The package going out to the NYU
and DU publishing institutes, and
the resulting 16-page booklet.
I've just finished putting together a little handout for students of New York University's Summer Publishing Institute (of which I'm a 2001 alum) and Denver University's Publishing Institute. Both programs are intensive multi-week courses, designed to jumpstart student's publishing careers with complete overviews of the industry and valuable networking opportunities. I was running too late this spring to be able to participate in either course in person, but was happy to be able to contribute a little from afar.

The handout I created is intended to spark students' thinking on the entrepreneurial side of the business and specifically ways in which the Internet is enabling a new kind of startup publishing enterprise. It's printed on two sheets of legal-size paper and includes simple directions to fold, cut, and bind the sheets together into a pocket-size 16-page booklet, using an included rubber band. The booklet consists primarily of this one quote:

"Trade book publishing is by nature a cottage industry, decentralized, improvisational, personal; best performed by small groups of like-minded people, devoted to their craft, jealous of their autonomy, sensitive to the needs of writers and to the diverse interests of readers."

It's the opening line of Jason Epstein's 2001 book Book Business, and remains my favorite statement on publishing. Following the quote, I invite students to "start their own cottage" and direct them to a collection of articles assembled at del.icio.us/holartbooks/101.

Download your own copy of the handout below (rubber band not included), or drop me a line and I'll mail one out -- just be sure to indicate whether you'd like it assembled or not.

1. Download
2. Print double-sided on legal-size paper
3. Assemble as indicated

"The College Art Association has averted a so-called libel tourism action threatened against it in Britain. The threat came from an Israeli professor of art history angry over a review of her book in Art Journal, one of the association's scholarly publications." Continue reading at NEWSgrist...

New York Times:
• The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Edward Dolnick (Harper)

The Bookreporter.com
• Stealing Athena, Karen Essex (Doubleday)

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
• Artworld Metaphysics, Robert Kraut (Oxford University Press) via Bookforum.com

The Guardian:
• Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, Andrew Graham-Dixon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

In publishing, you can either work to create demand for a supply of books you've already published, or you can work to create supply to match a demand that's already there. The latter is always your best option, it's just not always easy to judge what people are demanding. Unless, that is, you have web statistics.

Thanks to web statistics services built into almost every web host (or available for free thanks to Google Analytics) you can not only track what pages people visit on your site and in what quantity, but also what search terms they used to find you. And if you have pages devoted to books that you might publish (like, say, Hol's project book pages) then people searching for those books or topics will find you and by doing so, signal their interest -- their demand.

Since launching whatishol.com last year, two books have consistently and undeniably ranked as the most sought after -- Three Picassos Before Breakfast and Painting as a Pastime.

Three Picassos Before Breakfast is by Anne Marie Stein and it chronicles her life with infamous art forger David Stein. Painting as a Pastime is a short collection of observations on artistic practice by former British Prime Minister and dedicated amateur painter, Winston Churchill. Both books are out of print (though Painting as a Pastime is available as part of a somewhat-available larger volume on Churchill's life and art) and both are listed as possible Hol project books for republication. So, if you want to publish a book that readers already want, I might suggest you look no further. 

Portland Oregonian:
• Cezanne's Quarry, Barbara Pope (Pegasus)

Seattle Times:
• Hubert's Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus, Gregory Gibson (Harcourt)

The New York Sun:
• Let's See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl (Thames & Hudson)

Frieze:
• The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, George Kubler (Yale University Press) Cited by Adrian Piper in Frieze's Ideal Syllabus.

CAA Reviews: *
• Children in the Visual Arts of Imperial Rome, Jeannine Diddle Uzzi (Cambridge University Press)
• The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America, Charmaine A. Nelson (University of Minnesota Press)
• Painter and Priest: Giovanni Canavesio’s Visual Rhetoric and the Passion Cycle at La Brigue, Véronique Plesch (University of Notre Dame Press)
• Abstraction and the Holocaust, Mark Godfrey (Yale University Press)
• Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Rubens, Lisa Rosenthal (Cambridge University Press)

^{* Membership/subscription necessary to view}

This is whatishol.com:

Courtesy of a free and easy little web app that graphs websites (thanks to Leslie Brown for the link), you just plug in a web address and the program dynamically maps the site right before your eyes. The colors represent different kinds of basic web content including images, links, tables and forms. Other than that though, it's hard for me to know what we're looking at here, which is too bad. I assume the large symmetric burst at the lower right is our main project books page, but what's that single tendril leading off it? And those funny arms sticking out before you get to the less condensed mass filling the rest of the image? And that little gray dandelion at the top? And by publishing this post, did I just change the map?

And for more visualization info and eye-candy, check out visualcomplexity.com.

New York Times:
• Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom  (The New Press)

Boston Globe:
• A Curious Earth, Gerard Woodward  (W.W. Norton)

CAA Reviews:*
•  Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, eds. (Duke University Press)

Bookforum (June/July/Aug 2008):
• Art Power, Boris Groys (MIT Press)
• Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, Maggie Nelson (University of Iowa Press)

The Art Newspaper:
• Harald Szeemann: Exhibition Maker, Hans-Joachim Müller, (Hatje Cantz)
• Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology, Florence Derieux ed. (JRP/Ringier Kunstverlag)
via The Art History Newsletter

^{* Membership/subscription necessary to view}

Chicago Sun Times:
• Hubert's Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus, Gregory GIbson  (Harcourt) 

CAA Reviews:*
• Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde, Allan Antliff (University of Chicago Press)

New York Review of Books (vol. 55, no. 9):
• Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye, Linda Nochlin (Harvard University Press)
_{* Membership/subscription necessary to view}  

From Publishers Weekly, paperback publisher Picador is continuing its "The Best Books You've Never Read" series. The series consists of redesigned and reprinted classic titles from Picador's list that have fallen out of print or have otherwise wallowed in undeserved obscurity. The genius of it is that, at least in part, Picador's sales reps are the ones selecting which books will be brought back: "Now the publisher is regularly opening up its list to sales reps, giving them the power to bring favorite titles back into print under the Best Books banner." [from Publishers Weekly] Picador is putting the power of publishing books, into the hands of people who know and love the books the most devotedly, and who also have the skills and networks to sell them. Smart.

Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg, Calvin Tomkins (Picador)

 
On the occasion of last weekend's The Writings of Donald Judd symposium at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, don't miss Tyler Green's interview part I, and part 2, with professor Richard Schiff. And then get the book: Complete Writings 1959–1975, Donald Judd (The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design)

Just announced, frieze magazine is offering a new writer's prize. The award will be judged by curator Nicolas Bourriaud, frieze co-editor Jennifer Higgie and Guardian critic Adrian Searle. Sounds like a nice chance for a very new writer:

• Entrants must submit one 700 word review of a recent contemporary art exhibition.
• Entrants may only previously have had a maximum of 3 pieces published in any national or international print newspaper or magazine.
• The winning entrant will be commissioned to write a review for the October issue of frieze and be awarded £2000.
• Two further awards of £500 will be made for outstanding entries.
• Deadline is June 23, 2008.

Bookreporter.com:
• The Forgery of Venus, Michael Gruber (William Morrow)

CAA Reviews:*
• Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn, Margaret Dikovitskaya (MIT Press)
_{* Membership/subscription necessary to view} 

If you're curious about artist Allan Kaprow, don't miss Caryn Coleman's post on Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, an exhibition now on view at MOCA and various other participatory locations around Los Angeles. The exhibition runs through June 30, and I wrote about Kaprow's book Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life for the a recent Hol Bulletin. While I recommend the book, reading about the ideas behind Kaprow's unique Happenings will take you only so far. At some point you'll want to find a way to participate in them. The new exhibition affords an interesting opportunity, and Caryn's write-up does a great job grappling with the contradictions in Kaprow's work and in this current iteration of it.

It's not often the art and publishing worlds cross in anything resembling the tabloid-esque. This past Monday, however, The New York Sun had the gossip-iest bit of art/book news since author and collector Danielle Ganek had her publication party for Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him at the Guggenheim where her hedge-fund-manager husband is a trustee.

Author James Frey, of A Million Little Pieces notoriety (he lied to Oprah about its factuality, yikes!), has a new book coming out next month, Bright Shiny Morning. And though it seems to have little to nothing to do with art, The Sun reports that in the face of supposed publishing-world exile over his previous transgressions, HarperCollins and Frey are putting the author's art world connections to use in promoting the book. Specifically, a dinner in his honor at Sotheby's and a limited-edition companion volume to the novel with contributions by artists Richard Prince and Terry Richardson.

Where'd the art world cred come from? Frey has just co-opened a small art gallery on New York's Lower East Side, and "has purchased works by, among others, Mr. Prince, Matthew Barney, Damien Hirst, Ed Ruscha, and Cecily Brown". That'll do it.

Ganek's generally well-received book, a novel centered around a gallerist, is due out in paperback in May. Image of tabloids via.

Book Glutton is a social reading site that's just recently gone into public beta. I admit to not having tried it out yet, though I have been enjoying following their progress over their blog. A couple days ago they posted a couple lessons they'd learn which really rang true.

First, they talk about having spent a lot of development time researching and trying to understand the multitude of competing eBook formats out there. But in the end, they landed on a valuable position of platform neutrality, or rather, platform liberation:

"Now it no longer seems necessary for our system to natively use a book format at all. In fact, the more we learn about book formats and their proponents, the more we want to keep our distance. To that end we want to provide a host of tools to liberate books from these formats."

Second: "Another big eye-opener has been the importance of opening up as much content and functionality as possible to unregistered users and search engines." Along with Search Engine Optimization, they're also focusing on building an expanded web footprint for their company. So they're now on, or soon will be on, Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook; are adding RSS feeds to their catalog; and are actively exploring opportunities for collaboration with others.

Smart.

If I were in L.A. this weekend, I wouldn't miss the Art Book Swap at LACMA on Saturday from noon to five. Organized by Regency Arts Press Ltd. and the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), the event is as you'd imagine -- show up, bring books, leave with different books -- and sounds like good fun to me.

Glad to see Frieze magazine starting a regular feature called "An Ideal Syllabus", in which the editors will ask "curators, artists and writers to list the books that have influenced them". The series takes on from where Jerry Saltz's great little 1998 book of the same name leaves off. The first of the series is from Nicholas Bourriaud, and you can still purchase Saltz's book here.