The street is in play - Banksy - Manhattan, Oct. 2013 Talk about good timing. Right on the heels of Banksy's month-long residency in New York City comes the release of the definitive survey of international street art, The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti. Published by Yale University Press and compiled by Rafael Schacter the book is organized geographically by country and city and showcases more than 100 of today’s most important street artists. It also provides the essential historical context of the works and offers contributions by the foremost authorities on street art and graffiti. [caption id="attachment_3113"...
Stop the presses: A new printed dictionary has arrived
The Klallam dictionary is the first-ever dictionary of the language, which previously was only spoken!It weighs in at about six-pounds, contains more than 1,000 pages and took almost thirty years to complete.The language is native to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State were about 5,000 Klallam live on three reservations.When University of North Texas linguist professor Timothy Montler started the project in 1978 about 100 people spoke Klallam as their first language, today there are two left."The language is a jawbreaker for English speakers, with some words containing back-to-back consonants that are true pronunciation gymnastics"and now it is available in...
The Free Book Incident: Nothing to Buy, Nothing to Return
Photo courtesy of Chris Burnside The Free Book Incident (FBI), a month-long experiment & celebration of books & community. Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers and Olson Kundig Architects have partnered to create a unique environment to celebrate the power of books and investigate what can happen when they are available for free. FBI is inspired in part by The Book Thing of Baltimore, an ongoing free book exchange whose "mission is to put unwanted books into the hands of those who want them". Wessel & Lieberman will be donating the books and Olson Kundig will be creating the space, which...
The Book as the Starting Point
Why not just turn publishing on its head and try to change the world right off the bat?Welcome to Sharp Stuff a new publisher born from the confines of one of the great ad agencies on the planet, Wieden+Kennedy. Their mission: to explore "the boundaries of story building" by being a "rapid release content shop that hacks current formats to create new forms.""The book as the starting point, not the end game" is our approach says Jake Dockter, Director of Communications and Content.Their first project wastes no time in pushing the boundaries. Created in three months, American Dreamers "mixes the fluidity and dynamism...
The LunchBook
Snack on this: An international recipe book with "paper plate" pages to eat on. LunchBook is designed by Italian design team Sebastiano Ercoli and Alessandro Garlandini for the Expo Milano 2015 world exposition dedicated to food, sustainability and nutrition. This culinary world book contains international recipes encouraging the visitor to use its pages as plates and taste the many dishes from the Expo Milano stands. Once a page is used it can be easily removed. The pages have been coated with a waterproof biopolymer film and are 100% recyclable and compostable. An added feature is having each paper plate's border based upon the traditional...