Launch party Downstairs at Mother tonight cannot wait!

First a bit of research in the British Museum, looking at the way people interact with the space:

Then picking a space for our installation, we chose the Enlightenment Gallery – Room 1 -it’s the oldest room in the museum and always been a library. A Library!

Our installation required plinths and so we designed and made our own to be stackable and made out of reclaimed wood from past uni shows. This was easier said than done ofc but the one thing I have learnt from this project is to embrace failure and not be afraid to try things out and experiment as all the mistakes we made along the way helped a stronger final piece. Also as serious as the BM is and as seriously as we take our work we wouldn’t have made it without a good laugh.

The big night on 11/11/11 was so much fun, we made it in one piece but still recovering. We are going through all the pictures of the installation and collecting all the materials we used (acetate, remaining flyers, paper structures etc) that will be made into a book for Grayson Perry and the BM Library this week so the installation is completely sustainable and generates no waste.

I will post pictures of the night as soon as I have them but in the meantime there is plenty more information here:

http://journeytoenlightenment.tumblr.com

Meet my favourite illustrator in the whole world: Sonia Pulido. I think it was my good friend (and possibly 2nd favourite illustrator) IRKUS who gave me her first book saying I might like her work. Pencil lines, mid-century styled tragic heroines, pin-ups and losers in a surreal world mixed with collage and clever vintage colour palettes all executed with a very distinctive and sharp sense of humour… definitely my kind of illustration.

I treasure all her books to date and was lucky enough to be in Spain on holiday when her fifth book was released last week. El Park Guell de Gaudi Barcelona published by treseditores is part of a series about spanish cities and their landmarks.

Beautiful mosaic endpaper:

Unlike her other books, there aren’t any surreal elements to it and it doesn’t have any words only full spreads of the two tone illustrations:

Take a closer look and you realise there is a character that guides you through the park and the story, the little girl on the left that appears on every page sort of a Where’sWally? little narrator:

Launch party in Barcelona tomorrow, really wish I could go! More info here.

Submission flyer (front and back) for Literature’s Long book open to teenagers aged 19 and under. The orangey red should print as a fluorescent Pantone 805:

Submission flyer (front and back) for Queer Episodes an anthology of Queer Literature coming out next year using the pink triangle symbol:

Spread the word, hoping to get as many submissions as possible!

Thank you Pussy Magazine for your post on ‘How to WOW a Woman’ from Girls & Zines at Tatty Devine:

And Thank yo Sheeta Li for picking up my zine on your lovely blog!

The London Art Book Fair at The Whitechapel Gallery is one of my favourite book fairs and I’m glad I actually managed to book some lectures before they sold out this year. I attended ‘Artists Reimagine the Classics’ with John Morgan and other designers and artists discussing their work for Four Corners and a conversation between James Brett, founder of The Museum of Everything, and Achim Borchardt-Hume, Chief curator of the Whitechapel Gallery about outsider art and the role played by the independent museums. I also managed to catch the Publish and be Damned pop-up stall the following day.

I actually went twice and came home with a pile of books and catalogues:

Had a brief chat with the nice people at the Hatje-Cantz stall who told me about the 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts notebooks for the dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition. A series of 100 bilingual booklets in 3 different formats mainly facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations, and conversations with very different topics and lengths.

I bought these two:

Kluge’s book is only 2 pages long:

Finally got hold of the Book of war, mortification and love by Ruud Linssen published by design collective Underware.nl Essays on voluntary suffering printed in the author’s own blood (really):

They showed me a special edition bound in goatskin and not for sale:

’99p: 99 things you could buy instead of this book’ really is what it says on the cover: a collection of 99 things priced at 99p that I could have bought instead of the book. Genius. I still chose to buy the book, of course:

The best thing about book fairs is discovering publishers you didn’t know before and for me this year it was all about Eindhoven based Onomatopee:

They told me they curate exhibitions that inspire their books and publications, never meant as actual catalogues of the show but a discussion around the ideas triggered by it:

I flipped through every single one of their books and had a very hard time picking up these two:

Design Mass is a conversation about technology, beauty and design:

The layout works as a grid system in which every speaker is assigned a column:

It’s a very effective way of following a 4-way conversation. The resulting blocks of text are absolutely fascinating to look at, a visual representation of the flow of the dialogue:

Btw, sorry about the quality, really need a new camera!

Very exciting news, wish I could go visit in person!