here & now » books

STORE OF THE MONTH: SAUTTER + LACKMANN / HAMBURG

kvr — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:44:04 +0000

In Germany, we sort of take it for granted that every bigger city has at least one traditional art book store to satisfy your craving for printed matter in art, design, architecture and photography. They are usually run by grey-haired men in cardigans and thick glasses, or ladies smelling of cheap perfume, who all know exactly what to find where among hundreds of books piling up in every available corner – something that the Internet will never ever do for you.

It’s only when you go to other countries that you realize that this is not necessarily the case everywhere, so let’s raise our glasses for a moment to the old art book dealer of your neighbourhood, the ones you start missing only when they have disappeared. Sautter + Lackmann is a point in case, which has been holding up the torch for 42 years now in Hamburg, and gloriously so. It’s the place to go for digging into your monographs on Baselitz and Warhol, but for a long time, it was also the only store in Hamburg that was selling mono.kultur, pretty much from the very beginning – so much for stuffiness. And it’s always nice to know that there are some things you can still count on.

Sautter + Lackmann
Admiralitätstrasse 71/72
20459 Hamburg

L’UOMO UNIVERSALE

mc — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:52:20 +0000

Henrik Vibskov, the omnipresent ‘Mehrfachkünstler’ is already at a stage to present his first retrospective in the form of a book. The ingenius designer expanded the notion of fashion, while working towards an artistic ideal of freedom.

The unmissable compilation Henrik Vibskov is published by Gestalten Verlag.

DONLON BOOKS

sr — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 04:28:24 +0000

There’s an enjoyable interview with Conor Donlon of Donlon Books in the latest apartamento magazine. This independent bookshop is my type of bookshop, (and it also sells mono.kultur).

Donlon Books
77 Broadway Market
London

A Celebration of Creativity, Culture & Cuisine

emg — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:23:09 +0000

Bored with the temperamental weather outside? We’re all looking forward to those Sundays spent in the park, chilling, sunbathing and reading a book (while we strongly fear another Summer like last year’s one). But that’s not happening, at least for this Sunday. So we better make the best out of what we’re left with (which is still pretty good) and celebrate the joys of living (or passing by, at the moment) in a city such as Berlin. This weekend we suggest you Slow Travel Berlin’s event ‘A Celebration of Creativity, Culture & Cuisine‘, taking place at historical market Markthalle IX, where a series of good stuff is happening. From outside organized tours to the inside Locavore food market or the Lounge (where you can visit Portable Book Fair Berlin #03, among other things), the readings, workshops and concerts, there’s a complete schedule to please the whole family.

Markthalle IX
Eisenbahnstraße 42/43
Pücklerstraße 34
10997 Berlin

22 April, 2012
12-6pm
free entrance

the book of the future

emg — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 09:48:03 +0000

The book of the future will be precious. But meanwhile, meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice — the faces of tomorrow’s today’s book.

MEANWHILE, DOWN UNDER…

kvr — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 11:43:11 +0000

…Australia’s Independent Photography Festival is coming to the lovely shores of Melbourne, including the all new IPF Zine and Book Fair, where our humble selves will be presented among plenty of other tasty titles at the Motto booth. One day, and one day only. Yum.

IPF Book & Zine Fair
07 April 2012
10–16h

The Workers Club
51 – 55 Gertrude
St, Fitzroy, VIC 3065
Australia

The word to cure the world. A praise for Broken Dimanche Press

emg — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 09:30:19 +0000

In the beginning was the word and the man didn’t know how to use it.
Expelled from Paradise, he kept erratically wandering, expanding and populating, while the world grew old, hurt and tired. The dawn of the days approaches, unless we look for the cure.
The administration of prescribed word compounds, in exact and very precise quantities might be a solution, and that’s what Broken Dimanche Press‘ edition of Morten Søndergaard’s Wordpharmacy tells me; something as simple as the word might be the cure to the world.
Indeed, let european economies fail, let the countries and the boundaries fall, as long as we can still speak to each other, sing and claim poetry out loud, we will still be human.

Wordpharmacy is not the usual book you buy, read and give back to your shelf. If you buy it, you’ll be acquiring a set of ten small medicine boxes, which you will have to open one by one, patiently unfold the leaflet and put your enlarging glasses to read the small size writings. Each of the boxes represents one word group (interjections, verbs, adjectives, numerals and so on) and the practical and technical information is discreetly replaced with an instructional poem that extends the efficiency of the original leaflet while still guiding the readers’ ingestion of the given word group.

Though it’s frequent (as frequent as daily, indeed) that we come to hear about new independent publishing efforts, it’s also something close to a rule, that a big percentage of those projects, end up disappearing and falling into complete oblivion sooner or later. And that, we believe, is happening due to a total reborn of the love for print, to the extent that there is so much content out there right now that it becomes hard to keep up to date. And therefore few publishing projects meet true success and last.
The projects that fall in this group are the ones successful enough in distinguishing themselves from their surroundings, and if Broken Dimanche Press is accountable for other things else than publishing great books/editions is also by the capacity of establishing itself as one of the most promising publishing projects currently out there.
The recipe for the success? The simple combination of interesting subjects, I would say, with intriguing and captivating writing, amazingly well designed editions, a very good promotion work, a good dose of surprise, and most of all, the humbleness of not trying to be more than what it already is — a very good publishing project.

And since there’s no time to waste, another book has just been published: Mountainislandglacier, a compilation or art, writing and investigation that departs from the event of Eyjafjallajökull in May 2010, edited by the group ‘Correspondence from Eyjafjallajökull’.

NOGOODNIKS

sr — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 01:34:56 +0000

A Thursday smile from Adrian Norvid’s new book Nogoodniks.

STORE OF THE MONTH: ATHENAEUM / AMSTERDAM

kvr — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:28:15 +0000

Athenaeum is something of a wet dream for anyone who is even faintly interested in books and magazines. A proper bookstore with over 50,000 titles in stock, established in 1996 on Spui square in the heart of Amsterdam, they included a Nieuwscentrum a few years later, which has pretty much everything in terms of periodicals and magazines, ranging from all the major global newspaper to the smallest independent titles. The fact that they were one of the very first stores outside of Germany to carry mono.kultur just shows their zeal in assembling anything that is worth the paper it’s printed on. In short: an essential stop on your bike ride through Amsterdam.

Athenaeum
Spui 14-16
Amsterdam

MOTTO DISCO: MOUSE ON MARS

kvr — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:06:36 +0000

And since we mentioned Mouse on Mars the other day, and Motto Disco some other day before, we should really mention that the former have just compiled a mix for the latter, which you can download here. Awesomeness.