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.
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.
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.
We know not to judge a book by its cover, but even so it’s hard to resist buying every expertly designed publication included in the Book Cover Archive.
Designer and Yale fellow Jessica Helfand wrote about her “struggle to reconcile form with emotion” in this notable Design Observer piece published last year. She finds examples of how design and story come together in interesting places—in war propaganda and public health posters, for instance:
We here at Marquand Books like not only to write our own blog; we also enjoy seeing what others are blogging about and have to say.
In the Seattle PI’s Reader Blogs, Jeremy Tolbert keeps us posted on the latest happenings around the city. This month author Katharine Harmon is visiting the Ballard Public Library on January 21st at 6:30pm to talk about her new book, The Map As Art, a gathering of images by artists “whose maps to are used to express their visions.”
On Book Patrol: A Haven for Book Culture, Michael Lieberman speaks to the collector of “the world’s largest private collection of rare books on Haiti,” Robert Corbett.
In case you haven’t heard yet, as of January 11th, the New York Times Books blog, the Book Design Review, will be on indefinite hiatus. You will still be able to follow Joseph Sullivan on Twitter, and he suggests that you follow the Casual Optimist, Faceout Books, and the Book Cover Archive for any book-design-commentary needs he will no longer be filling.
“New Year/Fresh Eyes,” opens at Artxchange Gallery. Nine artists from around the world are featured, and the selected works encompass a range of media.
Gallery 4 Culture opens the new year with “White Lines (don’t do it),” a solo show of photographic works by Jesse DeLira. This series of black-and-white photographs “documents sweeping, graceful lines of chalk glyphs laid onto soulful urban surfaces.”
Suspended abstract works on paper and in ceramic by Nicholas Nyland are feature at SOIL.
Sara Tabbert woodcuts are on display at Collum Gallery. This new work incorporates the beauty of natural forms of wood, water, ice, and stone into a series based on a trip along the Great Northern Railway.
It’s been a busy year, but we still managed to squeeze some reading time in, and we are all looking forward to reading a few more in the coming year. Here are a few hand-picked gift recommendations from the Marquand Books and iocolor staff:
Ed recently transformed a space by the windows inside our Tieton Book Arts studio, home of Marquand Editions, into an arty general store of sorts. Here are a few recent photos from the space, offering Marquand Ephemera, handmade blank books and Spines and Memorieschapbooks amongst other keepsakes and curiosities:
Seattle-based artists Sara Osebold and Vaughn Bell launch Gallery4Culture’s new season September 3rd with their environmentally conscious exhibition Melt.
Osebold has constructed a large wool glacier as a kind of tribute to nature. Displayed in the gallery as a floor installation, her construction is reminiscent of a long cloak or security blanket.
During a recent February spent in Vermont, Vaughn Bell monitored the ice on a local stream as it melted in an unseasonable thaw. Bell has created a video installation in which the image of frozen ice hangs in the space, a video projection on a circular disc, resembling the moon. It gradually melts, revealing more and more open water, recalling how the full moon wanes.
Performance/demonstration during First Thursday, September 3rd at 7pm. Gallery4Culture, 101 Prefontaine Pl S, Seattle. Open Monday through Friday 9:00 am–5:00 pm. Call (206) 296-8674 for more information.
Seattle-based bookstore Wessel and Lieberman recently featured Marquand’s letterpress chapbook series on their blog. On Spines and Memories, the first in the collection, was written by Ed Marquand and printed and hand-bound in Tieton, WA. The occasional series will feature essays contributed by writers, curators, and book publishing professionals.
20 of 500 limited edition copies are available via the W+L website here.
On-line magazine and art network e-flux is opening a reading room in Manhattan’s Lower East Side next week. It will house more than 2,000 art and design publications from around the globe:
The reading room is a rapidly growing collection of several thousand books on contemporary art exhibitions open to the public at 41 Essex Street. The books have been donated by numerous art institutions and individuals from all parts of the world and reflect some of the more interesting developments in art of the past decade.”
The New York Times’ chief art critic Michael Kimmelman’s recent column, “At the Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus,” has generated a lot of buzz lately. For the article, Kimmelman observed visitors at the Louvre over the span of several hours and discovered that almost no one he saw contemplated a single piece of art for more than a minute. Tourists, he argues, use museums as quick therapy.
The Design Observer recently published an interview with artist James Turrell that’s well worth a read. The piece centers around his ambitious current project, transforming Roden Crater near Sedona, Arizona. The artist talks about how his classic themes of light and space play out in the crater, which contain sun and moon viewing rooms:
Basically what I am doing with the crater is that I’m working with the interior and exterior space, that is, the working of one space against another. Generally an aspect of that space is charged and related to how that space is filled. This quality of how the light inhabits the space changes throughout the day.
LA-based artist Robert Fontenot learned last January that LACMA was deaccessioning about 100 costume and textile collection items. To save these objects from obscurity, Fontenot purchased more than 50 pieces from the collection at three separate auctions. His mission? To re-identify and find new (and, it turns out, wildly creative) ways to use and appreciate the objects.
They include everything from a Turkish embroidered textile reconstructed into a wastebasket, trousers turned into the mainsail of a model ship, and (our favorite) a paisley skirt transformed into a handmade banner with appliquéd letters promoting LACMA’s current exhibit Your Bright Future.
So far, Fontenot has documented the transition of 21 pieces from his collection and is photographing and describing each one on his blog. We can’t wait to see what he does next.
Coudal.com: The Chicago-based design firm’s “ongoing experiment in web publishing, design and commerce.” Be careful, it’s way too easy to become a Coudal addict.
If you’ve never visited Coudal’s Museum of Museums, you don’t know what you’re missing. With so much recent press about different initiatives that museums are taking to secure a place with the younger set in these tough financial times, it’s refreshing to find Coudal’s well-curated, browsable, and at times quirky list (the Science Tattoo Emporium, anyone?).
It rotates quarterly to highlight galleries, shows, and traveling exhibitions, and features a strong permanent collection with heavy hitters like MoMA and the Smithsonian. With all that information at the mere click of a mouse, it’s bound to bring more web-savvy art lovers to the actual institutions.
Typography as a discipline is generally concerned with very small things. That’s not always true of course — sometimes letters can be big or even monumental. But most of the type we encounter daily is pretty small. In Marquand Books’ particular niche of the typographic world — book typography, and even more specifically art book typography — we’re especially concerned with another kind of small thing: numbers that are smaller than 1 but bigger than 0, expressed as portions of a whole. I.e. fractions.
It’s good to see more and more museums embracing blogs and social media, both as a way to promote upcoming exhibitions and to engage in commentary on the art world in general. A great example is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
It’s easy to lose track of time while clicking around LACMA’s website–in addition to the main museum site there are also regularly updated Twitter and Facebook pages. The museum’s Unframed blog recently started an ongoing “Ask a Curator” series, similar to one that’s in the works over at Untitled, the North Carolina Museum of Art’s blog. It’s an interesting development in exploring the question of how museums can tap into their curators’ knowledge to engage and attract readers on the web and, ultimately, visitors.
Over on Unframed, LACMA’s photography curator Charlotte Cotton talks about whether or not there is pressure to stay one step ahead of other curators in her field. Read what she has to say here.
Our book arts and letterpress studio in Tieton, Washington, just delivered four new coaster designs, now available through our Etsy store Marquand Ephemera. Each set has a different personality, so you’re sure to find one that fits the vibe of your next cocktail party, backyard BBQ, or ritzy dinner.
Video artist Willie Doherty discusses his early influences (Roxy Music, Warhol) and creative process in this 2005 interview, produced for the Channel 4 Ideas Factory website by the Irish production house Nerve Centre.
Doherty’s new exhibit “Requisite Distance” opens on Sunday, May 24 at the Dallas Museum of Art, preceded by an artist talk with Doherty this evening. From the New York Times:
This show offers a concentrated view of the work of Willie Doherty, one of the more influential conceptual artists to emerge from Northern Ireland in the past decade. Photographs and video make up the show, including a powerful 15-minute film, “Ghost Story,” a hit of the 2007 Venice Biennale.
The Marquand-produced book Willie Doherty: Requisite Distancewill soon be available from Yale University Press, London.
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.
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.
Ed stumbled upon a very cool website by Mirage Bookmark, featuring some of the grandest, creakiest, most modern, particularly drafty, and altogether essential bookstores–alive and well–on the planet. Click here for some stunning shots of venerable shops like Shakespeare and Co. Antiquarian Books in Paris and The Lello in Portugal.
Here are a few different images of make-ready sheets shot on press by Marquand Senior Designer John Hubbard. Make-ready sheets are the result of running paper through a printing press in order to align its plates. This helps achieve the right balance of plate pressure and ink density to match the client’s color proofs.
(Captions clockwise, from top left)
A typical sight at a book printing plant, this ready-made includes a standard test press sheet with color bars and gradients used to test the press and calibrate plate curves.
If you’re in the Omaha-area, don’t miss Sentimental Journey: The Art of Alfred Jacob Miller, on view at the Joslyn Art Museum. While you’re there be sure to pick up the exhibition catalog, produced by Marquand:
“This book will set a new scholarly standard for monographs on western art,” said Bill Truettner, Senior Curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and one of the leading scholars in America on western American art. “[It] will bring to the study of western-art patronage a refinement few others in the field have even approached.”
The exhibit remains at the Joslyn–its final destination–until May 10.
We’re in love with IndieBound, a new website that promotes local, independent bookstores across the US. The site offers excellent reasons to shop and think locally:
The Economy
*Spend $100 at a local and $68 of that stays in your community. Spend the same $100 at a national chain, and your community only sees $43.
*Local businesses create higher-paying jobs for our neighbors.
*More of your taxes are reinvested in your community–where they belong.
The Environment
*Buying local means less packaging, less transportation, and a smaller carbon footprint.
*Shopping in a local business district means less infrastructure, less maintenance, and more money to beautify your community.
The Community
*Local retailers are your friends and neighbors—support them and they’ll support you.
*Local businesses donate to charities at more than twice the rate of national chains.
*More independents means more choice, more diversity, and a truly unique community
A favorite feature of the site is the indie store finder. Type in your zip code and presto, you get a consolidated list of local booksellers in your area. Try it here.
On Monday, the New York Times posted a piece on its By Design blog that caught our eye. The author, Allison Arieff, Editor at Large for Sunset, writes an engaging, affectionate post about William Stout, owner of William Stout Architectural Books in San Francisco. Bill Stout is much respected in the bookselling and publishing worlds, and for very good reason. Give it a read.
Seattle’s Lead Pencil Studio has a new installation, Retail/Commercial, tucked into a corner retail space in Rainier Square. It feels familiar; it’s also disturbingly unfamiliar. But that’s the idea. Zach and I visited the installation—our second attempt—last Friday. Zach described the experience as: “Disorienting. That’s really the best word for it.” And he meant it in the best possible way.
Retail/Commercial transforms an aging, eighties-era retail environment into a wonderfully creepy spatial inquiry. The artists have created a kind of retail space that’s stripped of any recognizable goods, letting us look at the guts of the thing—or, at least, the guts of an imagined version of a retail space.
Aside from an attendant toward the back, we were the only two visitors there. We picked our way quietly through. I for one felt both squirmy and amused. What’s there: empty shelves, plenty of clear plastic racks, stacks of cardboard boxes tucked away in plain sight, a fake security camera, mannequins, a Ross shopping cart, soft music coming from different areas of the installation. What’s not there: shoppers and the things they buy.
After leaving the installation, we walked through the underground walkway that connects Rainier Square and Union Square. We passed several empty former stores with bare shelving units, the odd piece of display furniture, chairs loosely stacked. Retail/commercial indeed.
Retail/Commercial is open from 1 to 6 PM Fridays and Saturdays through March 14. Find it on the ground floor of Rainier Square at Fourth and Union in downtown Seattle.
Here are a few different perspectives on the printing process, captured in photos by Marquand Senior Designer John Hubbard. We can practically smell the ink and fresh-cut paper!
(Captions clockwise, from top left)
Found perspective on a color test form (press sheet) at CS Graphics in Singapore, 2004.
Macro detail of the edges of random sheets of specialty papers at CS Graphics in Singapore, 2004.
Detail of vintage wood type make-ready press sheet at Marquand Editions, Tieton, 2008.
Archive of film for books before Digital-to-Plate technology made film obsolete. CS Graphics, Singapore, 2000.
Here’s a few hand-picked gift recommendations from the Marquand and iocolor staff:
Art and Photography:
Gary Hawkey: A Certain Alchemy, Keith Carter (University of Texas Press) John Hubbard: Fully Booked, M. Hubner and R, Klanten (Gestalten) Adrian Lucia: Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years (MoMA) Zach Hooker: Alloy of Love, Dario Robleto (Har/Pstr) John Hubbard: The Printed Picture, Richard Benson (MoMA) Zach Hooker: All Known Metal Bands, Dan Nelson (McSweeney’s) Gary Hawkey: Bhutan: Hidden Lands of Happiness, John Wehrheim (Serindia)
Fiction:
Adrian Lucia: Indignation, Phillip Roth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Oleya Pearsall: No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July (Scribner) Zach Hooker: The Solitudes (The Aegypt Cycle), John Crowley (Overlook TP) Jeff Wincapaw: Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner (Penguin Classics) John Hubbard: I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation, Francis Picabia (MIT Press)
Non-Fiction:
Marissa Meyer: Working IX to V: Orgy Planners, Funeral Clowns, and Other Prized Professions of the Ancient World, Vicki Leon (Walker & Company) Adrian Lucia: The Forever War, Dexter Filkins (Knopf) Marissa Meyer: Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Andy Clark (Oxford University Press) John Hubbard: The Nancy Book, Joe Brainard (Siglio Press)
Young Adult:
Zach Hooker: Pretty Monsters, Kelly Link (Viking Juvenile) Marissa Meyer: The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press)
Culinary:
Stephanie Locke: Tartine, Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson (Chronicle) Zach Hooker: Elegant and Inspired Indian Cuisine, Vikram Vij and Meeru Dhalwala (Douglas & McIntyre) Keryn Means: The Food You Crave: Luscious Recipes for a Healthy Life, Ellie Krieger (Taunton) Sara Billups: How to Eat Supper, Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift (Clarkson Potter) John Hubbard: Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (Artisan)
Craft:
Oleya Pearsall: Knitting for Good!: A Guide to Creating Personal, Social, and Political Change Stitch by Stitch, Betsy Greer (Trumpeter) Stephanie Locke: Lotta Jansdotter Simple Sewing, Lotta Jansdotter (Chronicle)
Nature and Gardening:
Marie Weiler: Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens, Douglas Tallamy (Timber Press) Marie Weiler: A Short History of the Honey Bee: Humans, Flowers, and Bees in the Eternal Chase for Honey, E. Readicker-Henderson (Timber Press) Sara Billups: Birdscapes: A Pop-Up Celebration of Bird Songs in Stereo Sound, Miyoko Chu with the Cornell Lab of Omithology (Chronicle)
The struggle for civil rights is the most iconic of 1960s stories, and the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, followed the next year by Rosa Parks’s refusal to cede her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, are often cited as the era’s inaugural events. Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement 1956–1968(High Museum of Art), the catalogue for an extraordinary exhibition organized by Julian Cox, the curator of photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, is an important contribution to the visual record of the movement.
Coralie Bickford-Smith has designed a series of keepsake hardbacks for Penguin. Freshening up classics like Crime and Punishment and Madame Bovary with bedizened patterns and vintage color, the spines of these books were made to snuggle into a bookshelf together.
An interview with the designer on Penguin’s excellent blog is a delight, as visual as it is informational.
Not just a formalist, Ms. Akerman also takes on hot-button themes like racism in the American South, illegal immigration in the Southwest and a terrorism in the Mideast. As a political artist she can be heavy-handedly predictable or unexpectedly illuminating.
Currently based in Paris, Akerman’s latest work is featured in her first solo museum exhibition, “Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space,” which has traveled to the Blaffer Gallery at the Art Museum of the University of Houston and the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, MA.
The exhibit of five video installations is currently on view at the Miami Art Museum until January 25, 2009, when it will move to the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis in May of 2009.
The recent profile by Seattle P-I art critic Regina Hackett on Seattle-based artist Roy McMakin explores his broadly diverse career:
McMakin developed the initial identity for J. Crew stores, built the office furniture for the Getty Museum and created the set for “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.” He also moves easily in the world of galleries, public art and museums.
He builds houses but is not an architect. He makes furniture for use and sculptural contemplation. Like a musician who plays slightly off the beat, everything he does contains at least an element of the unexpected.
The full article is available here. Purplish, an exhibition of McMakin’s drawings, photographs, and sculpture, is showing at the James Harris Gallery in Pioneer Square in Seattle until November 8.
“This was taken in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong,” John says. “Hong Kong used to have tons of stationery and design stores back in the day, and I was surprised to see this place still standing, since it’s in a prime real estate area facing the Hong Kong harbor.”
It’s the height of fall in Tieton, a small town in eastern Washington that’s become a big part of the work we do in our Seattle Marquand Books office.
Long story short, Ed Marquand began Marquand Books in 1978 with a vision of producing high-quality, memorable publications for museums and artists around the globe. We’ve since produced hundreds of titles, printing offset in Asia and Europe.
In April 2005, Ed was riding his bike through the Yakima Valley. As the story goes, he got a flat tire running over a patch of goathead thorns and became stranded for the afternoon in Tieton’s town square. While repairing his bike, he decided to explore the town, a collection of mostly abandoned storefronts. It ignited his curiosity, and Mighty Tieton was born.
Pacific Northwest, the Sunday magazine for the Seattle Times, ran a cover story recently on what’s happened in Tieton since that day in April three years ago. It also touches on Marquand Editions | Tieton, our letterpress studio, which offers clients hand-bound and letterpress options to pair with offset printing services. Read the article and see photographs of Tieton here.
Besides providing studio and occasional gallery space to notable artists such as Trimpin, Allan Packer, and Diego Samper, new businesses are already brewing in Tieton. Goathead Press, a fine print studio from Fay and Robert Jones is up and running. The Drachen Foundation has a storage and production facility for producing kite kits that are sold to schools around the world. Margot Arellano has brought over her still from Germany, and she will start producing high-quality fruit brandies in the coming year.
Other ideas are still in their infancy. Some of the creative enterprises include a cidery, a small pub, a goat cheese creamery, a bed and breakfast, and a woodworking shop. Have an idea for a future business or project that would be a good fit in Tieton? Start dreaming and leave us a comment.
