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, Lagos is as much an experience as a place. The local experience and the foreign experience are certainly not the same. But that difference is not the only meaningful one. The city’s residents experience it differently: the businessman and the fisherman, the prostitute and the entrepreneur, the housewife and the bricklayer. There are more than 20 million Lagosians, and, one could say, just as many Lagoses. It is a fascinating city, but one where life can be hard. One survey placed it as the fourth worst place in the world to call home, and another ranked it as one of the world’s most unequal cities. But many of the people I met also expressed how they saw Lagos as a place where dreams come true, where hard work pays off and where, with a few good connections and smarts, one can rise from the streets and into the mansions of the city’s big men. My new book, published by Editions Bessard, is called ‘My Lagos,’ but only partly because it is my view of the city. It comes mostly from the interviews I conducted with the subjects of my portraits. I asked them to describe what Lagos meant to them, and they would answer, ‘My Lagos is. …’ Their quotations in the book and their portraits connect us, in a small way, to a people most readers will never meet, and through them we experience a piece of a place most will never visit.” 

Book of the day > Never Built New York by Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell with Daniel Libeskind. Published by Metropolis Books. “New York City as it might have been: 200 years of visionary architectural plans for unbuilt subways, bridges, parks, airports, stadiums, streets, train stations and, of course, skyscrapers. Never Built New York shows us the visionary architectural ideas of the city's greatest dreamers across two centuries of New York City history. Nearly 200 proposals spanning 200 years encompass bridges, skyscrapers, master plans, parks, transit schemes, amusements, airports, plans to fill in rivers and extend Manhattan, and much, much more. Included are alternate visions for Central Park, Columbus Circle, Lincoln Center, MoMA, the UN, Grand Central Terminal, the World Trade Center site and other highlights such as: Alfred Ely Beach’s system of airtight subway cars propelled via atmospheric pressure; Frank Lloyd Wright’s last project, his Key Plan for Ellis Island, on which he would have developed his dream city; Buckminster Fuller’s design for Brooklyn’s Dodger Stadium, complete with giant geodesic dome to shield players and fans from the rain; developer William Zeckendorf’s Rooftop Airport, perched on steel columns 200 feet above street level, spanning from 24th to 71st Street, Ninth Avenue to the Hudson River; John Johansen’s Leapfrog City proposal to create an entirely new neighborhood atop the tenements of East Harlem; and Stephen Holl’s Bridge of Houses, offering options from SROs to modest studios to luxury apartments on a segment of what is now the High Line.Fact-filled and entertaining texts, plus sketches, renderings, prints and models drawn from archives across the country tell stories of ideas that would have drastically transformed the way we inhabit and move through the city.”

Book of the day > Sex Pistols. Edited by Johan Kugelberg, Contributions by Jon Savage and Glenn Terry. Published by Rizzoli. “A definitive celebration packed with previously unseen material of the original punk band—the group that defined a movement, energized a generation, and brought punk music and the safety-pin aesthetic to the mainstream. The Sex Pistols have defined the look, sound, and feel of the punk movement since they formed in London in 1975. Together for less than three years—a short run that included just four singles and one studio album before they broke up in 1978—their impact on the musical and cultural landscape of the last forty years is nothing short of remarkable. The Sex Pistols—Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock (later to be replaced by Sid Vicious)—were brought together by the cultural impresario Malcolm McLaren. Between the cultivated attitude of the players themselves, the aggressive management of McLaren, and the tremendous success of their era-defining album Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols, the band embodied the punk spirit and colored the worlds of music, fashion, youth culture, and design forever. Published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the band’s formation, Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage draw on an unprecedented wealth of material—from McLaren’s handwritten letters to never-before-seen photographs of the band, Jamie Reid’s iconic album artwork, and a range of ephemera from concert tickets to fanzines—to produce the most comprehensive visual history of the band ever produced and a bible of popular culture for years to come.” @johankugelberg

Book of the day > Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois. Published by The Monacelli Press. “In a career spanning nearly 75 years, Louise Bourgeois created a vast body of work that enriched the formal language of modern art while it expressed her intense inner struggles with unprecedented candor and unpredictable invention. Her solo 1982 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art launched an extraordinarily productive late career, making her a much-honored and vivid presence on the international art scene until her death in 2010 at the age of 98.Trained as a painter and printmaker, Bourgeois embraced sculpture as her primary medium and experimented with a range of materials over the years, including marble, plaster, bronze, wood, and latex. Bourgeois contributed significantly to Surrealism, Postminimalist, and installation art, but her work always remained fiercely independent of style or movement. With more than 1000 illustrations, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois comprehensively surveys her immense oeuvre in unmatched depth. Writing from a uniquely intimate perspective, as a close personal friend of Bourgeois, and drawing on decades of research, Robert Storr critically evaluates her achievements and reveals the complexity and passion of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.”

Book of the day today (and book signing and discussion tomorrow at Arcana, 5-7!) > Lloyd Ziff: New York/Los Angeles, Photographs: 1967-2015. Published by KMW Studio. An exciting collection of images of the two cities taken over some 40 years, captured in black and white and color photography; as seen through the eye of photographer, art director and award-winning designer Lloyd Ziff. Shot over the last 4 decades, Ziff’s images capture the changing landscape of the cities’ architecture, streets and people.

Book of the day > The Definitive Maria Callas. Published by Roads Publishing. “Maria Callas is the definition of an icon.  Perhaps the most renowned and influential opera singer of all time, she is revered not just for her otherworldly voice and dramatic flair but for her passion, beauty and innate sense of style. The fire and intensity of her personal life paralleled the dramatic roles she interpreted so passionately. Working closely with the Fondaziono Proge Marzotto, the Italian arts trust who acquired the archive of Maria Callas in 2013; and Karl van Zoggel, head of the International Maria Callas Club, ROADS is delighted to present The Definitive Maria Callas: The Life of a Diva in Unseen Pictures. A lavish visual biography, the books showcases never-before-seen intimate letters, personal photographs and Callas’s private collection of recipes.  A comprehensive and joyous exploration of the life and work of Maria Callas, it is the perfect book for opera aficionados and casual admirers alike.”

Book of the day > Jessica Backhaus: six degrees of freedom. Published by Kehrer (@kehrerverlag ). “Jessica Backhaus examines universal questions of human existence. Based on her own life story she inquires after the significance of knowing the roots of one’s own existence and to what extent it is possible to re-elaborate these – usually prescribed – roots. Initially unconsciously, then ever more purposefully the photographer, who grew up in a family of artists, at some point in her life set off in search of her own background. On this journey she visits places of her childhood and youth and fills the gaps in her memories. With her photographs she symbolically captures the essence of this search and of her life stages. Simultaneously, she pulls off the balancing act of keeping the images open for the beholder. Her photographs possess metaphoric potential and work against the grain of a classic social documentary photography. They alternate between realism and abstraction. Jessica Backhaus is regarded as one of the most important representatives of contemporary photography in Germany. Her works are internationally exhibited, published and are found in major collections. "Six degrees of freedom" is her sixth photobook at Kehrer Verlag and deals with the great universal themes of background, yearning, identity, and destiny.”

Book of the day > Saul Bass: 20 Iconic Film Posters. Published by Laurence King. “This collection of 20 iconic movie posters by Saul Bass, one of the greatest American designers of the 20th century, is a must for graphic designers and film fans. Each poster is removable and designed to fit the standard frame size 12 x 16 inches.

The posters included are: The Man with the Golden Arm; Saint Joan; Love in the Afternoon; Bonjour Tristesse; The Big Country; Vertigo; Anatomy of a Murder; Exodus; Spartacus; The Magnificent Seven; Advise & Consent; The Cardinal; In Harm's Way; Bunny Lake is Missing; Seconds; Grand Prix; The Fixer; Such Good Friends; The Shining; Schindler's List.”

Book of the day (and book signing tomorrow (10/1, 4-6!) > Randi Malkin Steinberger: No Circus. Published by Damiani. They’re in most neighborhoods in Los Angeles - houses shrouded in brightly colored vinyl tarps being fumigated for termites. Noted photographer Randi Malkin Steinberger first encountered these tented houses when she moved to Southern California in the early 1990s. In her new book No Circus from Damiani and DAP, tented houses have become sculptural abstractions and enigmatic monuments inserted into the ordinariness of suburban streets.
Steinberger’s sixty-nine color photographs are accompanied by D.J. Waldie’s essay that ranges from the mating habits of termites, to the chemistry of fumigation, to the phenomenology of a shrouded house. “Houses haunt themselves” he writes. “While we’re away, the chair improvises a sitter, the door frame a passing figure, and the bed a sleeper. To be something more than a windbreak or a covering from rain or a frail barrier, a home must have dreamers inside. A house undreamed in is already neglected.  Joining us along with Ms. Steinberger and Mr. Waldie will be the book's designer - and Deadbeat Club head honcho Clint Woodside - along with a special musical performance by composer Gavin Gamboa. Evoking the language of insects - both real and imagined - as well as the sounds of quarantine, Mr. Gamboa of The Teaching Machine collective will provide a backdrop of chirping, clicking, whirling, buzzing oscillations to the event! @123randi @gavartgamhag @artbook @ damiani_books