UK-based on-line bookseller The Book Depository is a good resource for finding publications that are either out of print or not widely available in the US.
Check out the “Watch People Shop” feature. Tracing tabs on a world map as they ping-pong between recent sales in real time in entrancing. Someone in California just bought African Animal Stickers. Then someone in South Africa bought The Last Snake Man. Someone in Canada bought The Stars, and someone in Australia bought Bright Star a few minutes later. It’s like six degrees of book separation.
Book Patrol recently clued us in on what just might be the next big trend for the bookworm set: literate fashion!
We’re used to musicians and actors launching clothing lines, so why not authors? Douglas Coupland is keeping things interesting with his Roots x Douglas Coupland line featuring Canadian-inspired clothes and home goods.
And with L.A.-based Oogabooga’s Bookhanger Neck Chain you’re sure to never loose that novel again.
Handy for wearing paperbacks, but art books might be a bit more of a challenge.
The new Mighty Tieton Web site has just been launched. Home to Marquand Editions|Tieton’s growing line of gift products carried in museum and gift shops nationally, fresh businesses and events keep popping up in Tieton.
A new addition everyone at Marquand Books is excited about is the installion of a 1920s vintage Smyth Stitcher to bind short-run editions of hand-printed and digital books.
Victoria Adams has earned critical acclaim and developed a passionate following for her beautiful, Northwest-inspired landscape paintings. Celebrate the recent opening of her one-person exhibition on July 15 at 5:30 pm at the Tacoma Art Museum. Events for the evening include a lecture, gallery walk, and signing of the Marquand-produced book by the artist.
There are a lot of good reasons to submit art to 10 x 10 x 10 x Tieton, Mighty Tieton’s inaugural juried exhibition, before the July 5 deadline. The theme? Small is big. Which is a lot like Tieton, a little town over the Cascades in Washington State that’s home to our letterpress studio and a plethora of other compelling projects and artists.
Ed Marquand, Gail Gibson of Gail Gibson Gallery and Greg Kucera of Greg Kucera Gallery form the jury. All entries will be featured in a color catalogue of the exhibit. For an application and full details, download a PDF of the prospectus here.
The celebrated exhibition, Fleeting Beauty: Japanese Woodblock Printscloses July 4 at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. If you’re in the Seattle-area and haven’t been to the show, which includes Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa, now is the time.
Marquand produced the exhibition catalogue, featuring prints from renowned ukiyo-e artists of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Bringing together editors, designers, curators, publishers, and printers, the biennial The National Museum Publishing Seminar is a rare chance for everyone from our small professional world to be in (almost) one room together. It’s always both fun and engaging.
D.A.P. Executive Director Sharon Gallagher and Ed Marquand made a splash at The Standard Hotel in NYC on May 26 during a BookExpo America party. Sharon is wearing an “artist’s book skúta” in honor of a new exhibition in New York State featuring a project by Skúta Helgason:
This Friday night’s SAM Remix at Seattle Art Museum promises to be especially action-packed. A few highlights:
-Artist talk and book signing with Roy McMakin (9 pm) -Rare screenings of Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, shown on MTV in the 1980s (9 pm and 11 pm) -Fascinating tours with members of Seattle’s arts and music communities, Seth Aaron Henderson of Project Runway, and more (every 15 minutes from 8:30 to 11 pm) -Musician Sean Nelson performing live in the galleries -SAMtrax playlist curated by Kevin Cole of KEXP -Factory T-shirt silkscreening
It’s rumored the event will sell out, so if you’re in the Seattle-area be sure to buy tickets on-line here. The entire museum, including the exhibitions, love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death — Andy Warhol Media Works and Kurt, will be open from 8 p.m.-12 a.m June 4. The first 100 people wearing wigs get in free!
The DIA’s exhibition Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to Present is the broadest overview on the subject to date.
The show received praise in the New York Times:
Who would have imagined, even just a few years ago, that such histories and energies could have been found in art that most of us never knew existed? Enough to say that if you get a thrill from seeing things you’ve never seen and thinking thoughts you’ve never thought, Detroit is a good place to be these days.
The May/June issue of Yakima Magazine features a cover story on Ed’s work developing Tieton, a small town in Central Washington near Yakima.
A second article talks about Tieton Lofts, a fruit warehouse transformed into live/work lofts that are cool enough to be photographed for Apartment Therapy. You’ve really got to visit.
Richard Hugo House, the Seattle-based non-profit center for writing, will host panels and workshops on the changing landscape of publishing this weekend. The conference, called “Finding Your Readers in the 21st Century,” is an opportunity for writers to examine how the Web, blogs, and social media can assist in the publishing process.
Presenters include PEN/West Fiction Award winner Stacey Levine, veteran editor Alan Rinzler, and Third Place Books buyer Vladimir Verano. A small press fair is planned, including publishers and literary magazines like Tin House and Counterpoint/Soft Skull.
A full schedule and registration information are available at Hugo House’s Web site.
Co-Presented by the School of Visual Concepts, the documentary Typeface shows in Seattle this evening at Northwest Film Forum at 7 and 9 p.m. Jim Moran, director of The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum, will introduce the film.
MFA Houston’s exhibition, Alice Neel: Painted Truths continues to enjoy wide media attention. Marquand Books produced the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, distributed by Yale University Press.
Neel’s career was profiled in last Sunday’s New York Times:
She focused on the least fashionable of realist genres, portraiture, which had long since been declared dead, bringing to it an electrifying verve.
Each year, the American Association of Museums sponsors the Museum Publications Design Competition. This year, 700 entries were submitted. We are not a museum, and therefore are not eligible to enter our work. In fact, we don’t usually know which of our books have been entered, so it’s always a delightful surprise to win!
Marquand Books was honored with four awards for our books and exhibition catalogues produced in 2009. Our Design Director, Jeff Wincapaw, was responsible for three of the wins.
Good design is a collaborative process, and we are fortunate to have talented and engaged clients. The museum directors, curators, publications directors, artists, photographers, writers, editors, and production and administrative support involved in these exhibitions and publications deserve credit as well. Our pre-press partner, iocolor, always makes us look good, as do the printers we work with. Many thanks to them all.
We consider it an honor to have the iconic graphic designer Art Chantry as a guest contributor to Marquand’s blog. Below is an essay from his “Familiar Quotations Vol. 2” series. Look for more of Chantry’s writing to come.
alvin lustig was one of the most inspiring and prolific (and maybe among the very best) graphic designers of the last half century. he designed countless book covers, advertising, magazines (including the peculiar “gentry” magazine). unfortunately, he had the misfortune of dying before graphic design became such a popular sporting activity. the result is that nobody seems to remember him. like william golden or bradbury thompson, he’s been remaindered to that heap o’ exquisite designers thrown in the closet (and the landfill) so that we may worship at the shrine of paul rand (who managed to outlive all of his more talented competitors.)
Seattle’s venerable Elliott Bay Book Company officially opened shop in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood Wednesday. The store, which moved from its beloved Pioneer Square location after 37 years due to financial woes, is reinventing itself in one of Seattle’s most vibrant neighborhoods.
In major cities worldwide during the pre-burst bubble, many independent, street-level retail businesses were priced out of the cool neighborhoods they helped establish. Corporate conglomerates selling luxury goods drove commercial rent into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Many of these shops are simply environmental installations-as-advertising. While Nike, Chanel, Ralph Lauren, Gucci, and others of their ilk still drive many rental markets, it’s shifted a bit here in NYC, where desirable shopping districts such as Soho and Nolita are full of empty storefronts.
The other night, I attended a reception and dinner for an exhibition of work by an artist who is no longer living. We produced the accompanying book—a handsome, substantial effort.
The exhibition is impressive. Many museum members and out-of-town visitors extolled the work, the selection of the paintings, and the installation. Smiles and congratulations came from all around.
The new MFAH retrospective, “Alice Neel: Painted Truths,” was namechecked in the most recent T, the New York Times style magazine:
The artist’s sensitivity to nuances of style and gesture informs the portraits in “Alice Neel: Painted Truths.”
Since her portrait work was largely uncommissioned and did not require that she flatter the sitter, “you get a sense of how people really looked,” says Barry Walker, who, with Jeremy Lewison, curated the show.
