Book of the day > History Is Made At Night: Photographs 1976-1979 by Godlis. Introduction by Jim Jarmusch. Published by Matte Editions. “40 years in the making, HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT contains 119 photographs in a fine art duotone monograph edition; including photographs from GODLIS' nights at CBGB's between 1976 and 1979, when Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie, Richard Hell, Talking Heads, and Televsion ruled New York City's Bowery. GODLIS, shot in the style of photographers Brassai and Robert Frank, using his handheld Leica camera and Tri-X film to capture his subjects by the natural light of the Bowery outside as well as inside the club CBGB's. Analog all the way, these photographs will take you back to the grainy heydays of the New York City Punk Scene.” @godlis

Book of the day – and book signing tomorrow (Thursday, 6-8 at Arcana)! > Pamela Littky: The Villa Bonita. Published by Kehrer Verlag. “Like many apartment buildings in Hollywood, the Villa Bonita was built during the film industry’s first heyday bridging the 1920s to the 1930s. Built for the vast crews and casts that Cecil B.DeMille was hiring during his fertile period, the Villa Bonita has housed great Hollywood figures from Errol Flynn to Francis Ford Coppola. In absence of traditionally scaled, walkable neighborhoods, Los Angeles has long created community within the confines of these kinds of apartment complexes. Young and old, employed and between gigs, dreamers and those whose dreams left long ago –everyone arrived at the Villa Bonita for one good reason or another. In a series of photographs that brings us into intimate distance of its subjects, The Villa Bonita surveys all of the inhabitants of this historic apartment tower in the middle of Hollywood, creating a collective portrait of the transient nature of the city. Those residents who have been there for decades reconcile themselves to the increasingly diverse group who all live under the same roof, including those who, like so many people before them, are just passing through.”

If you can't make it tomorrow but would like a signed copy of The Villa Bonita, you can order it here.

Book of the day > Anthony Hernandez. [*Mark your calendars for a book signing and discussion with Anthony Hernandez and Thomas Demand on 10/8 at Arcana! In association with PACLA]. Published by SFMOMA with  D.A.P. “Since the early 1970s, when he began photographing on the streets of his native Los Angeles, Anthony Hernandez has consistently pushed his practice into uncharted territory, challenging himself by adopting new formats and subject matter. Moving from black and white to color, from 35mm to large-format cameras, and from the human figure to landscapes to abstracted detail, he has produced an unusually varied body of work united by its arresting beauty and subtle engagement with social issues. At first largely unaware of the formal traditions of the medium, Hernandez developed his own style of street photography, one uniquely attuned to the desolate allure and sprawling expanses of LA.

Published to accompany the photographer’s first retrospective, Anthony Hernandez offers a comprehensive introduction to his career of more than 40 years, tracing his evolution as well as highlighting continuities across his practice. The catalogue represents the full range and breadth of Hernandez’s work, with an extensive plate section that includes many photographs that have never before been exhibited or published.

Anthony Hernandez grew up in a Los Angeles far removed from the idealized Hollywood image of the city. Although he has turned his lens on other landscapes--including Saigon, Rome and various American cities--Los Angeles, and especially the neighborhoods inhabited by the working class, the poor and the homeless, has been his most enduring subject.”

Book of the day > Isamu Noguchi: Playscapes. Published by RM/Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo. “In 1933, the visionary sculptor Isamu Noguchi began making design proposals for children’s playgrounds in New York. The first one, Play Mountain (1933), marked the beginning of the artist’s fascination with exploring points of intersection between sculpture, public spaces and, above all, play. Radically experimental in its approach to children’s recreation, the design asserted, with no apparent precedent, that children’s exercise and entertainment could be stimulated by simply providing earth modulations and steps for running, jumping and sliding.

Noguchi’s playground was a spectacular innovation of design, and something never before seen in New York City’s brief 32-year history of building and operating playgrounds. But Play Mountain also initiated a lengthy period of frustrated endeavor, in which Noguchi only saw one of his park designs become a reality. This changed in the 1970s, when public space policies began to favor artists’ participation in project design. Since then, Noguchi’s pioneering playgrounds have become a touchstone for the revival of interest in the golden era of playground design.

This is the first volume to bring together all of the artist’s investigations into playgrounds over a period of 50 years. It reproduces his beautiful scale models, sketches and photographs of iconic designs, highlighting a little-known facet of one of the most versatile sculptors of the 20th century.”

Thanks to Tomas Maier of Bottega Veneta who is one of our great supporters! You can read the full piece in Condé Nast Traveler about the new Bottega Venetea shop in Beverly Hills (by Booth Moore) here.

""The boutique is as much a love letter to Southern California as a place to shop. Bottega Veneta creative directorTomas Maier is an architecture nut in the best possible way. He studies floor plans of historic Southern California homes (from Mediterranean Revival tomid-century), tours those open to the public, trawls open-house listings to peek at those that aren’t, and hunts down out-of- print books about them at L.A.’s Arcana bookstore when he’s in town."  (more...)

Book of the day > Grace: The American Vogue Years. Published by Phaidon. “The second and final volume of the collected best work of Vogue editor and international fashion icon Grace Coddington. This handsome slipcased edition showcases work of the last fifteen years by legendary Vogue editor Grace Coddington. The book celebrates seventeen of the master photographers with whom Coddington has collaborated - including Steven Meisel, Annie Leibovitz, Peter Lindbergh (whose photo is below) Craig McDean, David Sims, Mario Testino, and Marcus Piggot and Mert Alas - in a sumptuous compilation of Coddington's most beloved fashion stories.” @phaidonsnaps  

Book of the day > Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart. Published by Shakespeare and Company, Paris. “This first-ever history of the legendary bohemian bookstore in Paris interweaves essays and poetry from dozens of writers associated with the shop with hundreds of never-before-seen archival pieces. George Whitman opened his bookstore in a tumbledown 16th-century building just across the Seine from Notre-Dame in 1951, a decade after the original Shakespeare and Company had closed. Run by Sylvia Beach, it had been the meeting place for the Lost Generation and the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Since Whitman picked up the mantle, Shakespeare and Company has served as a home-away-from-home for many celebrated writers, from Jorge Luis Borges to Ray Bradbury, A.M. Homes to Dave Eggers, as well as for young authors and poets. Visitors are invited not only to read the books in the library and to share a pot of tea, but sometimes also to live in the bookstore itself--all for free. More than 30,000 people have stayed at Shakespeare and Company, fulfilling Whitman’s vision of a “socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore.” Through the prism of the shop’s history, the book traces the lives of literary expats in Paris from 1951 to the present, touching on the Beat Generation, civil rights, May ’68 and the feminist movement--all while pondering that perennial literary question, “What is it about writers and Paris?”@artbook. 

Book of the day > Hannah Höch: Life Portrait - A Collaged Autobiography. The Green Box. “Hannah Höch is best known for her association with the Berlin Dadaists. But her life and artistic career far outlasted Dada, spanning two world wars and most of the 20th century. And at the age of 83, Höch began to look back.

The result was Höch’s last--and largest, at nearly 4 x 5 feet--photo-collage, “Life Portrait,” created between 1972 and 1973. Though she did not originally set out to make an autobiographical work, the collage functions as a kind of self-portrait for the artist, looking back on her life and work while also ironically and poetically commenting on key political, social and artistic events from the previous 50 years. Höch literally inserts herself into the work several times, with photographs of herself at various ages (always identifiable with her trademark bobbed hair), and returns to themes and images which she had addressed throughout her oeuvre, including fashion imagery, news photographs, African art and pictures of plants and animals, which had become typical of her work after the end of the Second World War. London’s Whitechapel Gallery called it ‘a collage of collages.’  Hannah Höch: Life Portrait divides the monumental composition into 38 individual sections, as Höch imagined it, and offers explanatory texts and relevant quotations to complement each section. One of only a few English-language publications on the artist, this volume explores Höch’s final masterpiece, and the life’s work it represents.”

What kind of genius is Rosamond Purcell? Is she an artist? A scholar? A documentarian? A living cabinet of wonders? Her originality defies category…-Jonathan Safran Foer

We heartily encourage you to see the fascinating film AN ART THAT NATURE MAKES about our friend, photographer Rosamond Purcell! Finding unexpected beauty in the discarded and decayed, photographer Rosamond Purcell has developed an oeuvre of work that has garnered international acclaim, graced the pages of National Geographic and over 20 published books, and has enlisted admirers such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Errol Morris and Stephen Jay Gould. AN ART THAT NATURE MAKES details Purcell’s fascination with the natural world – from a mastodon tooth to a hydrocephalic skull – offering insight into her unique way of recontextualizing objects both ordinary and strange into sometimes disturbing but always breathtaking imagery.  September 2-8 at Laemmle Royal. More tantalizing details at anartthatnaturemakes.com.