The Museum of Love and Mystery by Jim Woodring

Jim Woodring is one of the finest artists alive today. He has a new book, called The Museum of Love and Mystery, and you can buy a signed copy for $25 postpaid.

We have received advance copies of THE MUSEUM OF LOVE AND MYSTERY, a souvenir picture album from Frank's strange vacation in the hinterlands of The Unifactor, and we believe she is a lulu. From the soul-satisfying symbolism of the Dark Ride to the majestic encounter in the Throne Room, this garden of unearthly delights is a place adventurous readers of all ages will want to visit and, eventually, move to.

The book proper is a tidy brick of well-modulated chroma; 12 gorgeously colored pen-and-ink drawings packed into 24 super-thick cardboard pages, specially engineered to lay flat for optimum viewing pleasure.

This book will be distributed by Diamond and made available in better comic book stores for $16.95; but if you want to you can buy one from me, signed on the cover in luminous ink (to go with the luminous Sanskrit title) for $25 postpaid anywhere in the USA; overseas, $30. You can order it from me via PayPal; jimwoodring(at)mindspring.com is the account handle.

And lovers of heavy vinyl take note: the book comes with a coupon explaining how to attain the new lifesize Pupshaw and Pushpaw figures... also from your genial pals at Presspop.

Museum of Love and Mystery

Harry Whittier Frees

John says:

The things we do to animals, real or only depicted. I can't look at Mainzer dressed cats without thinking of Harry Whittier Frees.

There is a seemingly universal desire to see animals dressed and going about the business of their inferiors - people. From the first time you scoop the poop, the dog knows the battle has been won.

Mary and Russel Wright's "Guide to Easier Living"

Russel and Mary Wright's low key modernist manifesto, Guide to Easier Living (1950), is back in print but appears to be available exclusively from the Russel Wright Center. Just as well, the website for Russel and Mary's home and studio is well worth a visit.


Link

Fantastic Review of Nest Magazine - "A Strange and Offensive Blend of Art, Design and Porn"

Besides being the best interiors magazine ever, the now defunct Nest altered how I interact with the world. Joseph Holtzman's passions changed how I think about art - it's less about masterpieces, more about individuals who have figured something out and are able to present it in a profound way.

I could prattle on and on about the impact of constructed environments, the designer as disruptor, and the nests that people make for themselves, but it would not compare to the fantastic review of Nest by serial Epinions reviewer, modernmarvel.

I am not sure what Nest is supposed to be other than a bohemian sort of cutting edge art magazine. It is purposefully offensive in so many diverse ways it is sure to make you toss down the magazine in disgust several times. However, if you can move past the offensive content, Nest is probably the most artistic magazine I have ever read.

I can't resist one more quote:

Actress Amy Sedaris is featured, along with the interior of her home filled with antiques, collectibles and junk. Interestingly, Todd Oldham designed a piece for her home. Amy is featured wearing a bra and panties that look like they came from K*Mart in a less than flattering pose (I guess that is what makes it art and not porn).

Amy! Don't listen to that prude. You are art and porn, baby!

Anybody out there know Joseph Holtzman or Carl Skoggard? Please direct them to D+R as we can think of no better guest bloggers.

Link to review

Little Blue Books

Little Blue Books are appealing because they look inexpensive, elegant, and mysterious.
Wikipedia says

Little Blue Books are a series of small staple-bound books published by the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company of Girard, Kansas (1919-1978). They were extremely popular, and achieved a total of more than 300 million booklets sold over the series's lifetime.

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, a socialist reformer and newspaper publisher, and his wife, Marcet, set out to publish small low price paperback pocketbooks that were intended to sweep the ranks of the working class as well as the "educated" class. Their goal was to get works of literature, a wide range of ideas, common sense knowledge and various points of view out to as large an audience as possible. These books, at approximately 3 1/2 by 5 inches (8 1/2 by 12 3/4 cm) easily fit into a working man's back pocket or shirt pocket. The inspiration for the series were cheap ten cent paperback editions of various classic works that Haldeman-Julius had purchased as a 15 year old (the Ballad of Reading Gaol being especially enthralling).

Little Blue Books

1975 Cross-Stitch Book

The patterns in this 1975 cross-stitch design book called, simply enough, "Cross Stitch Designs" from Ondori Publishing (Japan) almost make me want to take up cross-stitching. The colors are incredible and the designs include a flute-playing princess riding a unicorn, dancing blue monkeys, urban architecture and no, I'm not making this up. It's a gem that's worth tracking down.

Fixing broken spines on paperback books

William Smith of Hang Fire Books in Brooklyn has a tutorial on using a clothes iron to re-glue paperback book covers that have become separated from the pages.

The problem with learning a technique like this is that you immediately feel guilty about all the past patients you lost that you didn't have to. I'm sure Jonas Salk felt the same way.

Warning: If you try this technique, start out on worthless books until you find the right heat level and I WOULD NOT attempt this on vintage paperbacks with laminated covers (Dell Mapbacks for instance) unless you first remove the laminate (which is probably half-peeled off anyway).

Link

As I See Repro

Boris Artzybasheff's long out-of-print book As I See is available as a reprint from Ken Steacy Publishing. The work is something like Basil Wolverton meets Stanislav Szukalski. I especially love Artzybasheff's anthropomorphic renderings of industrial machines and manufacturing processes. They're beautiful, eerie and playful all at once.

LINK

Weird Tales covers by Matt Fox

If only the stories in Weird Tales were as good as the covers. Mr. Door Tree of Golden Age Comic Book Stories has uploaded three covers (from 1944-1950) illustrated by Matt Fox, with a promise of more to come. Link

Andrew Loomis Instructional Art Books

Many years ago someone told me that if I really wanted to become an illustrator, I needed to get my hands on Andrew Loomis' art books.

I dutifully went to the World Supply art store in Hollywood and (after stopping to admire the corkboard behind the counter with sketches that David Hockney had drawn on the supply order fax forms he sent in) asked the clerk if she had any Loomis books for sale.

"They are all out of print," she said, "even though we get many requests for his books." She suggested a used book store in Sherman Oaks.

There, the proprietor told me that he had one copy of Creative Illustration (1947). He told me it was $300. "The Disney animators snap up every Loomis book as soon as it arrives," he told me.

He let me look at the book, and as I carefully leafed through the pages, I understood why his books were in such high demand. His mastery of anatomy was impeccable.

I went home without the book, but always asked for his books whenever I went to a used book store. They either didn't have the books, or they cost too much for me.

I finally bought a beat-up, coverless copy of Figure Drawing For All It's Worth for $80 on eBay. But I wanted his other books. Now, thanks to the interwebs, I have them all, in PDF form. In this useful post on Alberto Ruiz's blog, Process Junky, you'll find links to PDF files of Loomis work, along with Ruiz's suggestions for other good art instruction books. Ruiz is a terrific artist in his own right, so it's worth paying attention to what he has to say.

1. Fun With a Pencil (1939)
2. Figure Drawing For All It's Worth (1943)
3. Creative Illustration (1947)
4. Successful Drawing (1951)
5. Drawing The Head And Hands (1956)
6. The Eye Of The Painter (1961)

Link

1914 Movie Poster for Extraordinary Adventures of Saturnino Farandola

Do yourself a favor and click above image for bigness

It appears that neither fiend nor fish is safe in the 1914 film L'Avventure Straordinarissime di Saturnino Farandola. In addition to creating the most beautiful movie poster I have ever seen, Albert Robida has written/illustrated over 200 books and completed 60,000 drawings.

In addition to being a prolific illustrator, Robida was a futurist and science fiction writer who pictured a future where books would be replaced with recordings listened to on pocket watch sized phonographs powered by the movement of the human body.

From the Project Gutenberg, La Fin Des Livres, (Eng.: The End of Books), by Albert Robida and Octave Uzanne, English summary by Michael Ward:

But what of the future of books? The narrator argues that Gutenberg's invention will soon disappear. Reading causes lassitude and wearies us tremendously. Words through the speaking tube, however, give us a special vibrancy. The gramophone will destroy printed works. Our eyes are easily damaged, but our ears are strong.

But, his listeners object, gramophones are heavy and the cylinders easily damaged. This will be taken care of; new models will be built which will fit in the pocket; the precision of watchmaking will be applied to them. Devices will collect electricity from the movements of the individual, which will power the gramophones.

The author will become his own editor. In order to avoid imitations and counterfeits, he will deposit his voice at the Patent Office. Instead of famous men of letters, we will have famous narrators. The art of diction will become extremely important. The ladies will no longer say that they like an author's style, but that his voice is so charming, so serious, that he leaves you full of emotion after listening to his work: it is an incomparable ravishment of the ear.

The libraries will be become phonographoteques. They will house famous works by artists in vogue, such as Coquelin's performance of Moliere, Irving's Shakespeare, Salvini's Dante, etc. Bibliophiles will become phonographophiles, and collect cylinders with the unique example of the voice of a Master of the theater, poetry or music, or those with new and unknown alternate versions of a famous work. Narrators will do comic pieces, sound effects, and dialects like Irishmen and American Westerners.

At the crossroads of all cities, there will be kiosks where the passerby can put in a penny and hear the works of Dickens, Dumas Sr. or Longfellow. The author can carry his works to buildings on the street, where multiple pipes will carry his words to all the windows for the people to listen. At four or five cents per hour, even the poor can afford this, and the wandering author will still make money because of the number of listeners at each house.

Our grandchildren will use phonographs everywhere; at every restaurant table, public transportation, steamship cabins, and hotel rooms; railroads will supply Pullman circulating libraries which will make travelers forget the distances they cover, while allowing them to look out the windows. Printing will be abandoned, except for a small possible use in trade and private communication.

He is right. All the kids are listening to iPods in their steamship cabins.


Link to La Fin Des Livres, Project Gutenberg
Movie poster via Paleo-Future

Ways of the Six-Footed: A Delightful Introduction to the World of Insects

Ways of the Six-Footed: A Delightful Introduction to the World of Insects, by Anna Botsford Constock, is not a well-known book. A Google search turns up just 57 results, none of which mention the book other than in passing.

Anna Botsford Comstock [wikipedia] is more well-known. In 1923, twenty years after the publication of Ways of the Six-Footed, a League of Women Voters survey named her one of America's 12 greatest living women for her role as a nature educator. She said her teaching method, based on direct observation, was to "cultivate the child's imagination, love of the beautiful, and sense of companionship with life out-of-doors."

Here's an excerpt about queen bees from a chapter on social insects called "A Perfect Socialism":

In appearance she is larger than the largest workers -- evidently a queenlier bee. Her first act, if unhindered by the workers, is her one claim to similarity to human royalty: she starts at once on a hunt for other queens in the hive, for our queen is jealous and will brook the presence of no other claimant to her throne. Her sting is a nobel weapon kept sacred to the slaying of her peers. She hunts for other queen-cells, tears them open with great fury, and assassinates the helpless young princesses within them. But she is quite as ready for a fair fight as for assassination, for when she finds another queen fully developed she will fight her until one or the other is killed. The stark bodies of fifteen unfortunate queens we found one day thrown out of their hives; grim witnesses to the prowess of the royal lady in possession of the colony.

I first came upon "Ways of the Six-Footed" 11 years ago in the library of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and spent the better part of an hour reading it. I ordered a copy from Amazon as soon as I got home (it's out of print, but you can buy a used copy for as little as $2.14!).

Woman's World

You might think nothing could be more boring than a video of the pages of a novel, and you'd be right, except in the case of Woman's World, by collage artist Graham Rawle, a book written by cutting out words, images, and sentence fragments from vintage women's magazines and pasting them on paper. The result is not only wonderful to look at, it's also an astonishingly good novel with a peculiarly appealing style that could only come as a result of being being written in this way.

The making of the Book

Woman's World, has been collaged from individual frgaments of text (around 40,000 in all) found in women's magazines published in the early 1960s. It has taken five years to produce.

In my previous book, Diary of an Amateur Photographer, I used scraps of found text from photography manuals and cheap pulp thrillers to tell parts of the story. I began to wonder if it would be possible to create a whole novel using nothing but words cut out of magazines...

I started writing this book in the usual way. When I had completed a rough draft, I then searched through hundreds of women's magazines, cutting out anything that seemed relevant to the scenes I'd written — sentences and phrases that, when joined together, could be rearranged to approximate what I wanted to say. These cuttings were then filed and from them I began to reassemble to story. Little by little, my original words were discarded and replaced by those I'd found. Once the transition was complete, I could start pasting up the pages as artwork.

The method was primitive: scissors and glue. Apart from a little tweaking here and there to enlarge very small type to a readable size, everything was done by hand. The artwork alone took two years.

Working from the library of collected materials meant surrendering my writing to the element of chance and forced me to be inventive with the words that were available. The language of women's magazines from that time is distinctive and although I have taken their words out of context to tell an entirely new story, the voice of the original 1960s woman's world remains.

Graham Rawle
London, 2005.

Book of collections: In Flagrante Collecto

There's no way to predict what things will become collectible in the future. But it's easy to predict what will be worthless, uninteresting, and uncollectable -- anything that is advertised as a "collector's item." To me, people who collect things for the sake of collecting are going about it the wrong way. Collecting is a symptom, a side-effect, a consequence of an obsession. Collections happen because the collector has no choice but to acquire those things that call to him or her for some highly personal reason.

No book captures the spirit of the true collector more accurately than In Flagrante Collecto (Caught in the Act of Collecting), by Marilynn Gelfman Karp. From her introduction:

There are people who amass gemstones and gold. There are competing collectors of baseball cards, stamps, and art. Then there are those who love the unloved. These are the purest kind of collectors; the ones who value misshapen pretzels, Do Not Disturb Signs, and other people's shopping lists. There is deep and satisfying value in collecting arcane objects that most people overlook or dismiss. This book is a tribute to the realm of those "unloveable" objects -- those that seem banal, common, corny, in bad taste, too familiar, or just invisible.

The 1000 photos give testament to the often beautiful byproducts of a having deep and unexplainable curiosity. Link

American Heritage Jr. Library: Steamboats on the Mississippi

The American Heritage Junior Library book on steamboats reads like a damn novel.

From Steamboats on the Mississippi:

There were many notable races, but the most famous of all was the one between the Robert F. Lee and the Natchez in 1870... All the glass in the Lee's pilothouse was removed, as were the steam escape pipes, and various doors, windows, shutters, and projections - anything that would cause air resistance... A captain trying to set a new record or show his heels to another boat would cram the fireboxes with fuel, throw in pitch or oil or fat sides of pork to make the fire burn faster and hotter, tie down the safety valves to raise the steam pressure to a screaming pitch - and hope for the best.

One of my very favorite books, and this isn't sickeningly sweet nostalgia for a book I read in a tree house as a kid - I read it the first time a couple of years ago! There is a chapter called "Scoundrels and Cutthroats!" A champion of a book. I wish history was always told so effortlessly.


American Heritage Junior Library "Steamboats on the Mississippi"
Out of Print
Link

Garage Sale Find: Lovebird Cuteness vs. Parrot Disease Double Book

This seemingly benign book celebrating the appeal of the common lovebird is actually a stealthy attempt to horrify the reader with extremely gory photos of parrot diseases. The juxtaposition of topics in a single volume seems almost too sinister. It appears to be a legit attempt to leverage the classic Ace Double Novel format, but I can't help to wonder if it isn't the work of an artist with extremely mixed feelings about birds.

The classic paperback gimmick - the original Ace Double Novel

Link to the stomach turning back cover photo. WARNING: It is disgusting.