If you’re in Edinburgh anytime soon, be sure to catch Irish video artist Willie Doherty’s exhibit at the Fruitmarket Gallery, showing now through July 12. Excerpts from Doherty’s “Ghost Story” appear in this video on the gallery’s website.
Marquand recently produced the catalog Willie Doherty: Requisite Distance, which features “Ghost Story,” for the Dallas Museum of Art, available through Yale University Press. The artist’s forthcoming stateside exhibition at the DMA opens May 24.
If you’re in the LA area, check out Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972–2008, on display until June 7 at LACMA. Marquand produced the accompanying catalog, designed by Beverly Joel and available through MIT Press. The LA Times Culture Monster blog recently posted a review of the tactile show:
Wrapping pieces of wood and cardboard and lengths of wire with gauze, coating it in plaster or papier mâché and painting the whole thing white, West made sculptures that the audience was meant to pick up, manipulate, examine at close range, hang on an arm or around the neck, or even stick one’s face into. The shapes are abstract. But often, part of the sculpture suggests a handle — a direct visual invitation to audience participation. Silently it says, Touch me, hold me.
An interview with West from the catalog is available through LACMA’s website. The artist talks about growing up in public housing in Vienna, his long thread of accomplishments as an artist, and everything in between.
In an effort to improve the overall quality of American Stiftung Buchkunst design competition entries, Marquand Books is modifying the nomination process for all 2010 submissions. Instead of inviting designers to submit their own work as we usually do, this year we are asking design and publishing professionals to submit their choices for the best-designed books published in 2009. We welcome and value your opinions as working professionals in this field to help us seek out the very best that American book design has to offer.
The process is simple: select a book and send us the title, name of the author, and the publisher. Entries can only have been published in the United States in 2009. Additionally, you can include a short statement about why the book should be considered, but please be aware that this will only be noted by the American selection committee, not the final competition jurors. We will review the nominations, contact the publishers for review copies, jury the selection with a select group of design and publishing professionals, and send the final choices on to the competition in Germany.
Complete guidelines are available on the updated Stiftung Buchkunst page on the top right corner of Marquand’s blog.
This week, Seattle-based alt-weekly The Stranger ran a profile of artist, lecturer, and consumer critic Chris Jordan, whose digital art explores American consumerism. The article includes a kind reference to the “handsome” catalog Running the Numbers, produced by Marquand. Fresh off the press, the book will soon be available through Prestel’s website.
Click here to read Jen Graves’ interview, and don’t miss the accompanying slide show.
The printing process is captured in photos by Marquand Senior Designer John Hubbard.
(Captions clockwise, from top left)
Folded magazine signatures await collating (gathering) at C&C Offset Printing Co., China, 2001.
Blue roller wheels on conveyor line at CS Graphics, Singapore, 2000.
Signature gathering line at Prosperous Printing Factory, Shenzhen, China, 2007.
Yellow ink trough in a Heidelberg Speedmaster 5-color offset press at CS Graphics, Singapore, 2000.
Ed has traveled to some 60 museums in the past few months, meeting with museum professionals across the country. Recently, he spent time talking shop with Ann Carper, an editor of SITES, the Smithsonian Institution’s Traveling Exhibition Service. Marquand is producing a catalog for SITES’s forthcoming exhibition, William H. Johnson: An American Modern. Read more about their conversation here.
Guest contributor Will Gillham offers tips on how to remember more of what you read. Here, he explains his system of tried and true reading notations.
The more gentle and reverent bibliophiles (i.e., collectors) among us will blanch at the mnemonic practice detailed in the following lines. If you count yourself among these good people, be forewarned: this post is about marking in books.
It was out of necessity in college (I possess whatever is the opposite of a photographic memory) that I created my own set of signs and symbols for marking a book so I could reread it in about half an hour. I drummed them up because I couldn’t stand the crass, abusive, and distracting underline, which I loathe in books. I still use the symbols. Excised from the text and then collated together, the passages I mark (always in the margin, lightly, in graphite) compose a Will’s Notes synopsis of a book.
The most basic (and most used) mark is a simple horizontal hash flaring off into the margin next to any sentence that is important to the subject as a whole. For example, while reading Ron Powers’ biography of Twain last evening I used the hash next to a line that revealed the one racist strain the great satirist was never able to personally jettison: his bias against Native Americans.
If the important passage runs longer than a line, I modify the horizontal hash to suggest, a bit arbitrarily, how far down I should read. The starting point of this mark is the hash, but I then add a vertical line descending down the margin, like a capital T; the length of the vertical post can travel anywhere from an eighth of an inch (just a couple of sentences) to an inch (at least double that). If the entire graph is critical, I flag it with the manuscript editor’s paragraph symbol.
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Will explains: This is a page from Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Some twenty years after I first read it, the line with neighboring checkmark still seems reasonably pragmatic to me today. The T below the checkmark means begin reading here, and read for several lines. The brief passage indicates a fundamental tenet of Jung’s psychological philosophy—i.e., important to review—and, after all these years, reminds me that if he’s right, my unconscious and I remain almost complete strangers.
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An x beside a line ratchets up the importance: this is going to be on the test. While reading Dava Sobel’s awesome little book on the history of the chronometer, I put an x next to the sentence revealing that even though Galileo, while bored sitting in church, was the first to imagine the pendulum clock, it was Christiaan Huygens who actually made the first successful pendulum timepiece.
The remaining marks in Will’s Notes are much less academic. A checkmark beside a line or poem title means simply that I like it—a lot. Again, in Powers’ book I found myself placing a check beside the line, “‘If Christ were alive today,’ Twain wrote in one of his notebooks, ‘there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.’” An exclamation point is for those “Whoa, that’s crazy!” passages, and the editor inside me (who does not shut down) draws a circle around any mistake I find.
Finally, there’s the infinity symbol. This lyrical mark illuminates any line that, for whatever reason, resonates with me, applies to my life or worldview, or is beautiful. In the margin of Bob Dylan’s autobiography, an infinity mark sits next to the line: “My grandmother always told me to be nice to anyone I met, because you never know what they might be going through.” This distilled truism sticks with me because anytime I’ve revisited that book, a subtle mark leads me back again to the profoundly imitable wisdom of Bob Dylan’s grandmother.
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Will explains: This is a page from David Cordingly’s excellent book on the history of pirates. It shows a hash and a T mark, the latter of which recalls my attention to the fascinating insurance policies of the booty-stealing demographic. Would you have guessed that the highest payment went for the loss of a right arm?
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Will Gillham is Director of Publications for the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
