Art & Design

In this collection of essays on the work of, and conversations with, John Berger, thirty-seven of his friends, artistic collaborators and followers come together to form the first truly international and cross-cultural celebration of his interventions. Berger has for decades, through his poetic humanism, brought together geographically, historically and socially disparate subjects. His work continues to throw out lifelines across genres, times and types of experience, opening up radical quest...

Mudpuppy's Andy Warhol Coloring Book features the iconic pop artist's greatest hits ready to be coloured in and customised by artists, young and old. Colour-in well-known classics like Andy's Campbell's Soup Cans with this 32-page colouring book. Each page is perforated to easily tear out and display as a new work of art. Paperback: 32 PagesProduct Dimensions: 243 x 299 mmISBN: 9780735346062 Published by Mudpuppy Press

In Beyond Wilderness, photographer Chua Chye Teck explores the fast disappearing natural wilderness in Singapore through a series of black and white photographs. Using the forest structure to express the idea of emotional layers, his photographs are a reflection on memory and transformation, and present the dualities of isolation and the unknown. Beyond Wilderness charts the artistic and spiritual journeys of the photographer, and is as much one man’s personal encounter with nature as it is a...

Book Cover Design from East Asia is a compendium of more than 100 book covers from China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The book features the work of Wang Zhi-Hong, Nakano Design Office, The Simple Society, UMA/design farm, Hayashi Takuma Design Office and many, many more.Paperback: 112 PagesProduct Dimensions: 115 x 150 mmISBN: 9780957081697Published by Counter-Print

Proposed in 1895 by Proust to the newspaper Revue hebdomadaire (it was rejected), this essay is much more than a straightforward piece of art criticism. It is a literary experiment in which an unnamed narrator gives advice to a young man suffering from melancholy, taking him on an imaginary tour through the Louvre where his readings of Chardin imbue the everyday world with new meaning, and his ruminations on Rembrandt take his melancholic pupil beyond the realm of mere objects. Published for ...

Jon Savage's Ralph Gleason Award-winning England's Dreaming is the ultimate book on punk, its progenitors, the Sex Pistols, and their time: the late 1970s. Full of anedcote, insight, and exclusive interviews, it tells the sensational story of the meteoric rise and rapid decline of the last great rock'n'roll band and the cultural moment they came to define.Paperback: 656 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9780571326280Published by Faber & Faber

From the skyline of Dubai to the idea of 'quality', the impact of broadband cabling in West Africa to the street plan beneath your feet Extrastatecraft is the operating system of the modern world. What can we do about it? Infrastructure is not only the underground pipes and cables controlling our cities. It also determines the hidden rules that structure the spaces all around us - free trade zones, smart cities, suburbs, and shopping malls. Extrastatecraft charts the emergent new powers contr...

In Girl in a Band Kim Gordon, founding member of Sonic Youth and role model for a generation of women, tells her story. She writes frankly about her route from girl to woman and pioneering icon within the music and art scene of New York City in the 1980s and 90s as well as marriage, motherhood, and independence. Filled with the sights and sounds of a changing world and a remarkable life, Girl in a Band is a moving, evocative chronicle of an extraordinary artist.Paperback: 288 PagesProduct Dim...

This is a statement, an art piece, a belief, a dream, an idea. This is an observation, an obsession, a process, a completion. This is a question, an answer, a declaration, a progression. This is a toe past the line, a thought outside the box, a boundary pushed. This is a whisper in an ocean of screams, a crack in a gargantuan wall, a thread in the wider tapestry. Or maybe this is just a book of postcards you can tear off and send to your friends who deserve more than a "FINE" t-shirt.Hardback...

Before Carrie Brownstein became a music icon, she was a young girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest just as it was becoming the setting for one the most important movements in rock history. Seeking a sense of home and identity, she would discover both while moving from spectator to creator in experiencing the power and mystery of a live performance. With Sleater-Kinney, Brownstein and her bandmates rose to prominence in the burgeoning underground feminist punk-rock movement that would defi...

Everyone needs and deserves housing. But today our homes are being transformed into commodities, making the inequalities of the city ever more acute. Profit has become more important than social need, The poor are forced to pay more for worse housing. Communities are faced with the violence of displacement and gentrification. And the benefits of decent housing are only available for those who can afford it. In Defense of Housing is the definitive statement by leading urban planner Peter Marcu...

In Junkspace, architect Rem Koolhaas itemised in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is here updated and twinned with Running Room, a fresh response from architectural critic Hal Foster. ‘The manifesto is a modernist mode, one that looks to the future… Junkspace makes no such claim: “Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century,” states Koolhaas matter-of-factly. Junkspace does a harder thing: it “foretells” the present, which is to say that it ...

During the course of the twentieth century, communism took power in Eastern Europe and remade the city in its own image. Ransacking the urban planning of the grand imperial past, it set out to transform everyday life, its sweeping boulevards, epic high-rise and vast housing estates an emphatic declaration of a non-capitalist idea. Now, the regimes that built them are dead and long gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin, Moscow to post-Revolution Kiev, the buildings, their most obvious legacy, remain...

Hans Ulrich Obrist has been conducting ongoing conversations with the world's greatest living artists since he began in Switzerland, aged 19, with Fischli and Weiss. Here he chooses nineteen of the greatest figures and presents their conversations, offering the reader intimacy with the artists and insight into their creative processes. Inspired by the great Vasari, Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects explores the meaning of art and artists today, their varying approaches to creating...

Ever since diving head first into the home entertainment market with a subscription-based DVD-by-mail operation, Netflix has constantly sought to improve the user experience through their user-specific movie recommendation algorithms. By introducing streaming in 2007 and removing the conventional constraints of time and place, Netflix has redefined the way we watch movies and television. Magazine: 138 PagesProduct Dimensions: 170 x 240 mmISBN: 9791160360028 Published by Magazine B

A fascinating insight into the strange world of collectors of the macabre, Morbid Curiosities features 18 unique collections and an extensive interview with each collector, explaining how and why they collect, and showcasing the most remarkable pieces from each collection. The collections include skulls, mummified body parts, taxidermy, occult objects and various carnival, and side-show and criminal ephemera. Detailed captions tell the curious stories behind each object, many of which are bei...

From the Yardbirds to Cream, Blind Faith to Derek and the Dominos, and a hugely-successful solo career, Eric Clapton's fifty years in the music business can look like an uninterrupted rise to become one of the greatest guitar players who ever lived. But his story is as complicated as it is fascinating. Clapton's god-like skill with a guitar was matched by an almost equal talent for self-destruction. He has never shied away from telling the truth about his battles with drink and drugs - or the...

If Paul Rand was the most influential American graphic designer of the twentieth century, then Paul Rand: A Designer's Art is the most important on his work. A comprehensive collection of his most important and best-known designs, A Designer's Art gives unique insight into Rand's design process and theory. This new edition of Rand's classic monograph, long unavailable, meticulously re-creates the graphic quality of the original. It includes more than two hundred illustrations and twenty-seven...

In this classic work of music theory Adorno critiques two major composers, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, who he presents as dialectically opposed to one another in terms of their musical styles, techniques and directions. Adorno's readings, especially of Schoenberg, continue to cause controversy and disagreement among musicians, music lovers and philosophers today. As always with Adorno, a wide range of social, cultural, philosophical and political questions are raised in the process...

Now Grayson Perry is a fully paid-up member of the art establishment, he wants to show that any of us can appreciate art (after all, there is a reason he's called this book Playing to the Gallery and not 'Sucking up to an Academic Elite'). Based on his hugely popular BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures and full of pictures, this funny, personal journey through the art world answers the basic questions that might occur to us in an art gallery but seem too embarrassing to ask. Paperback: 144 PagesProduc...

Poems About Sculpture is a unique anthology of poems from around the world and across the ages about our most enduring art form. Sculpture has the longest memory of the arts: from the Paleolithic era, we find stone carvings and clay figures embedded with human longing. And poets have long been fascinated by the idea of eternity embodied by the monumental temples and fragmented statues of ancient civilizations. From Keats's Grecian urn and Shelley's "Ozymandias" to contemporary verse about May...

Legendarily reticent, perverse and misleading, Prince is one of the few remaining 80s superstars who still, perhaps, remains unexplained. Now a firm fixture in the pop canon, where such classics as 'Purple Rain', 'Sign o' the Times' and 'Parade' regularly feature in Best Ever Album polls, Prince is still, as he ever was, an enigma. His live performances are legendary (21 Nights at the O2 in 2007) and while recent releases have been modestly successful at best, his influence on urban music, an...

Writer and artist Shubigi Rao has been working on 'Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book', a ten-year long film, book,  visual art, and exhaustive research project about the history of book destruction, censorship and cultural genocide, as well as the book as symbol and resistance. Travelling and filming solo across the world, collecting fragments, ephemera, anecdotes, and buried secrets, she visits public and private collections, libraries and archives, institutions and individuals th...

Translated by Donatien Grau This new translation by French writer and academic Donatien Grau includes an introduction that situates the essay within Gauguin's written oeuvre, as well as a selection of works to illustrate the text itself. Through Gauguin's final piece of writing we see the artist in the full throes of passion--for his work, for his art, for the art of others and against anyone who would stand in his way. Paperback: 56 PagesProduct Dimensions: 108 x 178 mmISBN: 9781941701393 Pu...

The raw concrete buildings of the 1960s constitute the greatest flowering of architecture the world has ever seen. The biggest construction boom in history promoted unprecedented technological innovation and an explosion of competitive creativity amongst architects, engineers and concrete-workers. The Brutalist style was the result. Today, after several decades in the shadows, attitudes towards Brutalism are slowly changing, but it is a movement that is still overlooked, and grossly underrate...

Mezz Mezzrow was a boy from Chicago who learned to play the sax in reform school and pursued a life in music and a life of crime. He moved from Chicago to New Orleans to New York, working in brothels and bars, bootlegging, dealing drugs, getting hooked, doing time, producing records, and playing with the greats, among them Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Fats Waller. Really the Blues, the jive-talking memoir that Mezzrow wrote at the insistence of, and with the help of, the novelist Ber...

Ever since the egg has been perverted as a rich and readily available source of food for human beings, we have not thought much of it beyond its role in our diet. An altogether loathsome person was once overheard commenting (with complete disregard for the minuscule strength of a chick) that the brittleness of eggshells is meant for the convenience of the human hand. To allow a faint glimmer in the gloom of ignorance, we must begin to become conscious of the subtleties within each egg. Scienc...

Among the many clothing types in our wardrobe, none leads a more unappreciated existence than the sock. Wavering between undergarment and outerwear, the staggering amount of pressure and force applied to the sock each time we take a step forward attests to its silent resilience. It is thus, not without irony, that the common definition of quality socks lies precisely in how little we take notice of its presence; a good pair of socks becomes one that is absent when worn on the feet...Magazine:...

Semi Private Life in Helsinki is a visual journal in four parts. It documents the every-other-day life of artist Aiwei Foo, during her years in Finland. This journal is also part of her on-going series The Beaming Girl.Paperback: 95 pagesProduct Dimensions: 190 x 245 mm Published by Math Paper Press

Semi Private Life in Helsinki is a visual journal in four parts. It documents the every-other-day life of artist Aiwei Foo, during her years in Finland. This journal is also part of her on-going series The Beaming Girl. Paperback: 95 pagesProduct Dimensions: 190 x 245 mm Published by Math Paper Press

This book is dedicated to the traveler. But not just any traveler, mind you. It is meant for the wide-eyed, sometimes curious, occasionally weary-hearted traveler who dreams too much and wanders too often. It is for the traveler who watches strangers go by and weaves a million imaginary stories about their lives. It is also for the traveler whose sojourns bring home lifelong friendships and connections. Each page is the author's determined choice to focus on the quiet and dream-like beauty th...

In The Book, Keith Houston reveals that the paper, ink, thread, glue and board from which a book is made tell as rich a story as the words on its pages-of civilisations, empires, human ingenuity and madness. In an invitingly tactile history of this 2,000 year-old medium, Houston follows the development of writing, printing, the art of illustrations, and binding to show how we have moved from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls to the hardcovers and paperbacks of today. Sure to delight book ...

Translated by Matthew Amos and Fredrik Ronnback How does a man who once adored music beyond measure come to revile it as a form of tyranny? Throughout Pascal Quignard's distinguished literary career, music has been a recurring obsession. As a musician he organized the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theatre at Versailles in the early 1990s, and thus was instrumental in the rediscovery of much forgotten classical music. Yet in 1994 he abruptly renounced all musical activities. The ...

Interest in home design has been on the rise for some time, but Kinfolk's focus on slowing down and creating a more intentional, beautiful home is where the attention is shifting. Through luscious photographs and insightful interviews, the author takes us into 40 homes around the world, from the Americas to Europe, Asia to Africa, ending in Australia. The homes range from an old cabin in the woods to clean-lined modern apartments, from singles living in small spaces to sprawling, multi-genera...

David Bowie was an icon, not only his stunning musical output, but also his fascinating refusal to stay the same--the same as other trending artists, or even the same as himself. In this remarkable collection, Bowie reveals the fierce intellectualism, artistry, and humor behind it all. From his very first interview--as a teenager on the BBC, before he was even a musician--to his last, Bowie takes on the most probing questions, candidly discussing his sexuality, his drug use, his sense of fash...

In a dazzling fusion of Quentin Fiore's bold and inventive graphic design and Marshall McLuhan's unique insight into technology, advertising and mass-media, The Medium is the Massage is a unique study of human communication in the twentieth century, published in Penguin Modern Classics. Marshall McLuhan is the man who predicted the all-pervasive rise of modern mass media. Blending text, image and photography, his 1960 classic The Medium is the Massage illustrates how the growth of technology ...

Many designs that appear in today's society will circulate and encounter audiences of many different cultures and languages. With communication comes responsibility; are designers aware of the meaning and impact of their work? An image or symbol that is acceptable in one culture can be offensive or even harmful in the next. A typeface or colour in a design might appear to be neutral, but its meaning is always culturally dependent. If designers learn to be aware of global cultural contexts, we...

The Camino de Santiago is a popular pilgrimage route in Europe. Globetrotting artist Alvin Mark Tan walks 800km of the way over 30 days, and records his sights and experiences in his drawings. He hopes his story will inspire readers to go off the beaten track from time to time.Hardback: 100 PagesProduct Dimensions: 160 x 225 mmISBN: 9789810986223Published by Math Paper Press

illustrated by Michael Kirkham Frank Lloyd Wright wasn't just an architect. He was a prophet, a poseur, a beloved teacher, a failed businessman. During his long, eventful life he experienced both incredible misfortune and great success. This Is Frank Lloyd Wright brings his projects and persona into vivid focus. Wit and visual punch have been the hallmarks of the This Is series to date; the first architectural title in the series will give readers an up-close look at Wright's progress from di...

Today we live in a world that can no longer be read as a two-dimensional map, but must now be understood as a series of vertical strata that reach from the satellites that encircle our planet to the tunnels deep within the ground. In Vertical, Stephen Graham rewrites the city at every level: how the geography of inequality, politics, and identity is determined in terms of above and below. Starting at the edge of earth's atmosphere and, in a series of riveting studies, descending through each ...

An enthralling journey through 40,000 years of art, from prehistoric cave paintings right up to the present day. Discover artists and their art around the world, in exciting and imaginative tales about artists and the way they created their work. Written by educator and art historian Michael Bird, and illustrated by Kate Evans, the book also features reproductions of the famous artworks discussed, a comprehensive timeline of events, and extra feature spreads on places connected with art. This...

What is modern art? Why do we either love it or loathe it? And why is it worth so much damn money? Join Will Gompertz on a dazzling tour that will change the way you look at modern art forever. From Monet's water lilies to Van Gogh's sunflowers, from Warhol's soup cans to Hirst's pickled shark, hear the stories behind the masterpieces, meet the artists as they really were, and discover the real point of modern art. You will learn: not all conceptual art is bollocks; Picasso is king (but Cezan...

Leo Tolstoy is one of the most celebrated novelists of all time. As well as writing literary classics such as Anna Karenina and War and Peace he was also the author of some hugely influential critical and philosophical works. First published in 1898, his book-length essay What is Art? has lost none of its power to challenge our perception of art and its function in society today. In this provocative work, Tolstoy famously dismisses works by Shakespeare, Dante, Wagner and even many of his own ...

Rapturous in its ability to depict the creative process, Words Without Music allows readers to experience that sublime moment of creative fusion when life merges with art. Biography lovers will be inspired by the story of a precocious Baltimore boy, the son of a music-shop owner, who entered college at age fifteen, before traveling to Paris to study under the legendary Nadia Boulanger; Glass devotees will be fascinated by the stories behind Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha, among so many ...