In the News Posted Oct 30, 2020

Wes Del Val, Book/Shop, and the #onegreatreader series

We’re delighted to share this interview with Arcana founder Lee Kaplan and Wes Del Val  for the One Great Reader series!
 
Book/Shop is a lovely store in Oakland, CA that we have admired for their thoughtful selection of out print books and charming biblio-themed merch. Please follow Wes’ #onegreatreader series for more interviews with the likes of Tosh Berman, Luc Sante, Sasha Frere Jones, James Crump, and more.
 
For his introduction to Lee’s interview Wes said: “Yes everything can be delivered to your door these days, but there is still nothing like seeing what an owner chooses to order for his shop, touch and look at what he decides to put out for his customers, talk to and ask questions of him, and then leave with what you bought, no waiting required. For years bookstores have been the only shops I am interested in going into and one of the absolute gems in America is Arcana: Books on the Arts. Owner Lee Kaplan has little free time outside of keeping the shop vital since 1984 so I feel very fortunate that he gave us our longest interview yet. 
 
Thanks to Wes, to our comrades at Book/Shop, and to all of you bibliophiles for your ongoing support of independent bookstores. 
Book of the Day Posted Oct 29, 2020

Book of the Day > Dieter Rams: The Complete Works

● Purchase ● The ultimate reference on one of the most influential product designers of all time
 
For more than sixty years Dieter Rams has defined the look, feel, and function of some of the world's best-loved consumer items. Using his 'ten principles for good design' as a philosophy and practice for improving the industry in a more holistic, responsible way, Rams has built a reputation with global resonance. Here, for the first time, is a catalogue raisonné of every product that he has designed in his lifetime — a true celebration of his seminal contribution to the field of industrial and product design.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 28, 2020

Book of the Day > In the Limelight: The Visual Ecstasy Of NYC Nightlife In The 90s

● Purchase ● Dive into the 1990s New York club scene with never-before-seen photos by its most prolific photographer, Steve Eichner.
 
Eichner was a fixture of 1990s New York City nightlife and served as both its official and unofficial photographer in an era before cellphones and selfies. In this book, readers go beyond the velvet ropes and into the spaces that witnessed some of the decade’s most incredible and sought-after parties. Previously unpublished, these intoxicating full-color photographs capture the over-thetop costumes, non-stop dancing, glitter, confetti, sex, drugs, and music that made 90s New York unlike any other place. Celebrities abound, from Leonardo DiCaprio, Dennis Hopper, and Tupac to Joan Rivers, Michael Musto, and Donald Trump. Eichner takes you to many of the city’s hot spots, including the Limelight, the Tunnel, Webster Hall, Club Expo, and Club USA. Texts by famous club owner Peter Gatien and BuzzFeed photo essay editor Gabriel H. Sanchez offer a historic and cultural perspective on an era when New York City was more affordable and every night saw artists, bankers, drag queens, musicians, and poets reveling together.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 27, 2020

Book of the Day > Matthew Wong: Postcards

● Purchase ● An intimate clothbound volume compiling the exquisite postcard paintings of Matthew Wong
 
This fully illustrated volume collects Matthew Wong’s small-scale postcard paintings made during the last year of his life in 2019. As Winnie Wong writes in her newly commissioned essay for the book, “Art critics have observed that Matthew Wong's landscapes are ‘uncannily familiar,’ and they do prompt viewers to search our own memories, but he almost never titled them as places. Instead, he consistently named them as moments in time: midnight, 5:00am, dawn, daybreak, 12:30am, Autumn, Winter, the first snow, the gloaming, the moon rise … For the postcard is a genre that seems to consciously elude a sense of stable locus, yet marks the times of our lives when we tried to grasp it. Matthew Wong painted at home, on the road, and in the studio. He spoke of the compulsion to finish each of his paintings in a single sitting, and talked of them always as process, rather than subject matter. Standing before paintings he finished years ago, he could recall every stroke and mark as if he had placed them just moments before.”
Book of the Day Posted Oct 24, 2020

Book of the Day > Gregory Halpern: Let the Sun Beheaded Be

● Purchase ● In Let the Sun Beheaded Be, photographer Gregory Halpern focuses on the French Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, a French overseas region with a complicated and violent colonial history.
 
Renowned for his photographic meditations on place, Halpern presents a compelling portrait of Guadeloupe and its inhabits, focusing on local histories and experiences. Let the Sun Beheaded Be commingles life and death, nature and culture, and beauty and decay in enigmatic color images of the archipelago’s residents and lush landscape, as well as monuments related to the brutality of its past.
 
The project is part of Immersion, a program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, in partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 23, 2020

Book of the Day > Black Moon

● Purchase ● In the year 2020, we are bearing witness to over 40 million jobs lost. Over 100 thousands lives lost. A viral and racial pandemic across the globe. Far beneath the devastation lies a transformational future that could be unfolding faster than we think.
 
Since the age of ancient Native American tribes, each full moon was an opportunity to set intentions for the next cycle, establish fresh goals, or conduct rituals that wipe the slate clean. Much like the microevolutionary process of our lives, this magical ball of light piercing the night sky is a mother icon of constant change and cyclical patterns.
 
One of the most powerful celestial phenomenons is the rare Black Moon. A second new moon that occurs within one calendrical month. It is said that the Black Moon amplifies a cleansing energy, dragging our deepest strengths and desires to the forefront, uninhibited. Just like the dark side of the moon, there is a side to each of us that we don’t reveal to others.
 
Mirroring a lunar experience in contemporary dance form, this book is a collection of inspirational messages and some of the most vulnerable stories revealed by women from around the world.
 
2020. This is Black Moon.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 22, 2020

Book of the Day > Thaddeus Mosley

● Purchase ● Long needed, the first full overview of American abstract sculptor Thad Mosley
 
Since 1959, the monumental, freestanding sculptures of Pittsburgh-based artist Thad Mosley, crafted with reclaimed building materials and felled trees, have occupied the forefront of abstraction in American sculpture. This book surveys his career.
 
Using only a mallet and chisel, he reworks salvaged timber into biomorphic forms. With influences ranging from Isamu Noguchi to Constantin Brâncuși—and the Bamum, Dogon, Baoulé, Senufo, Dan, and Mossi works of his personal collection—Mosley’s sculptures mark an inflection point in the history of American abstraction. These “sculptural improvisations,” as he calls them, take cues from the modernist traditions of jazz. “The only way you can really achieve something is if you’re not working so much from a pattern,” Mosley says of his improvisational method. “That’s also the essence of good jazz.”
Book of the Day Posted Oct 21, 2020

Book of the Day > Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta

● Purchase ● A Sixteenth-Century Calligraphic Manuscript Inscribed by Georg Bocskay and Illuminated by Joris Hoefnagel, Second Edition
 
In 1561–62 the master calligrapher Georg Bocskay (died 1575), imperial secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, created Mira calligraphiae monumenta (Model Book of Calligraphy) as a demonstration of his own preeminence among scribes. Some thirty years later, Ferdinand’s grandson, the Emperor Rudolf II, commissioned Europe’s last great manuscript illuminator, Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), to embellish the work. The resulting book is at once a treasury of extraordinary beauty and a landmark in the cultural debate between word and image.
 
Bocskay assembled a vast selection of contemporary and historical scripts for a work that summarized all that had been learned about writing to date—a testament to the universal power of the written word. Hoefnagel, desiring to prove the superiority of his art over Bocskay’s words, employed every resource of illusionism, color, and form to devise all manner of brilliant grotesques, from flowers, fruit, insects, and animals to monsters and masks.
 
Unavailable for nearly a decade, this gorgeous volume features over 180 color illustrations, as well as scholarly commentary and biographies of both artists, to inspire scholars, bibliophiles, graphic designers, typographers, and calligraphers.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 20, 2020

Book of the Day > Angela Davis: Seize The Time

● Purchase ● Inspired by a private archive and featuring contemporary work by artists who acknowledge the continued relevance of Angela Davis’s experience and politics, the essays, interviews, and images in this book provide a compelling and layered narrative of her journey through the junctures of race, gender, economic, and political policy. Beginning in 1970 with her arrest in connection with a courtroom shootout, then moving through her trial and acquittal, the book traces Davis’s life and work during the subsequent decades and her influential career as a public intellectual. Profusely illustrated with materials found in the archive, including press coverage, photographs, court sketches, videos, music, writings, correspondence, and Davis’s political writings, the book also features interviews with Angela Davis and Lisbet Tellefsen, the archivist who collected those materials, as well as essays that touch on visibility and invisibility, history, memory, and the iconography of black radical feminism.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 16, 2020

Book of the Day > Kim Gordon: No Icon

● Purchase ● An edgy and evocative visual self-portrait by musician and artist Kim Gordon, indie-underground cultural icon and muse of style for four decades.
 
As cofounder of legendary rock band Sonic Youth, best-selling author, and celebrated artist, Kim Gordon is one of the most singular and influential figures of the modern era.
 
This personally curated scrapbook includes a foreword by Carrie Brownstein and is an edgy and evocative portrait of Gordon's life, art, and style. Spanning from her childhood on Californian surf beaches in the '60s and '70s to New York's downtown art and music scene in the '80s and '90s where Sonic Youth was born. Through unpublished personal photographs, magazine and newspaper clippings, fashion editorials, and advertising campaigns, interspersed with Gordon's song lyrics, writings, artworks, private objects, and ephemera, this book demonstrates how Kim Gordon has been a role model for generations of women and men.
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