Fleur Olby's photographs of plants and flowers are beautiful and intricate in detail, many of her brilliantly hued works were images made for Monty Don's text in The Observer's gardening pages. This publication is the first on Olby's photography, and it depicts not merely plants and flowers but a career that has flourished over the years.

Fleur Olby: Plant Portraits

Arts & Photography

Fleur Olby

History & Criticism

FUEL Publishing

Library music--also known as source music and, occasionally, mood music--was first made for people who needed cheap, somewhat generic music as backgrounds for animations, low-budget advertisements, and television programs. Unavailable commercially to the public, this music was pressed from the 1950s onwards in limited quantities, and then sent directly to production houses and radio stations for use when necessary. The Music Library is a compilation of cover artwork from some of the most important--and beautiful--library LPs made throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s, some of which retail for up to $2,000 today. Features record sleeves from the collections of Jerry Dammers (The Specials), Jonny Trunk (of Trunk Records), YMC, Luke Vibert, Steve Stasis, Jazzman Gerald, Lo Recordings, Intoxical, Julian House and The Reverend Martin Green. Compiled by Trunk--who also wrote the introduction--The Music Library features a foreword by Dammers and an exclusive CD of rare library recordings.

The Music Library: Graphic Art and Sound

Jonny Trunk

Reference

Danzig Baldaev's father was an academic, an ethnologist who found himself imprisoned under Soviet rule as an enemy of the people. In fact much of Baldaev's family moved through the Soviet prison system, while he became a guard. At his father's suggestion, Danzig used his access to document and study the tattoos that were pervasive among the truly criminal portion of the prison population, the vory v zakonye, or legitimate thieves, a semi-professional class who kept their own brutal laws. During his 30 years supervising inmates in St. Petersburg's notorious Kresty Prison, Baldaev recorded more than 3,000 of their tattoos and parsed their meanings, in the drawings and text that made the first volume of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia a bestseller. This essential second volume, which collects all-new, previously unseen photographs and drawings, goes to the extremes of his incredible collection. Sergei Vasiliev's photographs authenticate the images, Baldaev's drawings make sense of them and through them both we glimpse an extraordinary world where the criminal's position, history and even sexual preference are displayed indelibly on his body.

Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volume II

Danzig Baldaev

The clever, bizarre and poignant DIY housewares that fill the pages of Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts have stories to tell. They communicate the textures of the lives of ordinary Russians during the collapse of the Soviet Union, they highlight alternatives to factory design and disposable goods, and they speak volumes about what goes on in other people's homes--how they spend and scrimp, how they make do. Home-Made highlights the best of the everyday objects made by ordinary Russians during and around the time of the Soviet Union's decline. Many were inspired by a lack of access to manufactured goods. Among the hundreds of idiosyncratic constructions for inside and outside the home are a back massager from a wooden abacus, a television antenna from unwanted forks, and a tiny bathtub plug from a boot heel. The author is himself a self-taught artist: he began exhibiting his own objects and installations in 1990, and collecting and cataloging these everyday, utilitarian objects handmade from modern materials a dozen years ago, in 1994. He accompanies each invaluable artifact with a photograph of the maker and his or her story. Foreward by Susan B. Glasser of the Washington Post Foreign Service.

Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts

FUEL

This collection of covers of official UK football programs--in American, that's soccer programs--includes every league club active from the end of World War II to the start of the Premiership (1992), which comes to more than 100 teams from across the United Kingdom. It covers the golden age of British football, a time of local pride and growing success, of "Roy of the Rovers" good feeling, all of which is reflected in period designs, colorful graphics and charming illustrations, far from the glossy corporate memorabilia that fans accumulate today. These pieces are rare and highly collectible, and the majority are reproduced in this book for the first time, but more importantly for most readers, they offer an armchair anthropologist's trip through 1960s, 70s and 80s England. By Bob Stanley, who worked as a freelance music writer with NME and Melody Maker before forming the group Saint Etienne, and with an introduction by Brian Glanville, a highly regarded sports writer and a leading authority on British soccer.

Match Day: Official Football Programmes: Post-war to Premiership

Paul, Kelley

BOB STANLEY

This groundbreaking collaboration--or, as the artists would have it, this groundbreaking bout--between the well-known writer Ian McMillan and the seasoned imagemaker Andy Martin, pits McMillan's robust poetry and prose against Martin's punchy visual interpretations. The result is a lavish book of ideas, oceans of notions, a mixture of the wry and the poignant, rendered in media ranging across digital illustration, photography, found imagery and painting, ingeniously edited into a consistent, entertaining and delightful whole. Ian McMillan is a poet and broadcaster with a following in both capacities, and Andy Martin is a widely respected illustrator in many mediums whose regular contributions to UK newspapers are instantly recognizable.

Ideas Have Legs: Ian McMillan vs. Andy Martin

Literature & Fiction

Andy Martin

Ian McMillan

Poetry

With just a few select books to date, the British publisher (and design company) Fuel has already made a splash with its beautifully produced books on such ephemeral or popular arts as tattooing (Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia Volumes I and II), soccer programs (Match Day) and improvised domestic implements (Home-Made). Fuel's latest publication extends this visual anthropology to the Internet, specifically the blog BibliOdyssey. Across the world, libraries and institutions are only recently starting to make their collections available online, and the bulk of this amazing material goes unnoted by the casual surfer. BibliOdyssey's mission over the past two years has been to diligently trawl the dustier corners of the Internet and retrieve these materials for our attention. Thanks to the daily efforts of this singular blog, a myriad of long-forgotten imagery has now re-surfaced, from eighteenth-century anatomical and architectural drawing to occult and alchemical engravings and proto-Surrealist depictions of the horrors of industrialization (for example, the half-plant, half-people illustrations of J.J. Grandville). Each of the images is accompanied by commentary from "PK," author and curator of the BibliOdyssey blog. The book also provides details for each image and links to the source website. With a foreword by artist Dinos Chapman, BibliOdyssey is a true cabinet of curiosities and a journey in discovery and delight.

BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet

The world of Russian public notices is fascinating, bizarre and saturated in tragic-comedy: "An old woman. Left home and has not returned. Small, hunchbacked. Wears: a blue dress, red wool cardigan, a white handkerchief with red flowers on her head, grey slippers on her feet. Does not have memory." The authors and readers of these usually handwritten notices are members of Russia's underclass, made visible by these acts of public address which so often go unread. In this secret economy of exchange and communication, you can swap a voucher for an airplane or help to find a missing earring lost "during the fireworks on the Day of Cosmonauts." All over Russia, all sorts of surfaces, stationary or mobile, have been papered over with such notices. The folklorist, lexicographer and contributor to the related publications Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia Volumes I and II, Alexei Plutser-Sarno, has been collecting these public notices from all over Russia for many years. Notes From Russia features the highlights of Plutser-Sarno's collection, which, combined with his commentaries, tells an alternative story of recent Russian culture. Designed as part of Fuel's acclaimed Russian series of books, and printed on an unusual mix of white and brown craft paper, Notes From Russia is a moving and vital contribution to the documentation of vernacular graphics.

Notes From Russia: Hand-Made Street Notices

How much do criminal acts and their representation in cinema, literature and music really have in common? Is the execution of crime in everyday life as appealing or as inspired as creative artists have made it seem since, say, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty? Does the film industry continue to learn from the real-life Mafia, or have the imaginings of scriptwriters had their own effect on organized crime? And what experience do these people who mold our perceptions of crime and criminals have of the real thing? This remarkable book is the first to explore our images of crime by interviewing those involved on, in and around all sides of the law, both real and fictional, and often somewhere in between. Through a series of exclusive interviews with artists, authors and actors such as Ben Affleck, David Cronenberg, Elmore Leonard, Viggo Mortensen, Ice-T, David Mamet and Takeshi Kitano, as well as real life bank robbers, gangsters and current prison inmates, editor Alix Lambert (artist, photographer of Russian prisoners’ tattoos and writer for HBO’s Deadwood) explores the gaps and overlaps between real crime and its representation in the arts, each commenting on and assessing the impact of the other.

Crime: A Series of Extraordinary Interviews Exposing the World of Crime―Real and Imagined

Humor & Entertainment

Lambert, Alix

Movies

This volume of drawings and photographs completes the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia trilogy. Danzig Baldaev’s unparallelled ethnographic achievement, documenting more than 3,000 tattoo drawings, was made during a lifetime working as a prison guard. His recording of this esoteric world was reported to the KGB, who unexpectedly supported him, realizing the importance of being able to establish facts about convicts by reading the images on their bodies. The motifs depicted represent the uncensored lives of the criminal classes, ranging from violence and pornography to politics and alcohol. A medieval knight is surrounded by the severed heads of his enemies, a naked woman simultaneously services a man and two dwarfs, a crying President Gorbachev grips a human bone between sabre-like fangs, a group of angels drink vodka with God on a cloud--the meanings of these arresting images are explained to the uninitiated eye. Sergei Vasiliev’s graphic photographs show the grim reality of the Russian prison system and some of the alarming characters that inhabit it, while the illustrated criminals of Russia tell the tale of their closed society. This volume, the last in the trilogy, includes an introduction by historian Alexander Sidorov exploring the origins of the Russian criminal tattoo and their various meanings today.

Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volume III

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