Book of the Day Posted May 25, 2021

Book of the Day > Stephen Shore: Steel Town

● Purchase ● In 1977, Stephen Shore travelled across New York state, Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio – an area in the midst of industrial decline that would eventually be known as the Rust Belt. Shore met steelworkers who had been thrown out of work by plant closures and photographed their suddenly fragile world: deserted factories, lonely bars, dwindling high streets, and lovingly decorated homes. Across these images, a prosperous middle America is seen teetering on the precipice of disastrous decline. Hope and despair alike lurk restlessly behind the surfaces of shop fronts, domestic interiors, and the fraught expressions of those who confront Shore’s 4x5” view camera. Originally commissioned as an extended photographic report for Fortune Magazine in the vein of Walker Evans, Shore’s multifaceted investigation has only gained political salience in the intervening years. Shore’s subjects – including workers, union leaders, and family members – had voted for Jimmy Carter the year preceding his visit; now he found them disillusioned with the new president, fated to leave behind the Democratic party and become the ‘Reagan Democrats’. Through unfailingly engrossing images by one of the world’s acknowledged masters, Steel Town provides an immersive portrait of a time and place whose significance to our own is ever more urgent.
Book of the Day Posted May 22, 2021

Book of the Day > Come Fly with Me: Flying in Style

● Purchase ● A wistful love letter to the joys of flying and the fun, fashion, and glamour that go with it.
 
Now, more than ever, nothing captures our yearning for travel, freedom, glamour, and adventure than the fantasy of flying away from it all.
 
From Frank Sinatra dressed to the nines in the golden age of Pan Am to celebrities snapped in luxury leisurewear in the lounges today, airports have always afforded the most glamorous glimpses into that most enviable aspect of celebrity life--jet-setting in style.
 
Curated by the renowned photo editor Jodi Peckman, Come Fly with Me is a love letter to the most longed-for escape, told through evocative images of the icons who've made the airport their runway. From John and Yoko waving from the airstairs to Rihanna bustling incognito through the halls, and from Muhammad Ali's crisp-pressed suits to Miley Cyrus's playful onesies, this is a whimsical and welcome reminder when we need it most of the joys of travel.
Book of the Day Posted May 21, 2021

Book of the Day > Trent Parke: Crimson Line

● Purchase ● Born in the Australian steel city of Newcastle, one of Trent Parke’s only early childhood memories is accompanying his mother to pick his dad up from work, travelling through a landscape dominated by ship yards, chimneys, and the BHP steelworks.
 
Throughout his career Parke has always been interested in the transformative powers of light, but it was the ephemeral changing colours of dawn and dusk, the multitude or different reds that made him curious about the colour crimson. He discovered the colour that is used in commercial products is harvested from the crushed and boiled bodies of the female scale insect, the Cochineal. A tiny minute insect who inhabits the pads of the prickly pear cactus and who are farmed for their crimson dye. A dye now used primarily in cosmetics and food colouring.
 
Scarlet, magenta, orange, and crimson, are the coloured dyes produced by the Cochineal and also seem to feature spectacularly in the colours of creation, as seen in an Eagle Nebula during the birth of a new star and recorded by the Hubble space telescope. These colours of birth and blood Parke also remembers from the bath water, the umbilical cord and placenta, at the birth of his sons.
 
‘As soon as the female insect is delivered of its new numerous progeny, it becomes a meer husk and dies; so that great care is taken in Mexico, where it is principally collected, to kill the old ones while big with young, to prevent the young ones escaping into life, and depriving them of that beautiful scarlet dye, so much esteemed by all the world.’ - John Ellis, Esq; 1762.
Book of the Day Posted May 20, 2021

Book of the Day > Ultimate Collector Cars

● Purchase ● For the seasoned car collector or the awestruck newcomer, this double-volume is the unrivaled collector car anthology. Curating 100 of the most exquisite, remarkable, and desirable cars of all time to tell a spellbinding story of automotive design-and-engineering endeavor in the tireless pursuit of ever-greater performance both on and off the track, from the first Indy 500-winning 1910 Marmon Wasp to the futuristic 2020 Aston Martin Valkyrie.
 
Laps ahead of any generic catalog, this superlative volume exudes authority and elegance, settling for nothing less than the very best of the best, and presenting each model with the lavish spreads it deserves, complete with stunning imagery taken by the world’s leading car photographers alongside rare archival treasures, from original factory photos to famous motorsports event posters. Each entry is also accompanied by expert descriptive texts and specs, detailing each car’s make, model, year, engine size, horsepower, top speed, transmission, and all-important production numbers.
 
By passionately tapping into their transatlantic expertise and insider knowledge of car auctions, museums, and collections around the world, design authors Peter and Charlotte Fiell survey the autoworld's finest cars of all time. Their carefully curated selection spans the whole history of the automobile, taking in such rare models as a 1912 Stutz Model A Bearcat, as well as lesser-known jewels such as the astonishing 1937 Talbot-Lago T150-C SS “Goutte d’Eau” Coupé by Figoni et Falaschi.
Book of the Day Posted May 19, 2021

Book of the Day > Carolyn Drake: Knit Club

● Purchase ● A foreboding meditation in the vein of Southern Gothic literature, Drake’s most recent body of work emerged through her collaboration with an enigmatic group of women loosely calling themselves “Knit Club.” The nature of the club is ambiguous. It is a cross between a gang, a cult of mysteries, and a group of friends bound by secrets only they share.
 
The book follows a narrative structure loosely borrowed from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying–– that is to say, not one omniscient narrator but many disparate stream-of-consciousness voices. We sense the authorship of the photographs to be collaborative, the result of creative play between Drake and the club in which she found herself embedded, their process a kind of alchemy. In the style of the Gothic, Drake’s masterful use of color to create mood opens the door to the tension between the real and the supernatural. What we find, however, is not grotesque but something vital. A community that manages to exist outside the gaze or control of men. Women, children, and mothers, shrouded in masks and mystery to live a life on their own terms.
Book of the Day Posted May 18, 2021

Book of the Day > Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories

● Purchase ● Made by Americans of European, African, Native and Hispanic heritage, these quilts and bedcovers range from family heirlooms to acts of political protest, each with its own story to tell
 
A mother stitches a few lines of prayer into a bedcover for her son serving in the Union army during the Civil War. A formerly enslaved African American woman creates a quilt populated by Biblical figures alongside celestial events. A quilted Lady Liberty, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln mark the resignation of Richard Nixon. These are just a few of the diverse and sometimes hidden stories of the American experience told by quilts and bedcovers from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
 
Spanning more than 400 years, the 58 works of textile art in this book express the personal narratives of their makers and owners and connect to broader stories of global trade, immigration, industry, marginalization, and territorial and cultural expansion.
Book of the Day Posted May 15, 2021

Book of the Day > Nancy Rubins: Fluid Space

● Purchase ● Words frequently used to describe American artist Nancy Rubins’s sculptural practice embody ideas of monumentality, fortitude, and awe-inspiring strength. While it is most certainly true that Rubins’s works result in formidable tours de force, evoking a wonderment about their seemingly impossible feats of construction, scale is often a means rather than a goal unto itself.
 
Meet Fizzy’s Nebuli, one of several new sculptures in the Fluid Space series. Standing approximately six-and-a-half feet high, eightand-a-half feet wide, and nine-and-a-half feet deep, this sculpture and those from Rubins’s newest series are, relative to her previous works, more petite. Fizzy’s Nebuli gives us permission for close and intimate viewing, inviting us to explore all of its elaborate details.
 
As our eye roves, biomorphic forms shift and appear before us, including calla-lily-like appendages, branches, hollowed out tree stumps, rosebuds, and ivy tendrils. These subtle gestures linger with us, even after those forms dissolve back into the sculptural whole.
Events Posted May 15, 2021

Show & Tell with Jason E.C. Wright!

Starting on Wednesday 5/26 at 5:00 PST we are delighted to host a monthly Instagram “Show & Tell” moderated by Jason E.C. Wright of @burntsiennaresearchsociety! You are in for a real treat so gather up your art books, design books, coffee table books or rare magazines and come nerd out with Jason.
 
Here’s how it works: Jason will be live @arcanabooks sharing some of his favorites with you. Raise your hand to share and he will tap you in. Chat about your most influential book or bookshop. Enjoy the hour, meet some interesting people, and support your local bookstore. There’s nothing like a little book fun in the middle of the week.
 
Jason E.C. Wright is the Founder of Burntsienna Reseach Society, a critical-thinking research consultancy for design histories, intangible culture, and reference materials. Jason is Indiana born and raised, who now considers Los Angeles home. He is an accomplished designer, researcher, writer, with 20+ years as a retail and fashion professional, who takes his love of books seriously, serving as librarian-in-residence at home in Treehouse Hollywood.
 
* You can watch the 5/26 show and tell through our instagram post here.
Book of the Day Posted May 14, 2021

Book of the Day > Ellen Sheidlin

● Purchase ● Russian artist and model Ellen Sheidlin provides an almost limitless exploration of millennial culture with her Instagram feed. Her conceptual self-portrait photography is both whimsical and weird, and the young woman also uses her doll-like appearance to induce more disturbing, bizarre undertones and thought-provoking social commentary in her creations. The many different layers of Ellen’s absurd and beautiful dreamscapes point to the perils of social media and our obsession with technology, or hint at more troubling topics like the situation of LGBTQ+ people in Russia and today’s global existential angst. Escape into her chameleonic fantasy world with this mind-bending collection.
Book of the Day Posted May 13, 2021

Book of the Day > Rashid Johnson: The Hikers

● Purchase ● A massive compendium on the multimedia art of Rashid Johnson, tackling themes of Black history, literature, philosophy and material culture
 
Rashid Johnson (born 1977) is renowned for challenging the assumptions often present in collective notions of Blackness. Based in New York, Johnson is among an influential group of American artists whose work employs a wide range of materials and images to explore themes of art history, literature, philosophy, and personal and cultural identity. After beginning his career working primarily in photography, Johnson has expanded into a variety of mediums, including text work, sculptural objects, installation, painting, drawing, collage, film, performance and choreography. Drawing on a dizzying array of historical, cultural, literary and musical references, Johnson ultimately invites audiences to find connections to their own lives.
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