NEW BOOKS BLOG

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We’ve expanded our FREE DELIVERY SERVICE: we’re now running it three days a week - Monday, Wednesday & Friday, and we’ve expanded the free delivery area to include the following postal areas EC1, EC2, EC3, EC4, E1, E2, E3, E8, E9, E10, N1, N5 & N16. If your postal address is in one of these postcodes, type in the code 'FreeDel' when processing your online order and the cost of £6.00 p&p will be deducted from the total. There is no maximum to the number of times this code can be used – however, it will only deduct £6.00 per order – so, if you want to order more than one item, either make multiple orders, or if not let us know and we’ll refund any delivery costs that may have charged.


To the left, some of the new magazine issues due in next week…

Forthcoming Books Seen This Week - ending 9 January

Graphic Design

               While magazines such as Spin and The Face have disappeared from newsstands and mailboxes, non-traditional periodicals with names like Boneshaker, Lucky Peach, Anorak, WRAP, and Kinfolk are taking their places on shelves and coffee tables everywhere. Print is Dead. Long Live Print is an eye-opening look into the explosion of independent, creatively led magazines that are currently shaping the future of print journalism. It showcases over 50 examples of innovative magazines from around the globe. The book divides the magazines into genres, including art and culture, travel, sports, and style. Each periodical is represented by selected spreads and newly commissioned photography, along with a brief introductory text. Interviews with editors, art directors, and founders from each magazine offer background information as well as insight into why they decided to start their publications and the challenges they face. A directory at the back lists dozens more magazines worth investigating. This paean to the printed word is filled with creativity and innovation as well as hope for the future of print media. Request email when in stock

               On Display: 50 Posters Designed for the Hayward Gallery is a large format collection of highlights from the Hayward Gallery’s archive of exhibition posters. The archive acts as both a who’s-who of contemporary art and a compilation of some of Britain’s finest exhibition poster design. Focused on a golden age of British typography, this collection brings together designs by the likes of Neville Brody, Theo Crosby, Richard Hollis and Roger Huggett - designers who would go on to define contemporary British graphic design. On Display is both a collection of highly desirable posters to tear out and frame, as well as a fascinating insight into art and graphic design in the second half of the twentieth century. Catherine Flood, Curator of Posters and Prints, V&A, introduces her selection with an essay placing them within the context of twentieth century graphic design. Each poster is further accompanied by an individual text by writer Hettie Judah illuminating the related exhibition and the work of the designer. A3 in format with perforated pages, each of the posters have been carefully re-scanned and colour-corrected to the highest possible standard, ready to be read, framed and displayed. Designed by Claus Due at Designbolaget. Request email when in stock

 

Sound

               Which mechanisms and logics of decision making and choice lie at the basis of the selections made by people working in the pop music circuit? Which general frames of thinking and evaluating do pop music professionals apply? Almost as a rule, these people will talk about the same bands, those that make the crossover to the outside world – the ‘hypes’. What are the origins of these hypes? How is it possible that everybody talks about the same bands? What makes people talk about some, yet the same bands, while remaining silent about other bands? And why is it that only a small percentage of the legion of bands that stand at the gates get ample airplay, concerts, press coverage and, as a result, a sufficiently large audience? Alternative Mainstream deals with the music segment that lies between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘underground’. This segment includes genres that range from hip hop to rock and from folk to electronic music. Gert Keunen attempts to uncover which aesthetics and ideologies lie at the basis of the cultural construct that is the alternative mainstream and embeds his findings in a broader socio-economic context. Doina Petrescu, Precarias a la deriva, Simon Sheikh, Stavros Stavrides, Maiko Tanaka, Marina Vishmidt, Sarah van Walsum, et al. Request email when in stock

 

Design

               The Grand Domestic Revolution Handbook is a compendium of living research developed by artists, designers, theorists, neighbours, and activists who investigate and expand the status of the home outside the narrow lens of private concerns, but in consideration of the great potential in supporting a privacy that revitalizes and allows for other forms of sociality. It offers numerous entries that include case studies, project documentation, ephemera, analysis, and theory in the form of artistic, collective, and spatial design operations. This collection of texts and images is thereby unusual, complex, and fascinating, yet as constructive as any home interior catalogue. The book provides tools for building a domestic commons where private and public merge and are thereby redefined. GDR is informed by neo-Marxist, post-structuralist, and late nineteenth-century material feminist views on domestic labour, issues, actions, and research. Inhabiting the structure of a 1960s home economics design manual, the book investigates existing domestic regimes and divides materials into the following key categories: Home Apparatus, Accommodations, Work at Home, Properties and Oikos, and Neighbouring (Organizing). Many projects are woven throughout these chapters. They constitute a diverse and sometimes conflicting tapestry of domestic tactics, apparatuses of disruption, and political entanglements to spark your imagination and catalyse your own GDR practices.  Whether you are a flexible worker, domestic worker, house husband, elderly caregiver, mother, activist, or student intern, this book aims to provide an evocative — if not useful — resource for an artistic, political, social, or personal "revolution" from the very place where you eat, sleep, and work. It brings together relations and tools being forged between the private and public spheres, and across multiple fields, in the interest of (in)forming society from the very inner but common sphere of the domestic realm. Contributors: Agency, Sepake Angiama, Ask!, Ruth Buchanan, Binna Choi, Doris Denekamp, Silvia Federici, Katherine Gibson, Arend Groosman, Shannon Jackson, Dolores Hayden, Christina Kiaer, Margaret Kohn, Gabriele Kunsch, Emily Pethick. Request email when in stock

                The Complete Designers’ Lights II (1950–1990). Clémence and Didier Krzentowski – the founders and directors of the leading contemporary design Galerie kreo – have been collecting lights for 30 years. Focusing particularly on Italian and French design, their collection is the most important of its kind today, spanning creations from the 1950s to the 1990s. It includes large groups of works by Paulin, Guariche, Castiglioni, and the biggest collection of Sarfatti. Conceived as a catalogue raisonné of nearly 500 lights, this book also includes a discussion between Didier Krzentowski, the design historian and Director of the Bordeaux Musée des Arts décoratifs et du Design, Constance Rubini, and the journalist and design critic Pierre Doze. Also featured is an essay by the design and art critic Alex Coles focusing on the relationship between light design and light art, mainly through a parallel study of Gino Sarfatti’s and Dan Flavin’s works. Request email when in stock

 

Architecture

                Cedric Price Works 1952-2003: A Forward-minded Retrospective.  This anthology brings together for the first time all of the projects and articles & talks by British architect Cedric Price (1934-2003).  A chronological arrangement places Price in the context of postwar England, illuminating how cultural, social and political factors conditioned his work from the outset, and then subsequently shaped its development as his practice changed from the 1960s-90s. Full project descriptions are set alongside illustrations, many previously unpublished. Content material is drawn from the original work. Edited by Samantha Hardingham, the books present the munificence of Price: thinker, philosopher, artist and unparalleled raconteur – a thoroughly modern traditionalist. Request email when in stock

                Small Architecture/Natural Architecture: Kengo Kuma. This book combines two extended essays by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, which together provide an overview of his key built works and a summation of his ideas about architecture, developed over the course of his career to date. Originally published as two smaller books, and until now only available in Japanese, this edition comprises a lucid theoretical manifesto for humble, sustainable architecture sensitive to materials and to place. Request email when in stock

 

Theory

                The Czech Files is a result of visits and discussions carried out by Hans Ulrich Obrist in artists’ studios in Prague around 2001 and 2008. Interviews with Milan Grygar, Jirí Kovanda, Karel Malich, and many others, map the historical events as well as unknown stories of the actors of the Czech ‘second avant-garde’. The artists and intellectuals of this generation were born in between 1920–1945. They lived through the 1960s cultural upheaval known as the Prague Spring, and witnessed the ‘normalization’ of the 1970s when censorship was re-introduced. This series of interviews contextualize a generation of Czech artists within the historical events that marked their lives and careers, and draw attention to their urgency to resist historical events while keeping their artistic practices sustained, radical, and vital. Published with tranzit.cz, this publication is a unique encounter with key artistic figures and moments of history, which created a complex landscape of artistic practices under socialism, as well as after the changes. Request email when in stock

                (Curating) From A to Z offers a summary of the development of curatorial practice over the last two decades seen through the eyes of curator Jens Hoffmann. In this publication each letter of the alphabet evokes a particular word related to the world of exhibition making: From A (as in Artist) and B (as in Biennial) to R (as in Retrospective) and W (as in White Cube). Employing a diarist style, the curator presents his personal curatorial alphabet with a similar transparency and the same idiosyncratic character revealed in many of his exhibitions. The entries are not only stimulating and intellectually rigorous, but also emotionally engaging. Request email when in stock

 

Art

                The Island: London mapped. A masterpiece of imaginative cartography, artist Stephen Walter’s detailed maps of London reveal much more about the city than its winding streets and historic buildings. London’s streets, built up over more than two thousand years, are a maze of history, cultures, and stories. In his fantastically detailed maps of the city, Stephen Walter translates these elements into a tangle of insightful yet humorous words and symbols that make up a complex of hidden meanings and wider contradictions. Testament to Walter’s skill and importance as a cartographer, his ground-breaking, oversized map The Island was one of only two contemporary works to feature in the seminal Magnificent Maps exhibition held at the British Library in 2010, the other by Grayson Perry, alongside hugely important historical maps, such as Pierre Desceliers's 1550 world map. The work, which reimagines London as an insular body of land surrounded by water, has been reconfigured and turned into Walter’s own version of a London street atlas, with readers able to explore his unique vision of the city by flicking through the pages. A grid at the front of the book lets readers navigate their way through the map and the large-scale reproductions allow for close examination of his witty depictions. Walter’s maps have a cult following and now a wider audience will be able to immerse themselves in his personal vision that both celebrates the art of cartography and pokes intelligent fun at the city he calls home. Request email when in stock

                Ulay has been a pioneer of Polaroid photography and one of the central figures of performance art since the 1970s. A singular presence among the artists of his generation, his radically innovative work, partly known for his twelve-year partnership with Marina Abramović, has received critical acclaim worldwide. This generous volume Whispers reveals an extremely innovative oeuvre, coherently rooted in a personal life philosophy guided by strong ethical principles. Contributors: Marina Abramović, Laurie Anderson, Timea Lelik, Tevz Logar, Thomas McEvilley, Charlemagne Palestine, Lena Pislak, Silvio Wolf.  Request email when in stock

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