The latest crowdsourced gem for the book crowd comes to us from Bibliobath. Thanks to Wing Weng and Jasper Jansen, a Dutch-Chinese couple based in Amsterdam, we finally have the waterproof book! They have 4 titles ready to go; a selection of short stories by Mark Twain, one of the selected poetry by W. B. Yeats, an edition of Shakespeare's Macbeth and a special Kickstarter-only edition of the Chinese classic The Art of War. The campaign just launched and the goal is to raise about $10,000 in the next month. Among the rewards are a couple geared...
Plant this Book
In 1968 Richard Brautigan published Please Plant This Book a collection of eight seed packets, each bearing an original poem related to its contents. Now almost 50 years later the Argentine publisher Pequeño Editor has unveiled a book that you can actually plant! The project is called Tree Book Tree and is designed to teach kids a little about the origin of paper books and sustainability. For its first release it took the popular children's book "Mi papá estuvo en la selva" (My dad was in the jungle), by Gusti Llimpi and Anne Decis, which is a true story about the...
A New Fine Press Edition of “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman
“A holy book of the nation, along with the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence,” - poet laureate Robert Hass on Leaves of Grass To mark their one-hundredth publication the noted fine press publisher Arion Press has chosen the 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Chosen in part as a tribute to the publisher's predecessors Edwin and Robert Grabhorn, whose masterpiece was their 1930 edition of the Whitman poem. “I thought Arion Press might do something with Whitman’s poetry that was different as to the text and yet pay tribute to the 1930 edition by using a similar format,...
A Tectonic Pop-Up Book
The supercontinent Pangaea that connected South America and Africa broke apart 200 million years ago. What a better way to convey the moving and shaking of the earth within a physical object than within the confines of a movable book. In ‘The Pangaea Pop-up’ Lesson at TED-Ed, animator Biljana Labovic explains how she and her team of animators created a pop-up book to visualize Pangaea -- and how you can make your own. [youtube]http://youtu.be/RZR_b753ZJ0[/youtube] Previously on Book Patrol: America's National Parks: Pop-Up Style Waldo Hunt and Pop-Up Books: A Brief Overview Pop-Up Books Meet Photoshop Maurice Sendak's First...
Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs
It was the last chapter of an amazing run. When he was no longer able to paint due to declining health Henri Matisse came up with a new way to express himself; Paper Cut Outs. He turned in his paintbrush for a pair of scissors and would carve and cut painted paper into an amazing array of work. The Fall of Icarus Beginning in April a new exhibition at the Tate Modern will be...