This book is a cover version, a recital, an echo. A guide to (modern) buildings in London: modified, amplified, rechannelled, redistributed through current modes of reproduction.
Published by Precint.
Posts tagged with books
Some Other Buildings
Make Ready
Nicholas Gottlund, Make Ready
April 18 – May 1, 2013 at Karma
For each book on display, there is a companion piece. The works in this exhibition both extrapolate upon the bound book as well as transform their materials by means of folding, cutting, exposing and overprinting – all methods that are routinely used in the production of the book. Through the manipulation of the method, the material, the tool and the reference, attention is brought back to the detail. It is not the detail–ing as in the addition of embellishment or of a final once over, but the inherent palpable quality of process made evident.
At the time I wasn’t aware of it, but my parents buying me a tape recorder when I was 11 was the trigger. It was a battery-powered portable tape recorder. I recorded everything in the house, and I realised that with batteries and a little microphone you could take it outside, and that was really liberating. Then I got into manipulating and listening back to it, it became a way of tuning in. Then I gradually became aware - this is the late 1960s and early 70s - of musique concrete. There’s this fantastic book I remember, I’ve still got it upstairs, called Composing With Tape Recorders. I’d got a tape recorder and I was interested in the idea of applying things musically, and I couldn’t believe it, that a grown-up had written this book. That got me interested in the idea of using the tape recorder as an instrument.
—Chris Watson
(⇒ via the quietus)
This is the Way Your Leverage Lies
A Mock-up draft of title page for Xerox Book.
Like Conceptual artists, Siegelaub explored subversive communication methods and mediums in his work and raised important questions about the making, display, ownership, distribution, and sale of art. This exhibition highlights items in The Seth Siegelaub Papers, now in The Museum of Modern Art Archives, that illustrate Siegelaub’s role in empowering artists within the hierarchy of the art world.
“This is the way your leverage lies”: The Seth Siegelaub Papers as Institutional Critique opens today at MOMA.
Word.Book 1, Graphic Design Terms
With the increasing international exchange and mobility of creative workers and students, unlike standard dictionaries, our publications respond to the need of translating rapidly evolving vocabulary. The terms are offered in both languages, with definitions, illustrations and references to related terms, where necessary.
Compiled through using a wide variety of sources, both in print and online, Word.Books are working tools that evolve with their sector. Online forums will act as a digital extension of each publication thereby offering users the possibility to suggest and discuss terminology, definitions and also to add illustrations to complement their Word.Book.
(⇒ via mosaia)
The Last Book Sale
Larry McMurtry at his book auction on Friday in Archer City, Tex., where some 300,000 books were for sale.
(Photo: Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times)
Now 76, Mr. McMurtry, the country’s highest-profile book dealer, recently decided to whittle his enterprise down to one building, which will remain open with an inventory of about 150,000 books. He said he expected the single store to be maintained by his heirs.
“One store is manageable,” he said. “Four stores would be a burden.”
The full article. And some more photos.
(⇒ via the nytimes)
McMurtry on the sale in the NYRB.
However, as all of us have discovered, even though the basic technology of hypertext may be with us for centuries to come, perhaps even as long as the technology of the book, its hardware and software seem to be fragile and short-lived; whole new generations of equipment and programs arrive before we can finish reading the instructions of the old. Even as I write, Brown University’s highly sophisticated Intermedia system, on which we have been writing our hypertext fictions, is being phased out because it is too expensive to maintain and incompatible with Apple’s new operating-system software, System 7.0. A good portion of our last semester was spent transporting our documents from Intermedia to Storyspace (which Brown is now adopting) and adjusting to the new environment.
—Robert Coover, “The End of Books”, 1992
Xerox Book
Douglas Huebler’s piece in Seth Siegelaub’s Xerox Book.
Each artist was asked to make a piece for 25 pages of letter-sized paper for the book. The book was the exhibition.
In Hans Ulrich Oberist’s A Brief History of Curating, Siegelaub discusses the project:
What I was trying to do was standardize the conditions of exhibition with the idea that the resulting differences in each artist’s project or work, would be precisely what the artist’s work was about.
It was an attempt to consciously standardize, in terms of an exhibition, book, or project, the conditions of production underlying the exhibition process. It was the first exhibition in fact where I asked the artists to do something, and it was probably somewhat less collaborative than I am now making it sound. But I do have the impression that the close working relationship with the artist was an important factor of all the projects, even when I was not particularly close to an artist, as for example, Bob Morris.
Ed Wood’s Sleaze Paperbacks
Hot on the heels of their exhibition on the political fanzines/ephemera of the Crass era, In All Our Decadence People Die, Boo Hooray is featuring another collection of overlooked media. From November 2nd till December 1st, the gallery will feature the sleaze paperbacks of Ed Wood. Should be a great show for those interested in book design, human sexuality (the books were recently purchased by the Cornell for their rare book collection), and Wood, himself.
The antiquarian mystique surrounding Edward Davis Wood Jr.’s career as an author of pornographic pulp fiction is legend. He wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, books were published and re-published under different titles, and occasionally under different author names. Multiple authors would share the same pseudonym, and the companies that published the titles weren’t the kind of operations that kept any kind of records, nor paid royalties, nor really existed in the manner that most are to expect of book publishers.
The paperbacks are truly rare, even in an age of mass-searchable used book engines, and google ferocity. Ed Wood’s sleaze fiction is also as strange, idiosyncratic and out of step with his times and mores as his infamous movies. Wood would write porn inter-spliced with lengthy philosophical, sociological and psychological discourse, he’d write first person narratives of life as a transvestite in the buttoned up America of the 1950’s. He’d riff on psychosexual themes, and unleash his id, his ego and his superego in turn, sometimes in the same chapter. He’d write about sex and the human condition without veneer or filters, offering up the damaged and anguished voice of a desperately soul-searching drunk with a sense of self-worth that would stand in dichotomy to his self-pity.
His descent into alcoholism and poverty was mirrored by the publishers that employed him. Towards the end of his life he wrote pornography with decreasing amounts of the strange flourishes of his eccentric personality. He died in 1978 of an alcohol-induced heart attack. His friends say the porn killed him. For further information see Rudolph Grey’s masterful biography Nightmare of Ecstasy.
This is the largest assembly of Ed Wood publications exhibited to date. Boo-Hooray has tracked down roughly seventy of his books and publications. Some collectors claim that he wrote dozens more. Entrepreneurial book dealers often indulge in Ed Wood pseudonym speculation. A ten dollar paperback can thus become an antiquarian rarity, even with flimsy or non-existent evidence. A handful of these are in the show.
A catalog is available for purchase here.
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