Happiest of Merries – Holiday Crafting

Merry Holiday season (or Happy War on Xmas, as you prefer)! – Here are some titles on arts and crafts for the holidays (or anytime). You still have until 10 pm tonight and tomorrow from 8:30am to 6pm to check books out over the break. If we don’t see you before 6pm tomorrow, have a safe and happy break and we will see you in 2012.

For inspiration, check out this Christmas tree in Lithuania made with used plastic soda bottles!

In the library:

An old-fashioned Christmas in illustration and decoration – GT4985.H594

Paper crafts for Kwanzaa / Randel McGee – TT900.K92 M34 2008

The 12 days of Christmas : a pop-up celebration / by Robert Sabuda – PZ8.3.S23 1996 (POP UP Book Case)

Luminous art : Hanukkah menorahs of the Jewish Museum / Susan L. Braunstein – BM657.H3 B73 2004

Reinventing Ritual: Contemporary Art and Design for Jewish life / Daniel Belasco – N7414.75.N48 J483 2009

Painted paper : techniques & projects for handmade books & cards / by Alisa Golden – TT872 .G62 2007

The romance of greeting cards; an historical account of the origin, evolution, and development of the Christmas card, valentine, and other forms of engraved or printed greetings from the earliest days to the present time./ Ernest Dudley Chase – NC1860.C5 1971

Winter Break Hours 2011-2012

The Visual Arts Library will close for the holidays tomorrow, Wednesday Dec. 21 at 6pm.
The library will reopen from Tuesday, Jan. 3, to Friday Jan. 6 with limited hours: 9am to 6pm, and close for the weekend of Jan. 7-8. We will reopen to our normal schedule on Jan. 9.

Can You Judge a Book By Its Cover?

Two new books on book cover design Breathless homicidal slime mutants : the art of the paperback by Steven Brower (NC973 .B769 2010) and Faber and Faber : eighty years of book cover design by Joseph Connolly (NC973 .C66 2009), prompted us to peek around in the collection for other books on the topic. It turns out there are quite a few, which isn’t too surprising, since book designers are both a key audience and creators of such tomes.

Whether you are looking for ideas for your own design work or just appreciate the form, have fun perusing the following titles. In addition make sure to take a look at the “Book Jacket” folders in the library’s Picture Collection. They range from the Pre-1970 folder up to the present.

Front cover : great book jacket and cover design / Alan Powers – NC1882 .P73 2001

Children’s book covers : great book jacket and cover design / Alan Powers -NC973.5.G7 P68 2003

Penguin by design : a cover story, 1935-2005 / Phil Baines – Z325.P42 B35 2005

Kidd : things that happened between 1986-2006, book one – NC1883.3.K53 K53 2005

Penguin 75 : designers, authors, commentary (the good, the bad– ) – Z271.3.B65 P46 2010

Puffin by design : 70 years of imagination, 1940-2010 / Phil Baines. – Z325.P84 B35 2010

Jackets required / Steven Heller, Seymour Chwast – NC1883.U6 H45 1995

Food for Fines Begins & Book Sale Ends

Starting today our end of the semester Food for Fines drive has begun. It will run until Wed, Dec. 21st.
One can of food equals $2 off library fines. All food will be donated to City Harvest for distribution to the needy. Eliminate your fines for cheap and help out those less fortunate this holiday season!
The fine print: No Ramen, frozen food, or perishables.

In other news, today will be the last day of the annual Book Sale. We still have hundreds of titles and, in case you missed it before, EVERYTHING is now free! Perhaps because of the disruption of last week’s flood, we ended up with more leftover stock than expected, including a lot of new titles and software manuals.

Here’s one seasonal book art idea (we invite you to create your own in whatever motif strikes your fancy):

Art in/and the Brain?

Philosopher Alva Noë is skeptical that art can be “explained” by neuroscience, as some of his ambitious colleagues contend, but that does not mean there will not be a fruitful interplay between the fields:

[N]euroscience, which looks at events in the brains of individual people and can do no more than describe and analyze them, may just be the wrong kind of empirical science for understanding art.

Far from its being the case that we can apply neuroscience as an intellectual ready-made to understand art, it may be that art, by disclosing the ways in which human experience in general is something we enact together, in exchange, may provide new resources for shaping a more plausible, more empirically rigorous, account of our human nature.

Out of our heads : why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness / Alva Noë.

Artful mind : cognitive science and the riddle of human creativity / ed. by Mark Turner. – N71 .A762 2006

Creative ice age brain : cave art in the light of neuroscience / Barbara Olins Alpert. – N5310 .A47 2008

Neuroarthistory : from Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki / John Onians – N71 .O48 2007

Book Sale Update: FREE

We have reached the terminal stage of the book sale. No more multi-tiered price structure – everything in the sale is now FREE. So come on down – there are hundreds of titles left, including quite a few recent software guides and popular non-fiction titles.
And if there are any book artists out there looking to bulk up on raw materials, we’d love to see our “Withdrawn from the Visual Arts Library” in a work of art!

Jerry Robinson – Cartoonist and Comics Historian – R.I.P.

Jerry Robinson, famed cartoonist and comics historian, has passed away. This past year Robinson came to SVA to talk about his revised edition of The Comics: an Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art 1895 – 2010 and the year before saw the publication of Jerry Robinson: Ambassador of Comics by N.C. Christopher Couch.
Robinson got his start after the creator of Batman, Bob Kane, noticed his illustration skills on a jacket Robinson had painted and invited him to work for DC. Robinson would go on to help create characters such as the Joker and Robin.
Here’s the first rendering of the Joker:

There is some debate about the origins, with Robinson’s co-creator Bill Finger saying he had suggested to Robinson that the Joker look like Conrad Veidt in the film ‘The Man Who Laughed’. Robinson’s recollection was that he came up with the image above and Finger then noted the similarity.
To see some of the many stages of the Joker’s evolution as a character, take a a look at this history.

Here are some resources in the Visual Arts Library to explore Robinson’s work and legacy further:

Jet Scott : a lost science fiction masterwork / Jerry Robinson & Sheldon Stark – PN6728.R624 J47 2010 v.01

The Greatest Joker stories ever told. – PN6728.B36 G74 1988

Batman archives / Bob Kane – PN6728.B36 K354 1990

The Man who Laughs – V-F L465 Man DVD

Scenes from a Book Sale

It’s dry in the library, whatever the case may be outside, and the Book Sale is in full swing. If you were not here for the first day’s picks, worry not, we have several shelves of material in the back, just waiting for table space to open up.

Here are some photos from today:

Book Sale Reminder – Starts Tomorrow

The carpet should be dry by tomorrow and the tarps will come off the tables revealing hundreds of books for sale. The sale will run 9am-9pm Wed & Thursday, Friday 9am-7pm, with additional days added if we have not run out of books.

Starting to Dig These Master Compass Prayer Logos – new books

Now dig this! : art & Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 / Kellie Jones – N6538.N5 J666 2011

Richard Prince : American prayer / ed. by Bob Rubin and Rose Dergan – N6537.P695 A4 2011

Los Logos : compass / ed. by Robert Klanten and Adeline Mollard – NC1002.L63 L644 2010

Master shots : 100 advanced camera techniques to get an expensive look on your low-budget movie / Christopher Kenworthy – TR850 .K46 2009

Boris Mikhailov : tea, coffee, cappuccino / Boris Mikhilov – TR654 .M54 2011

Starting your career as an artist : a guide for painters, sculptors, photographers, and other visual artists / Angie Wojak – N6505 .W644 2011