Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991

by Scott Mccloud

Paperback $24.95 Harper Paperbacks Graphic Novels

Long before manga took the American comics market by storm, Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics, Making Comics) combined the best ideas from manga, alternative comics, and superheroes into Zot!—a frenetic and innovative exploration of comics’ potential that helped set the stage for McCloud’s later groundbreaking theoretical work.

Zachary T. Paleozogt lives in “the far-flung future of 1965,” a utopian Earth of world peace, robot butlers, and flying cars. Jenny Weaver lives in an imperfect world of disappointment and broken promises—the Earth we live in. Stepping across the portals to each other’s worlds, Zot and Jenny’s lives will never be the same again.

Now, for the first time since its original publication more than twenty years ago, every one of McCloud’s pages from the black and white series has been collected in this must-have commemorative edition for aficionados to treasure and new fans to discover.

Includes never-before-seen artwork and extensive commentary by Scott McCloud

Being and Time

by Martin Heidegger

Paperback $19.95 Harper Perennial Modern Classics Philosophy

“What is the meaning of being?” This is the central question of Martin Heidegger’s profoundly important work, in which the great philosopher seeks to explain the basic problems of existence. A central influence on later philosophy, literature, art, and criticism—as well as existentialism and much of postmodern thought—Being and Time forever changed the intellectual map of the modern world. As Richard Rorty wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “You cannot read most of the important thinkers of recent times without taking Heidegger’s thought into account.”

This first paperback edition of John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson’s definitive translation also features a new foreword by Heidegger scholar Taylor Carman.

History of Advertising

by Stephane Pincas & Marc Loiseau

Paperback $ 39.99 Taschen Design & Architecture

The history of western advertising is a long one, starting as early as the 1630s, when Frenchman Théophraste Renaudot placed the first advertising notes in La Gazette de France, or in 1786, when William Tayler began to offer his services as “Agent to the Country’s Printers, Booksellers, etc.,” but the first time that the term “advertising agency” was used dates back to 1842, when Volney B. Palmer created his agency in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Widely considered to represent the birth of modern advertising, this date marks the beginning of a creative industry that has transformed many commercial works into cultural icons.

Divided into sections by decades, this book explores the legendary campaigns and brands of advertising’s modern history, with specific anecdotes and comments on the importance of every campaign. You will find the picture of the camel that originated the Camel pack, the first Coca Cola ad, and even how artworks by masters such as Picasso and Magritte have been used in advertising.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar

by Paul Theroux

Hardcover $28.00 - 10% Houghton Mifflin New HC Non-Fiction / Travelogue

Thirty years after his classic The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux revisits Eastern Europe, Central Asia, India, China, Japan, and Siberia.

Half a lifetime ago, Paul Theroux virtually invented the modern travel narrative by recounting his grand tour by train through Asia. In the three decades since, the world he recorded in that book has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed and China has risen; India booms while Burma smothers under dictatorship; Vietnam flourishes in the aftermath of the havoc America unleashed on it the last time Theroux passed through. And no one is better able to capture the texture, sights, smells, and sounds of that changing landscape than Paul Theroux.

Theroux’s odyssey takes him from Eastern Europe, still hung over from communism, through tense but thriving Turkey into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbor Azerbaijan revels in oil-fueled capitalism. Theroux is firsthand witness to it all, traveling as the locals do—by stifling train, rattletrap bus, illicit taxi, and mud-caked foot—encountering adventures only he could have: from the literary (sparring with the incisive Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk) to the dissolute (surviving a week-long bender on the Trans-Siberian Railroad). And wherever he goes, from the European Union to the Pacific Rim and back, his omnivorous curiosity and unerring eye for detail never fail to inspire, enlighten, inform, and entertain.

A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions

by Stefan Jonsson

Hardcover $29.50 - 10% Columbia University Press New Hardcover Non-Fiction / History

Stefan Jonsson uses three monumental works of art to build a provocative history of popular revolt: Jacques-Louis David’s The Tennis Court Oath (1791), James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888), and Alfredo Jaar’s They Loved It So Much, the Revolution (1989). Addressing, respectively, the French Revolution of 1789, Belgium’s proletarian messianism in the 1880s, and the worldwide rebellions and revolutions of 1968, these canonical images not only depict an alternative view of history but offer a new understanding of the relationship between art and politics and the revolutionary nature of true democracy.

Drawing on examples from literature, politics, philosophy, and other works of art, Jonsson carefully constructs his portrait, revealing surprising parallels between the political representation of “the people” in government and their aesthetic representation in painting. Both essentially “frame” the people, Jonsson argues, defining them as elites or masses, responsible citizens or angry mobs. Yet in the aesthetic fantasies of David, Ensor, and Jaar, Jonsson finds a different understanding of democracy-one in which human collectives break the frame and enter the picture.

Connecting the achievements and failures of past revolutions to current political issues, Jonsson then situates our present moment in a long historical drama of popular unrest, making his book both a cultural history and a contemporary discussion about the fate of democracy in our globalized world.

Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer

by Tim Stark

Hardcover $24.00 - 10% Broadway Books / Random House New Hardcover Non-Fiction

Situated beautifully at the intersection of Michael Pollan, Ruth Reichl, and Barbara Kingsolver, Heirloom is an inspiring, elegiac, and gorgeously written memoir about rediscovering an older and still vital way of life.

Fourteen years ago, Tim Stark was living in Brooklyn, working days as a management consultant, and writing unpublished short stories by night. One evening, chancing upon a Dumpster full of discarded lumber, he carried the lumber home and built a germination rack for thousands of heirloom tomato seedlings. His crop soon outgrew the brownstone in which it had sprouted, forcing him to cart the seedlings to his family’s farm in Pennsylvania, where they were transplanted into the ground by hand. When favorable weather brought in a bumper crop, Tim hauled his unusual tomatoes to New York City’s Union Square Greenmarket, at a time when the tomato was unanimously red. The rest is history. Today, Eckerton Hill Farm does a booming trade in heirloom tomatoes and obscure chile peppers. Tim’s tomatoes are featured on the menus of New York City’s most demanding chefs and have even made the cover of Gourmet magazine.

The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage

by Daniel Mark Epstein

Hardcover $28.00 - 10% Ballantine Books / Random House New Hardcover Non-Fiction / Biography

From Publishers Weekly:
Poet and biographer Epstein (Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington) never explains the rationale for this reliable but familiar account of the Lincolns’ frequently tempestuous marriage. If he had access to previously untapped sources, he does nothing to highlight them, and there’s little reason why this book should supersede either Jean H. Baker’s magisterial Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography or even Ruth Painter Randall’s respected Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage. What Epstein brings is a novelistic, almost lyrical touch, as in this passage, from Mary’s perspective, as her husband lay dying: Slowly the room grows larger with the light. The April days are long. Hold back the light. Let the day never dawn that looks upon his death. Well born, Mary was also highly strung, insecure, jealous and, like Abraham, prone to fits of depression. He suffered her rages silently, tolerated her profligate spending even when it became a political embarrassment and twice consoled her in the midst of his own grief upon the successive losses of two of their four sons. Sadly, in the end, their marriage seems to have been largely a pageant of tragedies: a black lily Epstein need not have attempted to gild.

The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball

by Nicholas Dawidoff

Hardcover $24.95 - 10% Pantheon / Random House New Hardcover Non-Fiction / Sports

From the author of the best-selling The Catcher Was a Spy, his most original work yet: a memoir of two cities (New Haven and New York), a family (troubled), a time (the 1970s), a boy who never quite fits in anywhere-and how baseball helps him find his place in America.

The Crowd Sounds Happy is the story of a spirited boy’s coming-of-age in a doomed hometown, with a missing father, a single mother, and the professional ballplayers who gradually become the men in his life as he listens to them every night on the bedside radio. This is a childhood shaped by remarkable characters, foremost Nicholas Dawidoff’s mother, a stoical, overwhelmed, enterprising woman committed to securing a more promising future for her children. It also tells, with the same arresting candor of Dawidoff’s celebrated New Yorker magazine memoir of his father, what it’s like to grow up with a disturbed, dangerous parent. Here are the events and places that come to define a young boy’s outlook: a local playground, a kidnapping and a murder, rock ‘n’ roll, the steamy awkwardness of adolescence and first love, and the private world of baseball-the inner game as it has never been described before.

The Crowd Sounds Happy is a beautifully written, moving piece of personal history that transforms ordinary moments into literature.

In the Hamptons: My Fifty Years with Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires, and Celebrities

by Dan Rattiner

Hardcover $24.95 - 10% Harmony / Random House New Hardcover Non-Fiction / Biography

Long before the Hamptons became famous for its posh parties, paparazzi, and glitterati, it was a sleepy backwater of fishing villages and potato farms, literary luminaries and local eccentrics. As the editor and publisher of the area’s popular free newspaper, Dan’s Papers, Dan Rattiner, has been covering the daily triumphs, community intrigues, and larger-than-life personalities for nearly fifty years.

A colorful insider’s account of life, love, scandal, and celebrity, In the Hamptons is an intimate portrait of a place and the people who formed and transformed it, from former residents like Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning, colorful locals like bar owner Bobby Van and shark fisherman Frank Mundus (who the character Quinn from Jaws was based on), and literary figures like John Steinbeck and Truman Capote, to present-day stars like Bianca Jagger and Billy Joel.

An insider who lived there—as well as a Jewish outsider amid the WASP contingent—Rattiner both revels in and is rattled by all he witnesses and records in one of the world’s most famous places. With dry wit and genuine affection, he shares a story of the Hamptons that few know, one defined by the artists, painters, fishermen, farmers, dreamers, hangers-on, celebrities, and billionaires who live and play there.

Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean

by Douglas WolkPaperback $16.95 Da Capo Press Graphic Novels / Essays & Literary Criticism

From Publishers Weekly:
As the graphic novel flourishes and gains legitimacy as an art form, serious comics criticism is an inevitable byproduct, and PW contributing editor Wolk’s analytical discourse is a welcome starting point. The volume contains two sections: Theory and History, an explanation of comics as a medium and an overview of its evolution, and Reviews and Commentary, a diverse examination of creators and works. This section spans Will Eisner’s pioneering efforts as well as the groundbreaking modern comics by the Hernandez brothers, Chris Ware and Alison Bechdel. Since there are decades worth of books already focusing on the superhero genre, the raw clay from which the comics industry was built, the relatively short shrift given to the spandex oeuvre’s insular mythologies is a wise choice that allows the nonfan a glimpse into the wider range that comics commands. Wolk’s insightful observations offer much to ponder, perhaps more than can be fully addressed in one volume, but the thoughtful criticism and knowledgeable historical overview give much-needed context for the emerging medium.

Dream Girl

by Lauren Mechling

Hardcover $15.99 - 10% Delacorte Books for Young Readers / Random House New Hardcover Fiction / Middle Reader’s

Claire Voyante has been having strange visions ever since she can remember. But the similarity between her name and her talents is purely coincidental. The name is French, and unlike the psychics on TV, she can’t solve crimes or talk to the dead. Whenever Claire follows her hunches, she comes up empty—or ends up in pretty awkward situations.
But that all changes on Claire’s 15th birthday, when her grandmother, Kiki—former socialite, fashion icon, and permanent fixture at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel—gives her something a little more extraordinary than one of her old cocktail dresses: a strange black-and-white onyx cameo on a gold chain. It’s not long before Claire’s world becomes a whole lot clearer. And a whole lot more dangerous.

Ai Weiwei

by Karen Smith, Sue-an van der Zijpp, and Ai Weiwei
Paperback $30.00 NAi Publishers Art

Born in 1957, Beijing-based Ai Weiwei is perhaps the most internationally visible contemporary Chinese artist. Philip Tinari has described his practice as a, “multitasking sprawl-encompassing artmaking, curating, publishing and architectural design-[that] threatens to answer the vaguely unsettling question, What would Andy Warhol’s career have looked like if it had played out in turn-of-the-millennium China? (For one thing, architecture might have stood in for film; where Warhol created an alter-Hollywood, Ai is a self-invented starchitect).” After spending the early 1980s in New York, Ai moved back to Beijing in 1994. Already an important member of the Stars group, a socially critical movement that borrowed heavily from western art and culture, he established the famed China Art Archives and Warehouse in 1997. In 2000, on the occasion of the Shanghai Biennale, he organized the attention-grabbing group exhibition Fuck Off in collaboration with curator Feng Boyi. More recently, he was involved in the design of the Olympic Stadium in Beijing by Herzog & de Meuron. This publication takes an in-depth look at Ai’s under-explored engagement with ceramics, and is published on the occasion of a solo exhibition of his recent ceramic work at Holland’s Groningen Museum.

Architecture in the Netherlands

Edited by Daan Bakker, Allard Jolles, Michelle Provoost, and Cor Wagenaar

Paperback $60.00 NAi Publishers Architecture

Once again, Architecture in the Netherlands selects the most remarkable architectural projects realized on Dutch soil over the preceding year. With projects by Arons & Gelauf, Burobeb, Claus en Kaan, Dynamo Architecten, Friedensreich Hundertwasser and many others.

Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920

by Augustus Sherman

Paperback $24.95 Aperture Photography

Throughout his tenure as a registry clerk with the Immigration Division of Ellis Island, Augustus F. Sherman systematically photographed more than 200 families, groups, and individuals while they were being held by customs for special investigations. This volume collects and provides an essential revaluation of Sherman’s striking portraits, which predate August Sander’s cataloging efforts by several years. A historical document of unprecedented worth, Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits includes almost one-hundred portraits taken from 1904 through 1920. The subjects are frequently dressed in elaborate national costumes or folk dress, emphasizing the variety and richness of the cultural heritage that came together to form the United States. Romanian shepherds, German stowaways, Russian vegetarians, Greek priests, and Ghanaian women in elaborately patterned dresses, are treated with equal gravitas. The resulting body of work presents a unique and powerful picture of the stream of immigrants who came through Ellis Island.

In its time, the material contributed to the larger project of ethnographic categorization and typology typical of the early twentieth century, much as Edward S. Curtis’s portraits romanticized the “last Indians” or John Thomson’s “Street Life in London” identified and codified social class in the late 1800s. Though originally taken for his own personal study, Sherman’s work appeared in the public eye as illustrations for publications with titles such as “Alien or American,” and hung on the walls of the custom offices as cautionary or exemplary models of the new American species.

Bill Wood’s Business

by Bill Wood

Hardcover $75.00 - 10% Photography

Bill Wood’s business was photography—and he produced tens of thousands of images over the course of his career. From 1937 (the tail end of the Great Depression) through the boom years that followed World War II and until his death in 1973, the Bill Wood Photo Company supplied local snap shooters and amateur photographers with cameras, flash bulbs, accessories, and quality photo finishing.

The variety of subjects and situations he captured provide an in-depth photographic record of life in Fort Worth, Texas, a post-World War II American city just hitting its stride.

Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan is the first major U.S, presentation of contemporary photo-based artwork from Japan in over ten years. The exhibition will include both photographs and video, many of which are large and dramatic pieces.

Changing Roles

by Liam Gillick, Johanna Billing, Henning Bohl, Martin Boyce, Jason Dodge, Matias Faldbakken, Ryan Gander, Brian Jungen, Jesper Just, Germaine Kruip, Erik van Lieshout, Sarah Morris, Marcel Odenbach, Robin Rhode, and Margaret Salmon

Paperback $25.00 Witte de With Art

How are you involved in the art world? Are you related to any specific scene? What would be the most productive place to present your work? What kind of curators do you like to work with, and why? What does the art market mean for your work? These are some of the questions that have been presented to every artist who has worked with Witte de With, the respected Rotterdam contemporary art center, over the past two years. This publication reflects on the ideas behind the works that the center has shown, and allows artists to voice concerns that are rarely discussed as part of a public initiative. The participants’ answers serve as a model, suggesting what roles they need institutions, curators and programs to play. Contributors include Jesper Just, Erik van Lieshout, Sarah Morris and Robin Rhode.

Gerhard Richter: Paintings from Private Collections (Hardcover)

Edited by Goetz Adriani

Hardcover $45.00 - 10% Hatje Cantz Art

Curator Robert Storr has said of the iconic, inscrutable German painter Gerhard Richter, “He’s not playing hard to get, he’s doing something that is hard to get.'’ The difficulty arises from a Conceptualist oeuvre that style-jumps from Photorealism to large, abstract compositions. Martha Schwendener has summed up Richter’s contribution by stating, “Seeing Gerhard’s abstraction and Photorealism together, you realize that this dual body of work is the perfect expression of what it means to paint today-and what a contemporary master might be.” Whatever the style, Richter’s subject is always painting itself. Because it features more than 80 works from important private collections, including the artist’s own, this monograph provides a unique contextualization of the artist’s incredibly influential career, which, spanning more than 40 years, mirrors not only the history of postwar Germany, but also the medium of painting.

Hedi Slimane: Rock Diary

by Vince Aletti, Jon Savage, and Hedi Slimane

Paperback $95.00 JRP|RINGier Fashion

This beautifully designed three volume boxed set presents new photographic work by Hedi Slimane, the iconic fashion designer who, during tenures at Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior, has infused men’s fashion with an androgynous, rock n’ roll swerve. The first volume is an album of Slimane’s photographs of the Lollapalooza-esque three-day Festival Internacional de Benicassim on the East coast of Spain, the second is devoted to images of the new British and American rock scenes and the third contains essays on Slimane’s work by art critic Vince Aletti and music critic Jon Savage. In a 2003 conversation with Interview’s Ingrid Sischy, Slimane discussed his beginnings as a photographer: “I started taking pictures before I even began in fashion. I didn’t start with clothes until I was 16, but I had my first camera when I was 11. I’ve always taken pictures, almost like some people take notes or write down their thoughts.” As this collection reveals, Slimane’s photographs of the international music scene are as fresh and intrinsic as his paradigm-shifting work in fashion.

Hardcover $29.95 - 10% Spertus Press Art

Imaginary Coordinates, published on the occasion of an exhibition originating at Chicago’s Spertus Museum, juxtaposes the museum’s extensive collection of antique Holy Land maps with contemporary artwork by Israeli and Palestinian women (including Ayreen Anastas, Yael Bartana, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Sigalit Landau, Enas Mutthafar, Michal Rovner and Shirley Shor) to explore issues of national identity, borders and the critical disparity between maps and lived experience. With their elaborate cartouches, fabulous sea animals and charming footsteps marking the people of Israel’s wanderings in the desert, the maps clearly do not correspond with the natural landscape; they are filled with human intention. Some maps speak not of landscape, but of the desires and intentions of mapmakers and their audiences. It is toward these emotions that Imaginary Coordinates turns.

Jasper Johns: Drawings: 1997-2007

Edited by Thomas Crow

Hardcover $60.00 - 10% Matthew Marks Gallery Art