Andy Warhol: 365 Takes

This book features 365 snippets of Andy Warhol's life and work--his illustrations, silkscreens, films, obsessions, inspirations, collections, and so on. I forgot to photograph the spine but it's about 2 inches thick. When I first got it I had intended to read a page a day for a year in an attempt to cull some inspiration. Or something.

There are his skull paintings,

his obsession with tape recording every conversation he ever had,

images from his first retrospective, at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm,

an accordion-fold book of details from Warhol's Marilyn Monroe prints,

details from Warhol's "Thirteen Most Wanted Men" (as a side note, there's an interesting story about this at Luc Sante's blog),

bits of ephemera from Warhol's trip to China (note the photograph of Mao),

posters for various Warhol films, and so on.

Warhol's helium-filled silver "clouds" on the back

The Physicists by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

I read most of this book in the stacks at the Pratt library, while I was supposed to be shelving. Hey, everyone did it--I was still more productive than most student employees.

As for the book, it's a satiric play by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt, in which the world’s greatest physicist, Johann Wilhelm Möbius, is in a madhouse, surrounded by two other scientists: one who thinks he is Einstein, another who believes he is Newton.

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

Yet another book in Penguin's deluxe classics series. This one is designed by Art Spiegelman, and it is one of my favorite books. Period. It's a trio of short novels by Paul Auster, part hardboiled detective fiction, part metafictional postmodernism (how do you like that?), exploring themes of identity and reality. They're referred to as "existential mysteries" in the book.

I love the map with the Tower of Babel inset.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr and E.B. White

I was first introduced to The Elements of Style as a college freshman by my writing teacher, who referred to it as "Strunk and White*" (as in, "Refer to your Strunk and White"). At the time I had the plain old small paperback edition, which served its purpose just fine.

Then this beautiful clothbound edition came out, with illustrations by Maira Kalman, and I somehow found myself buying a fancy version of a grammar guide. I'm curious as to how this all came about, as it seems a bit of an unlikely project, or at least unexpected. I certainly would have been surprised to hear of it back when I was being instructed to refer to my Strunk and White.

From the outset you can tell that this time it's going to be a little different.

(the corresponding "and goodbye" comes at the last two pages)

I love the box tied up with string to signify "contents." The juxtaposition of imagery with text is quite poetic--they evoke a feeling that I can't quite pinpoint just now.









I'm not sure if this is supposed to be the Philip Johnson glass house (which I have still not been to--every summer I try to buy tickets only to find that every tour is already sold out), but it is certainly what I think of when I see this.

I love the semi-colon embossed into the back (to match the colon on the front).

*That's White as in E. B. White, as in the author of Charlotte's Web. Just in case you didn't know.

Misery Loves Comedy by Ivan Brunetti

The landscape of contemporary "underground" comics tends to be a dark and disturbing place--and I like it that way. Even so, Ivan Brunetti's work really stands out as especially angry, dark, and violent, in addition to being pretty self-deprecating. This unassuming cloth cover does not do much to hint at what's contained inside...



I cropped this one a bit but if I'd left in the entire page you'd also see a few panels in which Brunetti chops off his own penis and throws it in the trash.

He does tend to get a bit wordy in his self-deprecation. I have to admit I didn't read every word of every panel. It gets a bit tiresome after awhile.

This one really amuses me though,

as does this page in which he attempts to emulate Chris Ware.

I'll leave you with some good advice for avoiding those pesky telemarketers.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin was the first novel by Vladimir Nabokov that I read, and it's still my favorite. It made me fall in love with his use of language--I can still remember reading this paragraph over and over again: "Presently all were asleep again. It was a pity nobody saw the display in the street, where the auroral breeze wrinkled a large luminous puddle, making of the telephone wires reflected in it illegible lines of black zigzags."

The story revolves around the character of Timofey Pnin, a Russian professor who comes to America to teach at a respectable university but never quite manages to assimilate. Nabokov adds complexity by using the "unreliable narrator" device, so that you begin to wonder how much of the story is believable, how much you really know about Pnin.

Nearly all of Nabokov's backlist is being repackaged, and I have to say it's long overdue. While the older cover design contains elements that I like (the squirrel photo, the leaf in the background) it just doesn't quite come together. As for the new package, I like the bowtie, and the repetition of p's, n's, and i's. The overarching theme for the series design is the specimen box, an homage to Nabokov's love of collecting butterflies. I love this idea, though I think some of the cover executions are stronger than others. I'm also not sure how I feel about the leathery looking black border on all of them. Here's a sampling of some of my favorites:




And, for the hell of it, here are a few older Pnin covers:




The last one is pretty surreal. Overall I think my favorite is the one of the old man and two sets of buildings. Although the bowtie is pretty nice, the more I look at it. The black border isn't even so bad. I might have to buy a few of these.

Golem: An Old Prague Tale by Jan Krůta and Jiří Votruba

About six years or so ago I spent a week in Prague. After seeing traces of the golem around the city in the form of statues, etc., I decided to pick up this little picture book.

The illustration style strangely reminds me of a Sam McPheeters drawing.

More about the story of the golem here.