What are your favorite art books?

This thing arrived today - all 30 lbs of it! *Much* bigger than I thought! Since I have a toddler, I'm sure I'll actually open it and enjoy it in about 15 years.

Does anyone remember the CD-ROM where you could see Joseph Cornell's boxes in action? You could turn them 360 degrees, zoom in, open the drawers, activate the little chutes and balls...it was so great! It's out of print and obviously doesn't work on any operating system now. That was my favorite art "book"

Phaidon is having one of its ridiculous "friends and family" sales at the moment - though i think it's probably open to everyone with the right e-mail.

I just got books with a face value of £300 for £75 and somehow earned £23 in loyalty points at the same time.

Thanks!

That giant phaidon graphic design archive is $20 for Black Friday.

thx

holy hell the size of this ting

Want

Thank you for the Phiadon/Graphic design tip, just ordered, amazing!

I have been on a James Turrell kick recently so have ordered a couple of his editions, hoping that the art will translate well enough onto the page.

I just ordered that Phaidon book too, wow!

This seems to be my main vice these days, I just picked up a beautiful Ellsworth Kelly retrospective (second hand) it's big, not huge, but the paper is heavy, the whole thing is weighty and the reproductions are just beautiful.

I'm also looking through AbeBooks trying to pick off the Taschen 'Domus' hardback editions, the cheapy reprint ones are waaay too small to properly read and nearly every page of the 1970s book alone is gold so I'm starting there and working backwards.

I don't have as many of these as I used to- I think the last one I bought was at the show of Michelangelo's drawings at the Met in like 2017 ("Divine Draftsman and Designer")

A lot of pieces really do not reproduce well, books of Jackson Pollock's paintings for example invariably elicit some response of 'this is completely pointless'. OTOH, I have a little fold-out catalog of Teching Hsieh's 'One Year Performance' from Exit Art that's beautiful and quite moving. Obviously it doesn't reproduce anything.

My favorite might be a full size facsimile of the "Morgan Beatus", a Spanish illuminated manuscript of the apocalypse of Saint John

Ilya Kabokov's 'Palace of Projects' was a wonderful text-based exhibit that also translates extremely well to a book format.

I find that you can't go back much beyond the late eighties for second-hand art books as the reproductive quality mostly isn't there, or they're done in b&w. I got a Charles Sheeler book last year on spec and the whole book is tiny, depressing, and counterintuitive.

Taschen sale on now!

Taschen.com

Anything interesting on Bruegel?

I sold and gave away most of my library back in November but kept my absolute favorite art books. These are the ones I would grab in a fire: Goya “Complete Drawings”, “Velazquez: The Technique Of Genius”, Turner “Early Sketchbooks” and “Sketches 1802-20” and two small paperbacks of Hokusai drawings I picked up in Tokyo years ago.

Oh and add the Dover “Complete Etchings” of Rembrandt to that stack!

George Shiras - Hunting Wildlife with Camera and Flash Light Vol. I & II (National Geographic Press, 1936)

("hunting" in this case means taking photos, not actually hunting tbc).

Taschen.com sale starts Thursday

If you're interested in Graphic Design, the two Taschen histories/overviews are pretty incredible, nice hefty books, pretty cheap, and very well done.

Good ‘ol chill 00s ILX

(Sorry, was reading the very beginnings of this thread.)

Thanks for the head’s up on this sale, will take a look.