reading notes

Keith Arnatt, Photographs 1974-2002
by David Hurn & Clare Grafik
ISBN: 9781905712052
I found the idea of this book appealing, despite not generally having much patience for discussions (arguments?) about is it art? Maybe it was the title; maybe it was the all-caps fierceness of the handwritten note on the cover (“YOU BASTARD! YOU ATE THE LAST OF [...]

The street art of Slinkachu
ISBN: 9780752226644
The tagline from Slinkachu’s blog may put it best: this is about “little handpainted people, left in London to fend for themselves”.
The book is a collection of photographs of these little people. They are models set up in urban locations, and the jarring quality of the images comes not [...]

by Mike Slack
ISBN: 0977648109
This book is a lot like Slack’s OK OK OK, down to the size and fabric and polaroids on the covers, the same lack of any textual explication, and the same magic in the everyday that is so wonderfully — if you are a fan — expressed with integral polaroid film.
These series [...]

by Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes
ISBN: 1568987846
This book is the result of a project that began on the web: each woman took a photograph in the morning, and they posted the resulting diptych on their blog. (Sadly, the whole year is no longer available online. I have a massive crush on Princeton Architectural [...]

by Maira Kalman
ISBN: 9781594201349
I was fascinated with the unexpected heaviness of this book as an object, and by the style of illustration – handwritten with bright colors and not polished (as in not antiseptic, not as in unfinished) – so of course I needed to bring it home when I found it at The Strand.
I [...]

by Brian Andreas
ISBN: 0964266024
This is the third collection of story-sketches from Andreas. (I read at liked a previous volume, Mostly True.) Whimsy and knowingess seem to be Brian Andreas’s thing: many of his stories – fragments, really – manage to deliver both even though they are less than a page long. “Open Heart” is characteristic [...]

by David Bayles and Ted Orland
ISBN: 0961454733
This book can be reliably found in used bookstores throughout Cambridge and Boston, so I’ve looked at it for years. Looking at it on the shelf always made me feel like a wannabe — I wasn’t a real artist, so I had no business reading the book.
I could [...]

A Saccharine Mouthful of Super Cute
by Charles S. Anderson Design Co. with text by Michael J. Nelson
ISBN: 0810992000
This book is outrageous.
That is pretty much the point: consider the subtitle. It’s full of unreal colors, plastic, toys both super creepy and super cute, and weird portrayals of animals. It dishes out nostalgia (anyone else remember sharp-edged [...]

Collected Stories & Drawings
by Brian Andreas
ISBN: 0964266008
We have one of Brian Andreas’s Story People sculptures on our living room wall. We picked it up last summer from a funky little gallery in Rockport, when we were on vacation. The whimsical appearance and thoughtful message spoke to me:

Wish for your
deepest desires, she said
& when I [...]

The How-to Craze that Swept the Nation
by William L. Bird, Jr.
ISBN: 1568982828

…hobby kits, like paint by number, functioned as a compromise between genuine creativity and the responsibilities of homemaking and earning a living. The real art began the moment the the hobbyist ignored outlines to blend adjacent colors, added or dropped a detail, or elaborated [...]