An Architecture of Play: A Survey of London's Adventure Playgrounds

Politics & Social Sciences

Paul Claydon Keith Cranwell Nils Norman

Social Sciences

Four Corners Books

Brian Wilson: An Art Book is a Brian Wilson reader written by artists and art writers from a wide range of perspectives. During the last few years there has been a great resurgence of interest in the music Brian Wilson made with the Beach Boys in the 1960s, not least among visual artists. It could be said that the nature of Brian Wilson's achievements is more evident to us now than then. This book examines this through the filter of contemporary art.   The texts are accompanied by a 48pp section of illustrations of art works that act as an exhibition in book form. Some refer to Brian Wilson or the Beach Boys directly; most, though, have been selected to evoke something of the feel of the music, the environment it emerged from, Wilson's extraordinary life story, or how these elements interrelate. Works date from the Beach Boys' earliest records to the present day.  This book has not been authorised by Brian Wilson or The Beach Boys.

Brian Wilson - An Art Alex Farquharson (2005) Paperback

Alex Farquharson

Arts & Photography

At 18, Corita Kent (1918-86) entered the Roman Catholic order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, where she taught art and eventually ran the art department. After more than 30 years, at the end of the 1960s, she left the order to devote herself to making her own work. Over a 35-year career she made watercolors, posters, books and banners--and most of all, serigraphs--in an accessible and dynamic style that appropriated techniques from advertising, consumerism and graffiti. The earliest, which she began showing in 1951, borrowed phrases and depicted images from the Bible; by the 1960s, she was using song lyrics and publicity slogans as raw material. Eschewing convention, she produced cheap, readily available multiples, including a postage stamp. Her work was popular but largely neglected by the art establishment--though it was always embraced by such design luminaries as Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller and Saul Bass. More recently, she has been increasingly recognized as one of the most innovative and unusual Pop artists of the 1960s, battling the political and religious establishments, revolutionizing graphic design and making some of the most striking--and joyful--American art of her era, all while living and practicing as a Catholic nun. This first study of her work, organized by Julie Ault on the 20th anniversary of Kent's death, with essays by Ault and Daniel Berrigan, is the first to examine this important American outsider artist's life and career, and contains more than 90 illustrations, many of which are reproduced for the first time, in vibrant, and occasionally Day-Glo, color.

Come Alive!: The Spirited Art of Sister Corita

History & Criticism

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Four Corners Familiars)

Literature & Fiction

Oscar, Wilde

Gareth, Jones

Literary

About The Relative Size Of Things In The Universe

Martin Beck

Individual Artists

In this volume, British artist David Musgrave revisits Franz Kafka's novella Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor, the tale of a man who arrives home one day to find two plastic balls bouncing off the ground of their own accord. To his great irritation, these balls follow Blumfeld--who is a stickler for absolute order in his universe--wherever he goes, and his attempts to divest himself of their presence are described with Kafka's customary flair for the detached observation of the extremely bizarre. Musgrave has responded to Kafka's story with a series of pencil drawings of curious artifacts and pseudo-archaeological fragments of his own invention. Combined with John Morgan's austere design--which finds the book typeset in Kafka's preferred font and large type size, which he was never able to see printed in his lifetime--this volume almost feels like a case study of some unique bygone supernatural phenomenon.

Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor: By Franz Kafka

KAFKA, FRANZ

World Literature

Truly a Dracula for both art and book lovers, this new edition of the most famous of vampire tales completely overhauls the notion of how a literary classic might be creatively revisited. James Pyman is already famed for his eerily exacting and hallucinatory draftsmanship, as well as for his relish for the exploration of book formats such as cartoon or children's books, and is therefore ideally suited to the illustration of this volume. Herein, Pyman returns to the original text, illustrating a line or phrase from each of the novel's 27 chapters in a series of wonderfully sinister and weirdly clinical pencil drawings. The book, which Bram Stoker composed as a series of diaries, letters and newspaper cuttings, has been typeset by designer John Morgan with a different typeface allocated to each character--each font being based on those in use at the time of the book's original publication. As a final flourish, the striking bright yellow clothbound cover, with its vivid red lettering, is based on that of the first UK edition.

Dracula: By Bram Stoker

Stoker., Bram

Genre Fiction

From 1967 up until his recent death, the British sculptor and Pop art innovator Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) used the pages of the innovative British literary magazine Ambit as a space for some of his most experimental creations, collapsing the boundary between text and image with Pop abandon. His Ambit works―collages, visual essays and fragments from novels, pop culture images from newspapers, magazines and advertisements―tackle such subjects as the war in Vietnam, the acceleration of Japanese technology and the mirages of mass advertising. Housed in a funky Day-Glo plastic slip cover with silkscreened title, and printed on a variety of paper stocks, The Jet Age Compendium reprints these works in their entirety for the first time. A 28-page booklet by David Brittain inserted into the slip cover celebrates these works and discusses Paolozzi's relationship to writers associated with Ambit such as J.G. Ballard.

Eduardo Paolozzi: The Jet Age Compendium: Paolozzi at Ambit 1967-1980

Nau Sea Sea Sick is a collection of highly unusual sea stories, selected and illustrated by American artist Kay Rosen. Rosen's selection ranges across literary eras and genres: John Moore's “Local Boy Makes Good”; Katherine Mansfield's “The Voyage”; Stephen Crane's “The Open Boat”; Isabella Bird's “The Hawaiian Archipelago, Letter I”; John Aaron Rosen's “Stranger in the Empty Night” and Eileen Myles' “Everyday Barf.” Rosen has been exploring the visual properties of words for over 25 years, approaching language as a material to construct with, and to confound, and building word installations that delight in the surfaces of short phrases, words and letterforms. Printed in French fold format, Nau Sea Sea Sick is part of the Four Corners Familiars series that invites contemporary artists to respond to the classics of literature, which also includes editions of Bram Stoker's Dracula and Franz Kafka's Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor.

Nau Sea Sea Sick (Four Corners Familiars)

CRANE, STEPHEN

MANSFIELD, KATHERINE

BIRD, ISABELLA

Myles, Eileen

MOORE. John

For this fifth volume in the Four Corners Familiars series, in which artists respond to literary classics, the young San Francisco artist Colter Jacobsen (born 1975) has chosen four absolute masterpieces of short fiction: Jane Bowles' “A Stick of Green Candy” and “Camp Cataract,” and Denton Welch's “The Trout Stream” and “Narcissus Bay.” Bowles (1917–1973) and Welch (1915–1948) share a perceptiveness and surgical lucidity for moods and surfaces that William Burroughs, a fan of both authors, remarked upon: “both writers are masters of the unforgettable phrase that no one else could have written… each has a very special way of seeing things.” Jacobsen, who has previously collaborated with the writers Bill Berkson and Kevin Killian, and whose paired drawings―one drawn from life, the other from memory―demonstrate a flair and desire for response and collaboration, adds to these stories his marginalia, chapter headings and paired drawings, making of the whole an enticing mesh of sympathies.

The Trout Stream/A Stick of Green Candy/Narcissus Bay/Camp Cataract (Four Corners Familiars)

Welch, Denton

BOWLES, Jane

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