Book of the Day Posted Nov 12, 2020

Book of the Day > Futura: The Artist's Monograph

● Purchase ● The most in-depth and comprehensive survey of the life and career of one of the pioneering artists of the original graffiti generation.
 
Having forged his graphic style painting subways in New York in the late 1970s, Futura was among the first graffiti artists to be shown in contemporary galleries in the early 1980s, where his paintings shared space with works by Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf. As the commercialization of street culture in the 1990s inspired collaborations with fashion and lifestyle brands, Futura's work moved toward a more refined expression of his abstract graffiti style. Commissions from era-defining brands such as A Bathing Ape, Stüssy, Supreme, and Mo' Wax saw his artwork canonized as an elemental component of the street aesthetic.
 
Collected here, among never-before-published reproductions of earlier paintings and drawings, is an archive of personal photography and ephemera that reveals how integral Futura has been to the evolution of street art and culture. Guided through more than forty years of work, and with interviews with key players in Futura's career, this is at once a definitive monograph of a legend of contemporary art and an indispensable chapter in the history of graffiti.
Book of the Day Posted Nov 11, 2020

Book of the Day > Masterpieces of Fantasy Art

● Purchase ● Fantasy art, that colorful blend of myth, muscle and sexy maidens, took off in 1923 with the launch of Weird Tales magazine, was reinvigorated in the 1960s with The Lord of the Rings, Conan the Barbarian paperbacks with Frank Frazetta covers, and the late ’60s emergence of fantasy psychedelia. It went big in the ’70s with the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, the brilliant French magazine Métal Hurlant, and the first Star Wars film. The number of active artists peaked in that decade, but a new generation of fans discovered the genre through fantasy trading card games in the ’90s, leading to a massive interest in the art form today. Frank Frazetta’s oil paintings—when they infrequently come to market—have sold for more than $ 5 million in recent years. Fans line up at Comic-Cons to meet Boris Vallejo, Rodney Matthews, Greg Hildebrandt, Michael Whelan, and Philippe Druillet, and memorialize dead icons HR Giger, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, and Frazetta. Imagine how eagerly they’ll welcome TASCHEN’s History of Fantasy Art, including all the artists listed above and more.
 
This monster-sized tome features original paintings, contextualized by preparatory sketches, sculptures, calendars, magazines, and paperback books for an immersive dive into this dynamic, fanciful genre. Insightful bios go beyond Wikipedia to give a more accurate and eye-opening look into the life of each artist. Complete with tipped-in chapter openers, this collection will reign as the most exquisite and informative guide to this popular subject for years to come.
Events Posted Nov 10, 2020

JOIN US SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22nd AT 1:00 PM (PST) FOR AN ONLINE EVENT TO CELEBRATE THE PUBLICATION OF JEFF GOLD'S "SITTIN' IN: JAZZ CLUBS OF THE 1940s AND 1950s"!

 
 
One of our oldest and dearest friends is esteemed music historian, archivist, collector, and author Jeff Gold. Jeff and I worked together for six years at the legendary Rhino Records store on Westwood Boulevard in the seventies, and our paths have been intertwined ever since. It is an Arcana tradition that each time Jeff releases a new - and fabulous - book, he is gracious enough to have his Los Angeles publication party take place at our shop. Given that we are living in a different, more cautious world just now, in lieu of a book signing, we are collaborating with Harper Design Books to present a discussion between Jeff and Mark Ruffin of SiriusXM's  "Real Jazz" on the subject of his hot-off-the-press "Sittin' In: Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s."
 
The book is a visual history of jazz clubs during these crucial decades when some of the greatest names in in the genre - Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Oscar Peterson, and many others - were headlining acts across the country. In many of the clubs, black and white musicians played together and more significantly, people of all races gathered together to enjoy an evening’s entertainment. House photographers roamed the floor and for a dollar, took picture of patrons that were developed on site and could be taken home in a keepsake folder with the club’s name and logo.
 
"Sittin’ In" tells the story of the most popular club in these cities through striking images, first-hand anecdotes, true tales about the musicians who performed their unforgettable shows, notes on important music recorded live there, and more. All of this is supplemented by colorful club memorabilia, including posters, handbills, menus, branded matchbooks, and more. Inside you’ll also find exclusive, in-depth interviews conducted specifically for this book with the legendary Quincy Jones; legendary tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins; Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic Robin Givhan; artist, musician, and creative director of the Kennedy Center, Jason Moran; and Jazz critic Dan Morgenstern.
 
Gold surveys America’s jazz scene and its intersection with racism during segregation, focusing on three crucial regions: the East Coast (New York, Atlantic City, Boston, Washington, D.C.); the Midwest (Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City); and the West Coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco). Its collection of ephemeral snapshots tells the story of an era that helped transform American life, beginning the move from traditional Dixieland jazz to bebop, from conservatism to the push for personal freedom.
 
Jeff Gold is a Grammy Award-winning music historian, archivist, author and internationally recognized expert who has consulted for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Museum of Pop Culture (EMP), and various record labels and cultural institutions. He has discovered a number of previously unknown tapes later released by major labels, including Bob Dylan at Brandeis University 1963 and unreleased performances by the Velvet Underground and The Stooges. He was a producer of the album Stone Free: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix (with Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck) and worked on archival projects for Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead and Gram Parsons. His discovery of 149 previously unknown Dylan acetate recordings received extensive media attention including articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Gold has helped curate museum exhibitions including the Experience Music Project’s Beatlemania! and the traveling exhibit Bob Dylan’s American Journey. He appeared as an authenticator / appraiser on PBS’s History Detectives, VH1’s television show Rock Collectors, and is profiled in the books “Vinyl Junkies” by Brett Milano and “Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past” by Simon Reynolds. Jeff is the author of Total Chaos: The Story of The Stooges / As Told by Iggy Pop, which was one of Rough Trade’s ‘Books of the Year’ and earned rave reviews in Rolling Stone, Mojo, Esquire and many other publications along with his 2012 book 101 Essential Rock Records: The Golden Age of Vinyl, From The Beatles to the Sex Pistols, one of eight books selected that year by Rolling Stone as “The year’s best reading material.” Gold owns the music memorabilia website Recordmecca and writes about topics of interest to collectors on its blog. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @recordmecca or on Instagram at @recordmecca.

 

 

Events Posted Nov 07, 2020

11/15/20 Jona Frank - Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined Book Signing!

Please grab your mask and join Santa Monica's own Jona Frank at Rustic Canyon Park on Sunday, November 15th between 12:00 and 2:00 PM to celebrate the publication her fabulous new "Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined" with CVT Soft Serve. If you cannot attend but would like to purchase a signed copy of this great new book - featured in the New York Times - place your order on our website here, drop in to the shop, email, or call us at 310-458-1499.
 
"Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined" is a multimedia memoir of photographic artist Jona Frank’s upbringing in - and flight from - a stifling suburban household. Told in words and evocative photographs, Frank’s account of her childhood struggles with a repressive mother, mentally ill brother, and overwhelming expectations is leavened with episodes from her rich interior world.
 
Akin to a graphic novel, this hybrid of personal essay and photography breaks open the memoir format, detailing the life of a young artist as she spends her days dreaming of a friendship with Emily Dickinson, longing for Bruce Springsteen, and eschewing the rules of femininity. Frank employs a cinematic approach to construct vivid scenes from her youth. Using elaborately dressed sets, era-specific wardrobes, and multiple actors to portray herself as a child, Frank refashions her memories into vibrant tableaux. Strikingly, Frank cast Academy Award-winning actor Laura Dern in the role of her strict and complicated mother in a performance as bravura as her film and television work.
 
As Frank outgrows the confines of her environment and suffocating domestic life, discovering art and photography as the path to her personal fulfillment, she plots her ultimate escape. A unique photographic storytelling project reminiscent of such classics as "Fun Home" and "The Best We Could Do", "Cherry Hill" is an intimate self-portrait of what it takes to break free of convention and answer the question, “Who am I meant to be?”
 
"Jona Frank grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, the daughter of an accountant and homemaker. Her previous books include "High School" (2004), "Right: Portraits from the Evangelical Ivy League" (2008), and "The Modern Kids" (2016). Frank's photographs have appeared in print and online publications including Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Mother Jones. Her films and photographs have been exhibited internationally and are held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, SFMOMA, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. She lives in Santa Monica, California, where she is beloved for her cherry pie."

 

Book of the Day Posted Nov 06, 2020

Book of the Day > Design Commune

● Purchase ● A journey through the acclaimed design studio’s effortless California aesthetic, ethos, and lifestyle
 
Design Commune reveals the evolution story of an acclaimed design studio rooted firmly in the California aesthetic, ethos, and lifestyle. Truly multidisciplinary in practice, Commune has, since its inception in 2004, tackled all areas of design. The work featured in this second book highlights all disciplines that Commune engages in, including interior design projects for private and commercial spaces, artist collaborations, product designs, packaging, and graphics. Its projects share many common threads, such as the influence of handcrafted materials, but each remains deeply personal and unique.
None Posted Nov 05, 2020

GOODBYE BARON WOLMAN

2020 has been sobering to the extent that I just haven't had it in me to write the standard occasional "In Memoriam" piece for the website when friends and those we admire shuffle off this mortal coil. And, sadly, this year has presented all too many unfulfilled opportunities. But seeing as how it is already such a fraught week in the world, I thought I'd give it a shot and get back on that horse inasmuch as Baron Wolman has now left the building.

 

Coming of age as a huge music fan in the sixties, "Rolling Stone" (the magazine) was my go to read followed shortly by "Crawdaddy", "Jazz & Pop", "Rock", "Melody Maker", "N.M.E.", "Creem", "Downbeat", "Coda", and then too many more to mention. While Jim Marshall and Annie Leibovitz are the in-house photographers one usually remembers from those early days, Baron Wolman was actually my favorite. His duotone 1969 portrait of Sun Ra - taken while he was a lecturer in residence at UC Berkeley! - wearing those space-age shades is inarguably one of the coolest magazine covers of the decade. And then there was the Rolling Stone "The Groupies and Other Girls" special issue featuring The GTOs, Plaster Casters, and even a youthful Sally Mann that was a milestone in counterculture publishing. Don't get me wrong, his images of Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, The Jefferson Airplane, Frank Zappa, and so many others are canon, but he was so much more. For instance, Wolman was the publisher of the idiosyncratic Squarebooks, which produced the classics "Levi's Denim Art Contest. Catalogue of Winners", Lisa Law's "Flashing on the Sixties", and his own "Profiles."

 

My favorite Baron Wolman endeavor was the short-lived, self-published Fashion magazine "Rags." Running for just thirteen issues between 1970 and 1971, it's art direction and tabloid look owed a lot to "Rolling Stone"; and was a monthly must-see for anyone interested in the stylings of post-Hippie American youth. Featuring articles primarily photographed by Wolman himself, it's West Coast-centric editorial coverage ran the gamut from The Cockettes to a pictorial contrasting the waitesses' workwear of LA's "Canter's" and Sausalito's "The Trident" to an original piece in printed form by Ed Ruscha entitled "Tanks Banks Ranks Thanks". More than a decade before "Pictures", Barbara Kruger worked in their art department for a hot minute! While "Rags" had to have been printed in runs of several thousand, fifty years later issues are as hard to find as they are sought after.

 

I am lucky enough to own a complete set (including the near-impossible to find prospectus issue!) in two volumes bound by the publisher in textured maroon boards gilt-stamped with the "Rags" logo that was an amazing find many years ago upstairs at "Moe's" in Berkeley - one of, if not my very favorite place to shop for books. And years later I was even more fortunate to get Mr. Wolman to sign these, Thank you Julia Dean for that.

 

So goodbye Baron Wolman! Our condolences go out to your family and friends. And to our readers, please enjoy these pictures of "Rags" from a kinder, gentler yet still turbulent America.

 

Lee Kaplan

 

 

 

 

 

Book of the Day Posted Nov 04, 2020

Book of the Day > Textures: The History And Art Of Black Hair

● Purchase ● Textures synthesizes research in history, fashion, art, and visual culture to reassess the “hair story” of peoples of African descent. Long a fraught topic for African Americans and others in the diaspora, Black hair is here addressed by artists, barbers, and activists in both its historical perceptions and its ramifications for self and society today. Combs, products, and implements from the collection of hair pioneer Willie Morrow are paired here with masterworks from artists like Sonya Clark, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, and Alison Saar. Exploring topics such as the preferential treatment of straight hair, the social hierarchies of skin, and the power and politics of display, Textures is a landmark exploration of Black hair and its important, complicated place in the history of African American life and culture.
Book of the Day Posted Nov 03, 2020

Book of the Day > Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury L.A.

● Purchase ● This comprehensive reconstruction and interpretation of Louise and Walter Arensberg’s groundbreaking collection of modern and pre-Columbian art takes readers room by room, wall by wall, object by object through the couple’s Los Angeles home in which their collection was displayed.
 
Following the Armory Show of 1913, Louise and Walter Arensberg began assembling one of the most important private collections of art in the United States, as well as the world’s largest private library of works by and about the philosopher Sir Francis Bacon. By the time Louise and Walter died—in 1953 and 1954, respectively—they had acquired some four thousand rare books and manuscripts and nearly one thousand works of art, including world-class specimens of Cubism, Surrealism, and Primitivism, the bulk of Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre, and hundreds of pre-Columbian objects. These exceptional works filled nearly all available space in every room of their house—including the bathrooms.
 
The Arensbergs have long had a central role in the histories of Modernism and collecting, but images of their collection in situ have never been assembled or examined comprehensively until now. Presenting new research on how the Arensbergs acquired pre-Columbian art and featuring never-before-seen images, Hollywood Arensberg demonstrates the value of seeing the Arensbergs’ collection as part of a single vision, framed by a unique domestic space at the heart of Hollywood’s burgeoning artistic scene.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 31, 2020

Book of the Day > Queen: The Neal Preston Photographs

● Purchase ● The official book on Queen, one of the greatest ever rock bands, photographed by one of the greatest ever rock photographers―with text by Brian May and Roger Taylor and intimate accounts from Neal Preston revealing the stories behind the pictures
 
Neal Preston is one of the most prolific and highly regarded rock photographers of all time. He began working with Queen in the mid 1970s as their tour photographer. He was present on the legendary South America tour in 1981, Live Aid in 1985, and the band’s last tour with Freddie Mercury in 1986, among others. Brian May has commented, “Neal just has the knack, the skill, to always be in the right place at the right time.”
 
This official book, produced in collaboration with the band, features over 200 images and is an exhilarating ride through their years on the road together. It is the first time Preston and Queen have collated this work in one volume: glimpses of life backstage, live performances, post-performance highs and lows, and outtakes―many of which have never been seen before―are accompanied by memories and anecdotes from Preston with forewords by Queen guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor. The pages vibrate with a palpable energy.
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. 
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