Artistic License
Think you know these artists’ creative outputs? Meet Franz Kafka, illustrator; Zelda Fitzgerald, paper-doll crafter; and other famous moonlighters
A Book of Days
Patti Smith (Random House) $28.99
Poet, musician, and National Book Award–winning memoirist Smith adds another line to her résumé: Instagram creator. Beginning with the image from her first post in 2018—the palm of her hand—she offers a photo (many but not all hers) and musing for each day of the year including Leap Day. Entries acknowledge personal milestones (the release of her album Horses, her wedding to Fred “Sonic” Smith), birthdays (Joan Baez’s, Robert Mapplethorpe’s, her daughter’s), and more, in what she calls “three hundred and sixty-six ways of saying hello.”
Franz Kafka: The Drawings
Edited by Andreas Kilcher, with Pavel Schmidt (Yale Univ.) $50
In 2019, hundreds of drawings by the author of The Trial and “Metamorphosis” were discovered in a private collection. This volume, publishing in English for the first time, brings together those documents as well as previously known works, for a total of more than 240 illustrations. Philosopher Judith Butler, who contributes an essay, cautions against viewing the drawings as early, inferior Paul Klee or minor expressionism. “This collection,” they write, “is surely too eclectic and interesting to warrant any such summary.”
A History of the World (in Dingbats)
David Byrne (Phaidon) $39.95
During the Covid-19 lockdown, Talking Heads front man Byrne, whose musical work often incorporates visual art, began a series of lighthearted doodles in the typographical tradition of “dingbats,” or “little drawings and icons that are often used to break up imposing and intimidating blocks of text.” But, as he writes, the drawings soon took on a different, deeper meaning, becoming a sort of record of the mood that enveloped that era. Despite its seemingly light premise, this is an excellent analysis of the self-reflection brought on by the pandemic.
The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald
Eleanor Lanahan (Scribner) $25.99
The archetypical flapper and wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald was a dancer, painter, writer, and, as documented here by Lanahan, a creator of paper dolls. They began as gifts for Scottie, the Fitzgeralds’ daughter and Lanahan’s mother, born in 1921, and continued long after Scottie had outgrown them. Examples include depictions of the young Fitzgerald family—Scott with a costume that includes angel wings, Scottie as a ballerina—various fairy tale characters, and King Arthur and the knights of the round table.
Seeing Loud
Edited by Vincent Bessières, Dieter Buchhart, and Mary-Dailey Desmarais (Gallimard) $45
Painter and graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat immersed himself in the downtown New York music scene of the late 1970s–early ’80s, playing in an experimental band of untrained musicians whose members included actor and director Vincent Gallo, dancing at the Mudd Club, creating an installation for the Palladium, and soaking up hip-hop, old-school bebop, and more. Through photos, paintings, and interviews, this book looks at the myriad musical influences on Basquiat’s artwork.
Color Therapy
Vivid fine art and lively pop culture visuals brighten up any dark winter’s day.
The Art of Eric Guillon
Ben Croll (Insight Editions) $60
Minions, assemble! The Despicable Me series has spawned memes and TikTok trends, but it’s the work of character designer Eric Guillon that really makes the film sing (or Sing, another franchise Guillon worked on). Separated from big-screen CGI and 3-D animation, Guillon’s concept art leans into mid-century cartoon sensibilities and embraces French influences—the work of New Yorker cover artist Jean-Jacques Sempé, for instance, fed the city-scapes of The Secret Life of Pets.
Craft Beer Design
Edited by Peter Monrad (Gestalten) $40
The colorful art of the modern beer can label could fill innumerable volumes; here, Danish graphic designer Monrad starts with 49 breweries. He goes heavy on North America and Europe but also highlights São Paulo’s Japas Cervejaria, founded by three Japanese Brazilian women whose flavors and designs are inspired by their joint cultural heritage, and Tokyo’s Vertere, whose cans feature snapshots from the brewers’ travels. Crack open a cold one and enjoy.
Hebru Brantley
Hebru Brantley (Rizzoli) $55
First gaining attention for murals painted all over his Chicago hometown of “Flyboy”—a kid rendered comic-book style in aviator goggles—pop artist Brantley has continued in that vein, with painting and sculpture depicting joyful representations of Black children at imaginative play. The book showcases his artwork, various exhibitions and installations, and his wide-ranging collaborations with, among others, Japanese fashion brand A Bathing Ape and the Chicago Bulls.
Lorien Suarez-Kanerva: Coalescing Geometries
Lorien Suarez-Kanerva (Artvoices) $40
Geometric abstract artist Suarez-Kanerva uses a variety of mediums and techniques—acrylic, gouache, monoprint, oils, pastels, textiles, watercolor—to create her kaleidoscopic work. She draws inspiration from the symmetry and repeating motifs of the natural world, such as crystal mineral structures, plant growth, or the spirals in shells. Rich in color and hypnotic in pattern, these are paintings to get lost in.
Spine Poems
Annette Dauphin Simon (Harper Design) $27.99
Dauphin Simon, a creative director and former bookseller, stacks books spine-out to tell poetic micro stories, categorizing the resulting verse in a bookshop-like way—cooking, parenting, true crime, and so on. The poetry is the main point (“Taking Turns/ Cleaning Up/ This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage”) but part of the fun, too, is admiring the ordered chaos of books arranged with no regard to color.
Illustrated Narratives
Stories of nature and nurture come to life through their authors’ complementary artwork.
In the Footsteps of Audubon
Denis Clavreul (Princeton Univ.) $39.95
Over the course of 16 years, French wildlife artist and biologist Clavreul set out to recreate the 19th-century journey that produced John James Audubon’s The Birds of America. Some 250 of Clavreul’s watercolors are included here, the work more impressionistic than Audubon’s detailed portraits, as ornithologist David Allen Silbey writes in his introduction: “They leave a lot of room for imagination. We are invited, even required, to fill in the story.”
Landings
Arwen Donahue (Hub City) $22.95
Donahue captures daily life on her family’s Kentucky farm, through short vignettes and 130 watercolor-and-ink drawings. The grays and browns of winter’s “more solitary season” give way to spring greens, the first CSA delivery of the year, and visits with and from friends. The illustrations have a quiet intimacy, whether depicting Donahue and her husband napping on a muggy June day before continuing the work of the farm, or their 10-year-old daughter, Phoebe, bringing in the young hens for the night.
Letters to Gwen John
Celia Paul (New York Review) $29.95
Painter Paul shares her thoughts on art, relationships, and the creative life through letters to Welsh artist Gwen John (1876–1939) in these intimate meditations. The included paintings, both John’s and Paul’s, are breathtaking, and Paul places several in conversation with one another. She juxtaposes, for instance, John’s Mère Poussepin Seated at a Table, a portrait of a Dominican nun who was later beatified, and her own 1990 work, My Mother and God.
Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings
Hermann Hesse, trans. from the German by Damion Searls (Kale Press) $28
Best known as the Nobel Laureate author of Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, Hesse was also an avid self-taught artist who began painting in his early 40s during a difficult period in his life. This volume collects some 30 of his arboreal essays, passages, and poems, each accompanied by one of his watercolor illustrations, which draw on impressionist and expressionist techniques.
Trees of the West
Molly Hashimoto (Skipstone) $22.95
Rendered in a variety of mediums—block prints, etchings, and watercolors among them—Hashimoto’s more than 130 works showcase dozens of species of mostly native trees across the American West. She shares botanical facts and tips on artistic techniques, and relates personal encounters, such as an experience among the 60-foot-tall trees of the Thousand Palms Preserve: “It was so unreal that I felt like I was on a Hollywood movie set: was it Jurassic Park or King Kong?”
Music
The offbeat goes on in these appreciations of sound and vision.
After All Is Said and Done
Mark A. Rodriguez (Anthology Editions) $50
The official Grateful Dead discography comprises a couple hundred studio and live albums, but that’s not nearly enough for the legions of Deadheads who sell, buy, and trade bootleg tapes recorded over the band’s three decades of touring. This volume shares hundreds of homemade cassette covers in all their psychedelic glory, as well as interviews with dozens of enthusiasts. Since author Rodriguez began collecting Grateful Dead cassettes in the mid-1990s, he’s had access to more than 27,000 tapes.
Belle and Sebastian: Illustrated Lyrics
Stuart Murdoch, illus. by Pamela Tait (Thames & Hudson) $24.95
Murdoch, front man for Scottish indie pop band Belle and Sebastian, teamed up with illustrator Tait for this visual interpretation of 20 ofthe band’s songs, drawing from 10 studio albums and including a few yet-to-be-released tunes. Fanciful artwork rendered in muted colors paired with creative typography matches the contemplative lyrical mood.
Lights, Camera, Accordion!
Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz (1984 Publishing) $40
More than 300 color photos represent 25 years of touring, filming, and recording with Alfred Matthew Yankovic, aka Weird Al, taken by Schwartz, his longtime drummer. Beginning shortly after the pair performed the Queen parody “Another One Rides the Bus” on The Dr. Demento Show in 1980 and ending with the 2006 album Straight Outta Lynwood, after which Schwartz switched to digital photography, this is a treat for fans.
Listen
Rhona Bitner (Rizzoli) $65
From 2006 to 2019, photographer Bitner crisscrossed the U.S. documenting existing and defunct music locales—
arenas and studios, clubs and concert halls, ballrooms and bars. Some 300 of those photos are in this book; locations include Van Gelder Studios, where John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, and many other jazz artists recorded seminal albums; and the site of the former Mabuhay Gardens, a Filipino restaurant and nightclub that became a hub for the early West Coast punk scene.
Sun Ra: Art on Saturn
Irwin Chusid and Chris Reisman (Fantagraphics) $75
Visionary Afrofuturist band leader Sun Ra released some 70 LPs between 1957 and 1988 on his Saturn label, many of them with covers hand-designed by himself and members of his Arkestra. They’re collected here, along with hundreds of hand-crafted sleeves and disc labels. “The quantity and variety of handmade Sun Ra covers is vast—and unknowable,” Chusid, a journalist and music historian, writes in the introduction. “This book contains the best of what we’ve found.”
Oracle Decks
These sets appeal to tarot practitioners and those who are tarot-curious but prefer fewer rules and more room for interpretation.
The Cantigee Oracle
Rae Diamond, illus. by Laura Zuspan (North Atlantic) $24.95
The 52 circular cards in this deck take their cues from nature (A Swarm of Bees, The Exploding Star) and offer aphorisms to ponder (Your Feet Are Two Fish) for use in quiet contemplation or to spur ecological activism.
A Compendium of Witches
Nataša Ilincˇic´ (Llewellyn) $37.95
Combining history, folklore, and anthropological fieldwork, this 60-card deck presents 30 fictional practitioners of witchcraft, from across the globe and throughout history, and 30 magical symbols.
The Modern Nirvana Oracle Deck
Kat Graham, Jennifer Sodini, Bryant Wood, and Frank Elaridi, illus. by Nathalie Miller (Chronicle Prism) $24.95
Drawing on avant-garde 1980s fashion for visual inspiration, each of the 50 neon-accented cards includes an
inspirational quote, meditations, and a mantra, with an emphasis on breathwork.
Mystic Mondays: The Cosmic Creatures Deck
Grace Duong (RP Studio) $28
Duong’s Mystic Mondays Tarot has sold nearly 90,000 copies, per NPD BookScan. Here, she brings her vision to a 66-card oracle deck; the accompanying guidebook includes animal profiles and rituals, connecting them to astrological signs and crystals.
Sacred Nature Oracle
Holly Wilmeth, with Alison Bastien (Beyond Words) $24.99
Sepia-toned photos showcase 62 plants commonly found in the Pacific Northwest and Mexico (areas where Wilmeth has spent considerable time), each modeled by an adult or child, encouraging users to embrace traditional plant wisdom.
Seasons of the Witch: Beltane Oracle
Lorriane Anderson and Juliet Diaz, illus. by Giada Rose (Rockpool) $24.95
Beltane, the Gaelic May Day festival, celebrates putting plans into action and
is the subject of this 44-card deck (top). Images depict Beltane themes, such as ribbons for awareness, or handfasting for unity.
The Wild and Sacred Feminine Deck
Niki Dewart and Elizabeth Marglin, illus. by Jenny Kostecki-Shaw (Shambhala) $35
Organized into four facets—archetypal, elemental, divine, and wild—this 52-card deck portrays women and traditions from around the world, looking to the sacred feminine as a source for clarity, confirmation, and guidance.
Woodland Wardens
Jessica Roux (Andrews McMeel) $19.99
Roux, author of 2020’s Floriography: An Illustrated Guide to the Victorian
Language of Flowers taps mythology, folklore, and literature for her 52 animal-plant pairings. The cat and lavender represent independence, for instance; the moth and eucalyptus, an ending.
Photography
Vintage collections and recent works represent the depth of the gift-giving field.
Barry McGee: Reproduction
Barry McGee (Aperture) $60
This is the first collection of photos by multimedia artist McGee. A key figure in San Francisco’s Mission School of the 1990s, he has participated in international biennials including Venice and the Whitney. The photos—of family, graffiti taggers, surf culture, urban trash heaps, and more—are, as SFMOMA curator emerita of photography Sandra S. Phillips writes in an included essay, “as fundamental to his artistic vision as the graphic paintings, drawings, zines, and installations for which he is so well known.”
Holding Space
Ryan Pfluger (Princeton Architectural Press) $29.95
Pfluger, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere, presents 100 photos of queer, interracial couples, taken in 2020 and 2021. Reaching across gender identity, race, and sexuality, each entry includes the couple’s portrait—sometimes clothed, sometimes not, always frank in their intimacy—and brief statements in which they discuss their relationship to each other and to the outside world.
Minimalism in Photography
(TeNeus) $70
The work of the 16 contemporary photographers (including one mother-daughter team) featured here is thematically varied but united in its simplicity. Colors are harmonious and patterns soothingly repetitive, whether in Matthieu Venot’s studies of sherbet-hued art deco buildings or Mária Švarbová’s staged images of swimmers at a natatorium built during her native Slovakia’s Communist era. Amid the riotous visual noise of modern life, these photos have a calming simplicity.
The New Black West
Gabriela Hasbun (Chronicle) $40
Hasbun commemorates the legacy of Black American cowboys with her photos of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, “the nation’s only touring African American rodeo.” This is rodeo pageantry at its finest: in one image, riders “glam up” to parade their horses at the BPIR in 2019, while a horse named Hercules dons a Louis Vuitton saddle. Reflecting on riding through a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest, competitor Brianna Noble holds that “nobody can ignore a Black woman on a horse.”
Our America
Ken Burns. (Knopf) $75
Documentarian Burns presents a stunning collection chronicling American history from 1839 to 2019. Presented one per page, the black-and-white photographs are captioned only with the date and location, fostering the viewer’s deep engagement with each image. (Comprehensive illustration notes appear at the end of the book.) The collection includes the obscure (a 1903 photo of the first Japanese American baseball team in the mainland U.S.) as well as the famous. This is a must-have for fans of Burns’s documentaries.
Surfing the Cosmos
Steve Miller (G Editions) $29.95
As part of what Miller calls his ongoing “samba with science,” he juxtaposes and sometimes layers photos he took in a Rio de Janeiro favela with images he captured at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. In Rocinha, residents lacking basic resources tap into a dangerous spaghetti of electrical wires to get power, while at CERN, scientists untangle the quantum world of elementary particles. Neil deGrasse Tyson contributes the foreword to this heady mingling of art and science.
Walker Evans: Last Photographs & Life Stories
Michael Lesy (Blast) $45
Lesy met Walker Evans in 1973, two years before the legendary photo-journalist’s death. Evans was still taking photos, with a new-at-the-time Polaroid SX-70, and Lesy shares some of those instant images here—objects in decay, close-up portraits of mostly young people. Included as well are brief biographies alongside photos Evans took of key figures in his life, such as James Agee, with whom he collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Space
These books take readers to infinity and beyond.
Apollo Remastered
Andy Saunders (Black Dog & Leventhal) $75
Fifty years after humans last walked on the moon, this collection of digitally restored photos allows a new, crystal-clear look at NASA’s crewed missions, beginning with 1968’s Apollo 7 and finishing with Apollo 17. Many of the images have been stored in a frozen vault in Houston for half a century.
The Art of the Cosmos
Jim Bell (Union Square) $35
Planetary scientist Bell, whose résumé includes work on NASA’s Mars Rover expeditions, focuses this book on deep space photography as art. Images include what he calls selfies—when a camera team deliberately keeps the rover or lander in frame to contrast the familiar with the alien landscape—and the “eXtreme Deep Field” photography of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Out of this World
Edited by Bill Schwartz (ACC Art Books) $65
Through photos, diagrams, and other archival material, Schwartz tracks six decades of NASA’s space explorations, peppering his narrative with down-to-earth trivia. Crews on the 1970’s-era Skylab, for instance, conducted experiments based on the suggestions of high school students; around the same time, an ardent letter-writing campaign led by Star Trek fans convinced NASA to name the first Space Shuttle orbiter Enterprise.
The Space Shuttle
Roland Miller (Artisan) $50
Six space shuttle orbiters flew 140 flights over the course of 30 years, ending with Atlantis in 2011. Miller takes a chronological, behind-the-scenes look at each, with quick facts—crew member names, launch and landing dates, mission highlights—serving as scaffolding for photos both awe-inspiring (Bruce McCandless taking the first untethered space walk) and intimate (a candid of astronaut Mae C. Jemison, who in 1992 became the first Black woman to fly to space).
Welcome to the Universe in 3D
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, J. Richard Gott, and Robert J. Vanderbei (Princeton Univ.) $29.95
This book is a newfangled version of an old-fashioned View-Master: when propped open, a stereo viewer allows the reader to look at paired stereoscopic images—one for the right eye, one for the left—of earthrise, a solar eclipse, comets, and more in 3-D.
Correction: The writeup for Holding Space by Ryan Pfluger has been edited to reflect that fact that its photos are original to the book.
