{"id":3069,"date":"2011-07-25T21:17:59","date_gmt":"2011-07-26T04:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2011\/07\/art-books-2k11\/"},"modified":"2012-03-21T14:07:41","modified_gmt":"2012-03-21T21:07:41","slug":"art-books-2k11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2011\/07\/25\/art-books-2k11\/","title":{"rendered":"Art Books 2k11"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.observer.com\/2011\/07\/the-origin-of-the-book-as-a-work-of-art\/\" target=\"_blank\">from The New York Observer<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<h1>The Origin of the (Book as a) Work of Art<\/h1>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.observer.com\/author\/emily-witt\/\" target=\"_blank\">by Emily Witt<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/artbooks.jpg\" hspace=\"5\" align=\"left\" \/>Midway through a party for Thornwillow Press at the St. Regis Hotel last night, a book publicist brought up Heidegger. \u201cIt\u2019s all about the thinginess of the thing,\u201d he said gloomily, sipping champagne, after a discussion about why Montblanc pens was sponsoring a book party. His point was that nice pens, small letterpress books, the St. Regis, fine stationary \u2013 these are all formerly rather ordinary objects that have now become rarified.<\/p>\n<p>The book in question was\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.thornwillow.com\/shop\/libretto-1\">It Happened Here<\/a>, a history of the St. Regis Hotel by Lesley M.M. Blume, the first in a series of \u201clibretti\u201d by Thornwillow Press that intends to transform books, as Van Gogh once did with a peasant\u2019s shoes, into art (by emphasizing the books\u2019 beauty, their status as \u201climited edition,\u201d and by charging $40 to $400 dollars for them.) As the press release for Ms. Blume\u2019s book put it, \u201cthe Libretto Library is dedicated to the belief that physical books \u2013 tangible, aesthetically pleasing, letterpress printed and beautifully bound \u2013 have a new and even more important place in our lives: as repositories of permanence in an increasingly ephemeral world of letters.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Thornwillow is not the first publisher to treat the book as a thing divorced from its more equipmental characteristics. The most recent example would be James Frey, who avoided a traditional publisher in the United States and printed only a limited run of the physical edition of his book,\u00a0<em>The Final Testament of the Holy Bible<\/em>, through Gagosian Gallery (along with a $6.99 e-book). And the representatives of New York publishing who are involved in the Thornwillow series \u2013 Andrew Wylie, the literary agent; Jonathan Galassi, the publisher of FSG and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/07\/14\/postcard-from-paris\/\">Lorin Stein<\/a>, the editor of\u00a0<em>The Paris Review\u00a0<\/em>are themselves men who have distinguished themselves by maintaining a certain decorous ideal of literature, life in New York, and dapper dress. (They are joined by Henry Finder, editorial director of\u00a0<em style=\"border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: italic; font-size: 15px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px\">The New Yorker<\/em>, Michael Shnayerson, a contributing editor to\u00a0<em>Vanity Fair\u00a0<\/em>and Ms. Blume.)<\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.observer.com\/2011\/07\/the-origin-of-the-book-as-a-work-of-art\/\" target=\"_blank\">click to continue reading at The Observer<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The New York Observer The Origin of the (Book as a) Work of Art by Emily Witt Midway through a party for Thornwillow Press at the St. Regis Hotel last night, a book publicist brought up Heidegger. \u201cIt\u2019s all about the thinginess of the thing,\u201d he said gloomily, sipping champagne, after a discussion about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}