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Tag: art books

Gerhard Steidl is Making Books an Art Form

Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker

Rebecca Mead’s long profile of publisher Gerhard Steidl for The New Yorker is a wonderful, fascinating read:

Each Steidl title is unique, printed with a bespoke combination of inks and papers. But to the informed eye, and the informed hand, a Steidl book is as distinctive as an Eggleston photograph. Unlike another German art publisher, Taschen—which is known for reproducing risqué images by the likes of Helmut Newton in enormous formats that would crush most coffee tables to splinters—Steidl produces books that invite holding and reading. Steidl dislikes the shiny paper that is often found in photography books, and prefers to use uncoated paper, even though it takes longer to dry and thus makes a printing cycle more expensive. He opts for understatement even with projects that would tempt other publishers to be ostentatious. “Exposed,” a collection of portraits of famous people by Bryan Adams, the rock star turned photographer, has no image on its cover. Bound in blue cloth, the book looks as if it might be found on a shelf in an academic library. Steidl wants his creations to satisfy all the senses. When he first opens a book, he holds it up close to his nose and smells it, like a sommelier assessing a glass of wine. High-quality papers and inks smell organic, he says, not chemical. To the uninitiated, a Steidl book smells rather like a just-opened box of children’s crayons.

I love this part about the attention to the detail:

Designing a book’s packaging is a process Steidl particularly relishes. “He wants to pick the cover, he wants to pick the endpapers,” [Robert] Polidori told me. “He treasures this limited one-on-one time with the artist. It’s almost a love act.” Sometimes Steidl indulges in a brightly colored ribbon for a bookmark, like statement socks worn with a formal suit. He pays attention to elements that barely register with most readers, such as the head and tail bands—colored silk placed where the pages attach to the spine. “It’s a tiny bit of fashion,” Steidl said. “With Karl [Lagerfeld], it is the buttons. With me, it is the head and tail bands.” For Gossage, he chose black bands and black endpaper, to contrast with the colored ink on the pages. The endpaper was made from cotton, and would cost thirty cents per book, as opposed to the seven cents it would cost if he used offset paper. “Using the cheaper one saves significant money for the shareholders,” he said. “But I am the only shareholder.”

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The Bolted Book

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Designers & Books, in collaboration with the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York and the Mart, the Museum of modern and contemporary art of Trento and Rovereto, Italy, is launching a Kickstarter campaign on October 18 to publish a new facsimile edition of Depero Futurista, the 1927 monograph of Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero. Famously bound by two industrial aluminum bolts, “The Bolted Book” is full of typographic experimentation and widely recognized as a masterpiece of avant-garde book-making.

At the project’s website you can see each of the book’s (amazing) 240 pages in detail, read translations from the original Italian and annotations of selected texts, and learn more about Depero’s life and work.

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Julian Barnes on Lucian Freud

Julian Barnes reviews two recent books about the painter Lucian Freud — Man with a Blue Scarf by Martin Gayford and Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Greig — for The London Review of Books:

Freud was always a painter of the Great Indoors. Even his horses are painted at home in their stables; and though he curated a great Constable show in Paris in 2003, the greenery he depicted himself lived either in pots or was visible from a studio window. His subject matter was ‘entirely autobiographical’. Verdi once said that ‘to copy the truth can be a good thing, but to invent the truth is better, much better.’ Freud didn’t invent, nor did he do allegory; he was never generalising or generic; he painted the here and now. He thought of himself as a biologist – just as he thought of his grandfather Sigmund as an eminent zoologist, rather than a psychoanalyst. He disliked ‘art that looks too much like art’, paintings which were suave, or which ‘rhymed’, or sought to flatter either the subject or the viewer, or displayed ‘false feeling’. He ‘never wanted beautiful colours’ in his work, and cultivated an ‘aggressive anti-sentimentality’. When there is more than one figure in a picture, each is separate, isolated: whether one is reading Flaubert and the other is breastfeeding, or whether both are naked on a bed together. There is only contiguity, never interaction.

An interesting painter, but not a pleasant man, unfortunately.

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In the Wilds | Nigel Peake

With the winter winds and driving rain, things naturally fall apart — twisted, gnarled, and eventually incapable of function. When something goes wrong, the solution is often improvised with whatever is available. This haphazard collage of old materials can make it feel as if the country is in a constant state of disrepair. The fences and gates, in particular, embody this with their bespoke supports. When one part collapses or a hole appears, the ubiquitous blue twine come out to bind everything together. Sometimes the original structure disappears altogether, and all that remains is the collection of parts propping it up. With this unspoken artistry, the unexpected is made.

From the introduction to In the Wilds by Nigel Peake

One of the joys of working at Raincoast Books is receiving books from New York-based publisher Princeton Architectural Press in the mail. This week, a beautiful  6″ by 8″ hardcover called In the Wilds by artist Nigel Peake arrived.

Peake who has worked with the likes of Ninja Tune, The Believer, Blueprint, and Dwell Magazine, lives and works in the Irish countryside (the self-described “middle of nowhere”). In The Wilds collects together his obsessively detailed drawings and watercolors of this rural life — the trees, fields, lakes, and rolling hills, but also farm houses, tractors, fences, and telegraph poles.

It is simply lovely.

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“Fuck The Midtones” — How To Make A Book With Steidl

Screening at MoMA next month, How To Make A Book With Steidl is an award-winning documentary by Jörg Adolph and Gereon Wetzel about book publisher Gerhard Steidl:

(via Coudal. Of course.)

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Benedikt Taschen | CBS News

A short profile of Benedikt Taschen from CBS Sunday Morning:

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Midweek Miscellany

Beautiful typographic notecards by Chicago-based designer Tom Davie.

The King of Comps — The prolific Ian Shimkoviak, one half of The Book Designers, interviewed at Caustic Cover Critic:

Every designer has their way of doing things… For me, I start with 3 sketches and as I work on those it will lead to other potential solutions and then I see something online or on a walk or in a magazine and it seems like it could work well for that project too and it just goes on and on. Things also happen unexpectedly. Something happens almost by accident and it looks interesting and somehow works.

No Layout — described as “a digital library for independent publishers, focusing on art books and fashion magazines.” (via Michael Surtees)

Warmblooded — NPR talks to independent booksellers, including Rebecca Fitting and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo of Greenlight Books in Brooklyn, about the future of bookstores:

“I kind of feel like we’re coming to end of the age of dinosaurs and there’s all these warmblooded animals running around instead,” [Fitting] says…

For her part, Bagnulo sees the chains’ woes — and the recent news that Google is entering the e-book market — as something of an opportunity.

“The potential is for there to be two trends,” she explains. “Digital content — which is ubiquitous and everywhere — and the local, boutique, curated side. And the chain stores unfortunately don’t have the advantage in either of those areas. I mean, they can’t carry every book in the world in their store, and they don’t have the same emotional connection to their neighborhood that a local store does.”

And finally…

Author Umberto Eco on WikiLeaks and how technology advances crabwise (and sounding weirdly like William Gibson) for Presse Europ:

So how can privy matters be conducted in future? Now I know that for the time being, my forecast is still science fiction and therefore fantastic, but I can’t help imagining state agents riding discreetly in stagecoaches along untrackable routes, bearing only memorised messages or, at most, the occasional document concealed in the heel of a shoe. Only a single copy thereof will be kept – in locked drawers. Ultimately, the attempted Watergate break-in was less successful than WikiLeaks.

I once had occasion to observe that technology now advances crabwise, i.e. backwards. A century after the wireless telegraph revolutionised communications, the Internet has re-established a telegraph that runs on (telephone) wires. (Analog) video cassettes enabled film buffs to peruse a movie frame by frame, by fast-forwarding and rewinding to lay bare all the secrets of the editing process, but (digital) CDs now only allow us quantum leaps from one chapter to another. High-speed trains take us from Rome to Milan in three hours, but flying there, if you include transfers to and from the airports, takes three and a half hours. So it wouldn’t be extraordinary if politics and communications technologies were to revert to the horse-drawn carriage.

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Midweek Miscellany Oct 1, 08

Great book covers and  design by pioneering graphic designer Erik Nitsche on Flickr  . (Via Ace Jet 170 who has more Nitsche images).

On the subject of Flickr , the San Francisco Chronicle visits the offices of the popular photo site and talks to Director of Community Heather Champ:

“I can’t think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own.”

Photo District News considers the market for limited edition photography books.

10 Things Epublishers Should Do For Readers : a nice wish list from Dear Reader.

And Kassia Krozser has further thoughts on moving from Print to E on Booksquare:

“eBooks are not going to be the next big thing; they’re going to be a thing. A part of a complex mix of reading choices. With that in mind, let’s think about ways we can blend ebooks into the publishing culture without pain.”

Publishing is Dead, Long Live Publishing:  Hugh McGuire  responds to that New York Magazine article on the Huffington Post:

“There’s been much teeth gnashing and lamenting over the impending collapse of the publishing business… Well, the traditional publishing business might be in for a rough ride, but I think we’re poised to see a flowering of a new kind of independent writing, book-making and reading, driven by the web but rooted in the old-fashioned book.”

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