I was excited to see a book published on Martha Rosler Library. I'm just not sure that I know more about the project than I did before reading it.

First exhibited in New York, at e-flux's storefront space in late 2005, Martha Rosler Library has continued to travel ever since -- seemingly on its own momentum -- showing up in a half dozen places in Europe so far. In brief, the project is approximately 7,800 of artist Martha Rosler's books, shelved and made available to the public. While each installation is slightly different, they tend to also include programs of public events and discussions.

I've been interested in the project since first hearing about it, but not having had the opportunity to personally visit the library at any of its venues, I've had to content myself with the odd article here and there. So, it was to my great interest that the hosts of its most recent stops in Liverpool and Endinburgh published a small book about the project: Martha Rosler Library, Paul Domela and John Byrne eds. (2008, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art Ltd, $14.95, 9780953676170).

Aside from introductions from the hosting venues, this small, thoughtfully-produced volume includes an interview with Rosler and art writer and curator, Stephen Wright; a second with Wright and Anton Vidokle, the co-founder of e-flux and co-initiator of Martha Rosler Library; and an essay by Elena Filipovic, originally published in Afterall magazine last year. You would think that amongst this collection of writers and artists, one would get a clear sense of the project, and yet there's a peculiar ambiguity surrounding what's being said about the project and about how it really seems to operate.

In her interview, Rosler states that the library is a space free from her own authority, open for the public to make their own meaning from. And yet, after the first couple installations (where the organizations was based loosely on how it was found in her home) she imposed an stricter, numbered ordering system on the books. And as far as one can ascertain in the text, she also has a very particularly strong hand in their installation in each location.

Also, despite being comprised of her books, in her organization, and under her name, the artist further insists the library is not a portrait of her. Yet, Elena Filipovic brackets her entire essay on the scraps of toilet paper found marking the pages of many of the books. She dwells (awkwardly) on the very person-ness this implies.

Lastly, in the interview with Anton Vidokle (fascinating enough for his discussion of his e-flux project) one gets the distinct sense that his conception of the project and Rosler's conception of the project have veered significantly and perhaps uncomfortably away from one another over the last couple years.

These are interesting problems. Do the contradictions imply a failure on the part of the piece, or on the part of its interpreters? Given the continually extended tour the library has been on, and the interest it seems to generate in each stop, the piece is at least popular. But is this popularity a result of a misunderstanding of the project on the part of the venues and audiences, or is the project something none of the players here can quite grasp? Is Martha Rosler Library somehow above being described in words?

A new issue of the Hol Bulletin is (finally) available. This month features a biography of Giorgio Morandi, a conversation with Catherine Opie, the writings of Henri Cartier-Bresson, some exciting Hol Project Books, and highlights from the New Museum's September HOTLIST. Read it online now.

Subscribe for free to receive the next issue by email. October will feature books on Gilbert & George, Louise Bourgeois, and more.

September

Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World, Jed Perl (September 2008, Knopf, $25, 9780307266620). Biography/History. "Weaving together historical fact and personal reflections, the influential art critic Jed Perl reconstructs the amazing story of this pioneering bohemian artist who, although he died in 1721, when he was only thirty-six, has influenced innumerable painters and writers in the centuries since." In its full description, the book sounds like an interesting approach to Watteau, and it has gotten some good early reviews. The success of Perl's last book, New Art City, doesn't hurt either.

The Man in the Picture: A Ghost Story, Susan Hill (September 2008, Overlook Press, $15, 9781590200919). Fiction. "In the apartment of Oliver's old professor, there's a painting on the wall, a mysterious depiction of masked revelers at the Venice carnival. On this cold winter's night, the professor has decided to reveal the painting’s eerie secret. The dark art of the Venetian scene, instead of imitating life, has the power to entrap it."

October

All the King's Horses, Michèle Bernstein (October 2008, Semiotext(e), $14.95, 9781584350651). Fiction. "[O]ne of the odder and more elusive, entertaining, and revealing documents of the Situationist International. At the instigation of her first husband, Guy Debord, Bernstein agreed to write a potboiler to help swell the Situationist International's coffers." Translation and introduction by John Kelsey. This weird connection between high art and trash fiction is too irresistable. For a different take on the Situationist International, see Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International, being published by Semiotext(e) in December (listed below).

A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World, Marcia Tucker (October 2008, University of California Press, $27.50, 9780520257009). Memoir. "This engrossing memoir brings to vivid life the behind-the-scenes struggles of Marcia Tucker, the first woman to be hired as a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City." Edited and with an Afterword by artist Liza Lou. Marcia Tucker, who died in 2006, has also just had a volume of her short stories published through the Acadia Summer Arts Program in Maine, Marcia Tucker: Three Stories.

A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, John Yau (October 2008, D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, $39.95, 9781933045627). Essay. "This beautifully illustrated and profoundly original volume of essays by the New York poet and critic John Yau mounts one of the most eloquent defenses of the art and vision of Jasper Johns ever written--going well past tired and traditional Formalist readings of the artist's work to propose a completely new way of reading them: One that is intensely human." Yau's first book on Johns, The United States of Jasper Johns (1996, Zoland Books), was generally well-regarded but for me didn't live up to expectations. Perhaps though, Yau was just warming up.

Caravaggio's Angel, Ruth Brandon (October 2008, Soho Constable, $25, 9781569475195). Mystery. "Dr. Reggie Lee, new at London's National Gallery, is planning a small exhibition of three almost identical Caravaggio paintings when she discovers a fourth. One must be a forgery. That discovery detonates multiple murders. Like Flavia di Stefano in Iain Pears' art history mysteries, Reggie is attractive, knowledgeable when it comes to art, and percipient when it comes to people with motives to defraud." I reviewed a numer of art mysteries in a previous Hol Bulletin, and am happy, even if guiltily, to see a new one published.

Chagall: A Biography, Jackie Wullschlager (October 2008, Knopf, $40, 9780375414558). Biography. "Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall’s complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as André Breton put it, “under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting,” and helped shape the new surrealist movement." THe publisher is comparing Wullschlager's Chagall biography to Hilary Spurling's acclaimed Matisse, and John Richardson's eqaully vaunted Picasso -- they just might be right.

Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait, Michael Peppiatt (October 2008, Yale University Press, $35.00, 9780300142556). Biography. "In this invaluable book Michael Peppiatt, a major art critic and close friend of Bacon’s, offers an entertaining and uniquely well-informed portrait of this complex artist. Peppiatt’s collection of interviews and essays spans more than forty years—from 1963, when the two men met, to 2007, when Peppiatt wrote an essay explaining Bacon’s passionate involvement with Van Gogh."

* The Lightning Field, Kenneth Baker (October 2008, Yale University Press, $35.00, 9780300138948). Essay. "Critic Kenneth Baker visited [Walter de Maria's] The Lightning Field numerous times over the course of the past 30 years in order to write this text. Inspired and challenged by this remarkable artwork, Baker speculates on the course of our contemporary human condition. But, rather than building on ideas in narrative sequence, he deploys quotation to effect multiple perspectives and points of view. Baker's citations and elegantly crafted prose are arrayed––in a metaphorical parallel to De Maria's choreographing of the vast landscape of the American Southwest––to create a compelling text." Preface by Lynne Cooke. This might be my favorite pick for the fall. Sounds like a great approach to a particularly interesting work.

The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe (October 2008, Picador, $14, 9780312427580). Essay. 1975 Reissue. "He addresses the scope of Modern Art, from its founding days as Abstract Expressionism through its transformations to Pop, Op, Minimal, and Conceptual.... '"If you have ever stared uncomprehendingly at an abstract painting that admired critics have said you ought to dig, take heart. Tom Wolfe . . . is on your side. The Painted Word may enrage you. It may confirm your darkest suspicions about Modern Art. In any case, it will amuse you.' --New York Sunday News"

Theanyspacewhatever (October 2007, Guggenheim Museum, $45, 9780892073771). Exhibition. "During the 1990s a number of artists claimed the exhibition as their medium. Working independently or in various collaborative constellations, they eschewed the individual object in favor of the exhibition environment as a dynamic arena, ever expanding its physical and temporal parameters." Essays by Michael Archer, Daniel Birnbaum, Nicolas Bourriaud, Xavier Douroux, Patricia Falguieres, Hal Foster, Massimiliano Gioni, Michael Govan, Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and more.

True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, Lawrence Wechler (October 2008, University of California Press, $24.95, 9780520258792). Biography. "Soon after its publication in 1982, artist David Hockney read Lawrence Weschler's Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin and invited Weschler to his studio to discuss it, initiating a series of engrossing dialogues, gathered here for the first time.... These conversations provide an astonishing record of what has been Hockney's grand endeavor, nothing less than an exploration of "the structure of seeing" itself." And don't miss University of California Press' November release of a greatly expanded version of Weschler's Seeing is Forgetting (listed below).

November

Envy, Alan Elkann (November 2008, Pushkin Press, $15.95, 9781901285819). Fiction. "...a writer falls victim to an obsessive curiosity about a famous artist Julian Sax...The narrator begins to fear that his wife Rossa might succumb to the charm of this seductive man who attracts women, paints them and then discards them." Translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwan. Creepy cover illustration by Hans Bellmer.

The Marriage of Love & Squalor, Jake Chapman (November 2008, FUEL Publishing, $32.95, 9780955862007). Fiction. "In his fiction debut, the notorious British artist Jake Chapman satirizes the standard paperback romance novel in his own inimitable way, slashing the genre down to bare bones and creating a disfigured version from the remains."

Me and Kaminski, Daniel Kehlmann (November 2008, Pantheon, $21.95, 9780307377449). Fiction. "Half road novel, half satire on the contemporary art scene, Kaminski and Me is a wryly humorous meditation on art, memory, and identity. It provides further compelling evidence of the exceptional talents of one of Europe's most exciting and gifted young novelists."

Seeing is Forgetting the Name of Thing One Sees, Lawrence Weschler (November 2008, University of California Press, $24.95, 9780520256095). Biography. 1982 Reissue. "Now expanded to include six additional chapters and twenty-four pages of color plates, Seeing Is Forgetting chronicles three decades of conversation between Lawrence Weschler and light and space master Robert Irwin... enhancing what many had already considered the best ever book on an artist." Some of my recent thoughts on Weschler and Irwin here.

Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton (November 2008, W. W. Norton, $24.95, 9780393067224). Essay. "[Sarah Thornton] reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture." Thanks to Megan for the tip.

December

Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1935–1975, Fairfield Porter (December 2008, MFA Publications, $22.50,  9780878467433). Criticism. "Known as one of America's finest and most influential painters, Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) was also a prolific and highly insightful art critic. His writing not only reflects the independent, original mind that presided over his own visual works, but also covers an extraordinary period in American art, in which he played the double role of protagonist and witness." I might be biased for having worked a bit for MFA Publications, but I'm very glad to see their artWorks series continuing.

Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957–August 1960), Guy Debord (December 2008, Semiotext(e), $19.95, 9781584350552). Letters. "Debord's letters--published here for the first time in English--provide a fascinating insider's view of just how this seemingly disorganized group drifting around a newly consumerized Paris became one of the most defining cultural movements of the twentieth century." Translated by Stuart Kendall. Introduction by McKenzie Wark, a 2006 Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant winner.

San Francisco Chronicle:
• Frida's Bed, Slavenka Drakulic, Christina P. Zoric trans. (Penguin)

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

CAA Reviews:*
• The Anthropology of Art: A Reader, Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins, eds. (Blackwell)

The Guardian:
• Life Class, Pat Barker (Penguin)

The New York Sun:
• The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren, Jonathan Lopez (Harcourt)
• The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Edward Dolnick (Harper)

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I've just finished reading Andrea Bowers / Catherine Opie, a conversation between the two artists, published this year by A.R.T. Press. I'll be featuring the book in our next email newsletter in time for Opie's upcoming exhibition at the Guggenheim (subscribe for free here), but I just had to point out this thought-provoking and particularly funny passage:

"Bowers: I admire how proactive you are in supporting other artists. Although there are many more opportunities for women artists today, the inequalities are still huge. There's still a glass ceiling, particularly in publishing. That's why I think it's so important that we are doing this interview together.

"Opie: Well, it's the same thing with me. I'm gonna have four floors at the Guggenheim...

"Bowers: I mean, c'mon Cathy, I'm so happy for you!

"Opie: ... yeah, it's unbelievable. But at the same time, whenever one of my contemporaries—Wolfgang Tillmans, Jack Pierson—sneezes out a photograph, a book is published."

Lawrence Weschler's early book on artist Robert Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, should arguably be considered one of the all-time great works of writing on visual art. It's based largely on a number of conversations Weschler had with the artist from 1976–79, and published in 1982. Long having sat on my own reading list, it was a pleasure to finally pick it up this summer, and to subsequently be led to Weschler's more recent set of Irwin interviews, published in Robert Irwin Getty Garden (copiously illustrated with photographs of the garden by Becky Cohen).

Irwin and Weschler are rare talents in their respective fields. The great pleasure taken in reading these two books, undoubtedly stems from this fortunate pairing.

Robert Irwin was born in 1928 and has spent most of his life in and around Los Angeles. Despite a few years at Otis Art institute and an important early relationship to the artists of the now-infamous Ferus Gallery, Irwin's pursuits always tended toward the solitary and the obsessive. From the beginning of his artistic career, from series to series, he worked tirelessly to sharpen his skills and more importantly, his eye. He whittled away at the work in front of him and at the spaces in which that work was exhibited. Trying, it seemed, to reach a purity of vision and some satisfaction of the artistic questions that dogged him. As Weschler writes near the end of the book:

"At the terminus of Irwin's trajectory, when all the nonessentials had been stripped away, came the core assertion that aesthetic perception itself was the pure subject of art. Art existed not in objects but in a way of seeing.

"And that, for a man who had spent twenty-five years honing his vocation as a practicing artist, had some fairly profound implications."

Despite Irwin's realization that his work as an artist seemed to lead him to the conclusion that there was actually no art to be made, he did indeed find a way to carry on. And though Seeing is Forgetting was published too early to capture it all, in the nearly 30 years intervening years between Weschler's first conversations with the artist and today, Irwin has continued to explore, to stretch, to hone, and to realize an amazing body of work.

Perhaps the most renowned of his more recent works is the Getty garden. And for the occasion of this first (and only?) comprehensive garden project Irwin had thus far undertaken, Weschler rejoined the artist for a series of extensive conversations charting his process and progress. Though the resulting publication is simply a transcripts of those talks — rather than the more fully realized and crafted narrative of Weschler's earlier biography — it makes for satisfying reading. If for nothing else, for perfectly delaying that moment when, suddenly reaching the last page of Seeing is Forgetting, you regret having to let it go.

Lawrence Weschler, Becky Cohen, photo., Robert Irwin Getty Garden (2002, Getty Trust Publications, $45, 9780892366200)

Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982, University of California Press, $17.95, 9780520049208)

Frieze:
• Art Power, Boris Groys (MIT Press)

St. Petersburg Times:
• The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America, Tom Buk-Swienty, Annette Buk-Swienty, trans. (W.W. Norton)

CAA Reviews:*
• Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan, Kim Brandt (Duke University Press)
• Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600–2005, Patricia J. Graham (University of Hawai'i Press)
• Acquisition: Art and Ownership in Edo-Period Japan, Elizabeth Lillehoj, ed. (Floating World Editions)

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frieze magazine has announced the winner of its inaugural Writer's Prize:

"frieze is delighted to announce William Gass as the winner of the 2008 Writer's Prize. He will receive a prize of 2,000 GBP and be writing a review for the October issue.

"The runners up are Graham T. Beck and Conor Carville. Kate Forde, Tyler Friedman, Clay Lerner, J. MacNeill Miller, Chris Moore and Marianne Templeton have been highly commended.

"Jennifer Higgie, co-editor of frieze commented, 'The volume, quality and international scope of entries we received this year reflects the growing interest in frieze's commitment to encouraging new writing. William Gass' lively engagement with complex ideas made him a clear winner, and we look forward to his future contributions to the magazine. We are also very excited to have discovered new writers in Graham T. Beck and Conor Carville and in the shortlist of highly commended entrants. We were honoured to have Nicolas Bourriaud and Adrian Searle as judges and appreciate their dedication to new writing.'"

Somewhere amongst our move from Boston to Tucson, I was happy to find myself back in L.A. for a short visit, and even more happy to be able to attend a meeting of the Future of Publishing Think Tank while I was there. One might expect such a grandly titled group to consist of top publishing industry executives working at the leading edge of their field. Thankfully however, this isn't really the case.

The Future of Publishing Think Tank is actually comprised of an intimate group of writing groups, booksellers, and indie publishers you've probably mostly never heard of —the meeting I attended included folks from Writers At Work, Les Figues Press, Los Angeles Public Library, Red Hen Press, Skylight Books, Poets & Writers, and Poet Joi Publications.

These enterprising folks gather once a month or so to talk about what might be around the corner in publishing. While they may not have the resources or clout of the major publishing houses, the wonderful thing about them is that they're operating at a level particularly close to the source of all things publishing—the writer. This on-the-ground perspective is their greatest asset and offers the promise to make their work relevant far beyond their small group.

While executives at the world's biggest publishing companies are indeed talking about and strategizing for the "future of publishing" I find it heartening (if not all that surprising) that small, independent groups like the one in L.A. are out there actually trying to make it happen.

For a summer marked primarily by my own cross-country move, Erin Hogan's recent book, Spiral Jetta, made for an obvious reading selection. Hogan is the director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Spiral Jetta chronicles her multi-week trip around the American West to see some of the great monuments of Earth Art. Her stops included Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer's Double Negative, Walter De Maria's Lighting Field and Donald Judd's former home and city-wide installation/studio, Marfa, Texas.

These works—arguably some of the most important of the last fifty years—are also some of the western United States' greatest artistic assets. Unfortunately, early in the book Hogan (and so too the reader) is distracted from any deep consideration of the art by her self-professed nervousness about traveling alone and at such distances by car. While soon enough she, and we, get used to this subplot, it remains a theme throughout the book. Even near the end of the journey, she states:

"While I considered the trip so far a success, I realized that I pinned this assessment on my newfound ability to travel alone without having a nervous breakdown and not on the experience of viewing earth art."

She does ultimately make honest attempts at experiencing and understanding the art she sees. And her passages of smooth description and her ever-present personality make those attempts often interesting and rewarding to read. So while the book could as easily be considered personal essay as it is art criticism, it undoubtedly provided me new incentive to ponder a similar journey of my own.

Erin Hogan, Spiral Jetta, (2008, Univeristy of Chicago Press, $20, 9780226348452)

And after indulging myself here with a brief photo essay of our road trip west, I'll be getting back to all things publishing in due haste and with satisfying regularity. So, without further ado...

On the first day of our trip, only a few hours outside of Boston, we stopped at Dia:Beacon. We'd been there for opening day in 2003, but somehow hadn't made it back since. It was just as impressive this time. The size and light in the first galleries is rivaled only by the size and darkness of the basement gallery space below: The four Serra torqued ellipses are perfect: And if you love Fred Sandback's witty and fascinating yarn works like I do, this remains the place to see them. (We took this picture—the only one we got there—because we have a friend in Boston named Dan Jonhston. Presumably the shirt is about the outsider artist and musician Daniel Johnston rather than our friend, but you never know.)

Late that same night, we found ourselves on the rather abandoned-feeling Pennsylvania Turnpike until we inadvertently stopped at this Twilight Zone of a truck stop. The place was lit up like Las Vegas and was a madhouse of cars and trucks. We ate at a pseudo-50s-diner Denny's and were glad for the eerie loneliness of the Turnpike once we got back on the road afterward.

On the morning of the second day we stopped at Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Falling Water. We took two pictures, both of the gift shop on the way in... it really was quite lovely.

 
We stopped for lunch in Charleston, West Virginia. We drove blindly into the nice little downtown area to look for a place, but then thought it best to call our personal OnStar service—a good friend in Boston who volunteered his Googling skills. He quickly found these two top-rated lunch places in town and then, better than any GPS service on the market, led us to them turn by turn. We were so impressed with his service that we've forgiven him the fact that one of the diners was closed for the afternoon and the other was out of business.

The terrific sink at the equally terrific (and indulgent) 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky—A combination museum dedicated to art of the 21st Century and boutique hotel. We would have been happy to stay there a little longer if our schedule and our wallets allowed, but we did get to take away a new love for Malin + Goetz rum soap. Like the hotel, it's expensive but totally worth it.

This single horse is, according to our 15-mile detour experience, the only thing left of what was once thriving horse country east of Louisville.

Louisville may not have horses anymore, but they've got bourbon, and I love the lettering formed in the concrete of this liquor store where we stopped to buy a bottle on the way out of town.

What trip west would be complete without a shot of the Arch? This one was take at about 60 mph. And apparently, though we never saw it, the mighty Mississippi River is down there somewhere too.

This was to be a picture of the Nelson-Atkins Museum's amazing new building by architect Steven Holl. We weren't going to make it into Kansas City until late at night, and couldn't stay long enough the next morning to actually go inside the museum, but luckily, much of the brilliance of Holl's building is supposed to be revealed in its nighttime lighting. We were relieved to arrive in town with—according to the museum's website—45 minutes left before the building's lights were turned off for the evening. But when we pulled up the lights were off. So, sorry Nelson Atkins, but you're dead to me now.

Along with the Saint Louis Arch, another American road trip staple is of course Very Big Things along the side of the road. This particular Very Big Thing happens to be a 24 by 36 foot Van Gogh sunflowers reproduction off Interstate 70 in Western Kansas. And the little red building at right? A homemade jerky and gun emporium... Ah, America.

Chicago Tribune:
• Look Up: The Life and Art of Sacha Kolin, Lisa Thaler (Midmarch Arts) 
• Old Masters, New World: America's Raid on Europe's Great Pictures, Cynthia Saltzman (Viking)

CAA Reviews:*
• Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, Lorraine Daston, ed. (Zone Books)
• Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art, Maria H. Loh (Getty Research Institute)

London Review of Books (vol. 30, no. 16):*
• The Bellini Card, Jason Goodwin (Faber & Faber)
• The Bellini Madonna, Elizabeth Lowry (Quercus)

New York Review of Books (vol. 55, no. 13):
• Rembrandt's Jews, Steven Nadler (University of Chicago Press)

The Times Literary Supplement:
• Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory, Peter Read (University of California Press)

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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)

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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

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Dallas Morning News:
• The Forgery of Venus, Michael Gruber (William Morrow)