A couple of books caught my eye in the recent Chronicle Books catalog. The Who, the What and the When: 65 Artists Illustrate the Secret Sidekicks of History by Jenny Volvovski, Julia Rothman and Matt Lamothe is a unique combination of history and art that provides short biographies of a ton of folks few readers will be aware of. From the catalog copy:
...this offbeat illustrated history reveals 65 people you've probably never heard of, but who helped shape the word as we know it. Muses and neighbors, friends and relatives, accomplices and benefactors—such as Michael and Joy Brown, who gifted Harper Lee a year's worth of wages to help her write To Kill a Mockingbird. Or John Ordway, the colleague who walked with Lewis and Clark every step of the way.
The catalog also shows Ian Stewart, 6th member of the Rolling Stones and Julia Warhola, Andy Warhol's mother. (I'm still freaking out over the Browns who gave Harper Lee a year of money so she could write!!!)
Also, be on the lookout for the The Spiritglass Charade by Colleen Gleason, another Stoker and Holmes novel and sequel to The Clockwork Scarab. This time around there is a case of spiritualist fraud, some pickpockets, vampires returning to London and an attempt to tag a client as a "lunatic" (which was a very scary thing to be tagged with back then).
I'm also mightily intrigued by the group art project The Thing The Book: A Monument to the Book as Object. No idea what this is going to look like overall, but the pictures in the catalog sure are intriguing. It's from the artists who curate for THE THING Quarterly.
[Post illustration by Keith Negley. From his tumblr: The person I was assigned is Christopher Morcom. He was Alan Turing’s first crush, but died from tuberculosis as a young man. Turing was devastated and inspired him to explore the concept of an intangible soul in a tangible body which eventually led to the birth of computer science. Very honored to be a part of this great project.]
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