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"From codex to document, from performance to self-image, the world of artists' books is made available to student and teacher, collector and connoisseur.” –Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, Library JournalNow Back in Print! Johanna Drucker's The Century of Artists' Books is the seminal full-length study of the development of artists' books as a twentieth-century art form. By situating artists' books within the context of mainstream developments in the visual arts, Drucker raises critical and theoretical issues as well as providing a historical overview of the medium. Within its pages, she explores more than two hundred individual books in relation to their structure, form, and conceptualization. This latest edition of the book features a new preface by Drucker and includes an introduction by New York Times senior art critic Holland Cotter.Prior praise for Johanna Drucker's The Century of Artists' Books:“[Drucker] locates the artists' book, in all of its multitudinous aspects, within every significant modern movement and draws on an extensive bibliography of scholarly references to reveal the philosophical and artistic connections among the several emerging avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century.... The book vastly expands our understanding of the interdependence of structure and meaning in artists' books.”--Buzz Spector, Art Journal“A folded fan, a set of blocks, words embedded in lucite: artists' books are a singular form of imaginative expression. With the insight of the artist and the discernment of the art historian, Drucker details over 200 of these works, relating them to the variety of art movements of the last century and tracing their development in form and concept. This work, one of the first full-length studies available of artists' books, provides both a critical analysis of the structures themselves and a basis for further reflection on the philosophical and conceptual roles they play. From codex to document, from performance to self-image, the world of artists' books is made available to student and teacher, collector and connoisseur. A useful work for all art collections, both public and academic.” Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, Library Journal

Inseparable collects poems written between 1995 and 2005 by the New York poet, editor and novelist Lewis Warsh. Strongly identified with New York since the 1960s, when he co-founded Angel Hair magazine with Anne Waldman, Warsh makes poems from the city’s linguistic fabric, interwoven with a bemused real-time interiority. The 35 poems of this collection are pitted with reminiscences made approachable to the reader by their lack of self-absorption; it is the momentum of the will to persist by means of language--“moving, word by word”--against the incipient flickerings of mortality, that is their real logic. This act of self-propulsion may be subject to doubt (“Can we spend our lives feeding/off simple endurance?”), but it is humbly pursued: Warsh resists the inflated rhetoric such preoccupations usually attract and sticks instead with (in the words of his colleague Clark Coolidge) “confusion, in strict order.”

The American artist's much-imitated memoir, described by Paul Auster as "one of the few totally original books I have ever read.”Joe Brainard's I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic, praised and admired by writers from Paul Auster to John Ashery and Edmund White. As autobiography, Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain "I remember": "I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail." Brainard's enduring gem of a book has been issued in various forms over the past thirty years. In 1970, Angel Hair books published the first edition of I Remember, which quickly sold out; he wrote two subsequent volumes for Angel Hair, More I Remember (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both of which proved as popular as the original. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York published Brainard's I Remember Christmas, a new text for which he also contributed a cover design and four drawings. Excerpts from the Angel Hair editions appeared in Interview, Gay Sunshine, The World and the New York Herald. Then in 1975, Full Court Press issued a revised version collecting all three of the Angel Hair volumes and added new material, using the original title I Remember. This complete edition is prefaced by poet and translator Ron Padgett.

Reviled, rioted over and banned as pornographic even as it was recognized by many as an unprecedented visionary masterpiece, Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures is one of the most important and influential underground movies ever released in America. J. Hoberman's monograph details the creative making--and legal unmaking--of this extraordinary film, a source of inspiration for artists as disparate as Andy Warhol, Federico Fellini and John Waters. Described by its maker as "a comedy set in a haunted music studio," the story of Flaming Creatures is here augmented with a dossier of personal recollections, relevant documents and remarkable, previously unpublished on-set photographs by Norman Solomon. Expanding on notes originally prepared for the 1997 retrospective on Jack Smith at the American Museum of the Moving Image, the monograph includes further material on his unfinished features Normal Love and No President, as well as shorter film fragments.

Threads, a series of talks devoted to the art of the book, includes poets, scholars, artists and publishers. It explores and enriches relationships between various strands of book culture that are often approached in isolation--poetry and writing, visual and performing arts, collaboration, design, printing, independent publishing, literary history, critical theory and material culture. The premise for the series was very similar to the kind of interdisciplinary approach to the book that has interested Granary Books and Cuneiform Press all along. A book is never more successful than the relationship between its parts; the philosophical and material connections between the writing, art, design, typography, translation and distribution are more significant than excellence in any isolated area. Threads began in March 2009 and concluded in October 2012. There were 12 speakers: Alan Loney, Charles Alexander, Simon Cutts, Buzz Spector, Jerome Rothenberg, Cecilia Vicuña, Jen Bervin, Kathleen Walkup, Johanna Drucker, Keith Smith, Richard Minsky and Emily McVarish.

Answering a need for critical attention towards experimental and avant-garde music, Arcana is a ground-breaking work--as far-ranging and dynamic as the current generation of musicians. Through manifestoes, scores, interviews, notes and critical papers, performer/composers address composing, playing, improvising, teaching and thinking in and through music, Rather than an attempt to distill or define musicans' work, Arcana is a remarkable book--challenging and original--essential for composers, musicians, theorists and fans alike. Edited by John Zorn, it includes contributions from Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot (on earplugs), Ikue Mori (on drum machines), Bob Ostertag (on a string quartet) There's a discussion on plunderphonics with John Oswald, an overview from Elliott Sharp on his group Carbon, and David Mahler expounds his responses to a set of nine questions posed by Pauline Oliveros. The writings range from brief 2 or 3 page entries (Mike Patton's "How We Eat Our Young," Marilyn Crispell's "Elements of Improvisation") to long and elaborate essays (Scott Johnson's "Counterpoint," David Rosenboom's "Propositional Music"). Some of the contributions are more unusual, such as Zorn's "Treatment for a Film in Fifteen Scenes," Fred Frith's notebook extracts, or Peter Garland's journal of his trip to Australia's Northern Territory. All of them provide for inspiring and thought-provoking reading, making this an invaluable book for both fans of these artists and aspiring musicians of the avant garde. An appendix of brief bios for each artist ends the book, along with short lists of recommended listenings.

Comprising her most recent poems and a selection of poems written from 1981-1991, Kimberly Lyons' Abracadabra brings us a poet with a striking and original voice. The work we find here gives a dreamlike view of the fractured cycles of birth and regeneration that mark our years, weeks, and hours. And Lyons' world is one where signs become objects and objects become signs--and her intent here is not so much to make sense of this world as to consider, sometimes in awe, its unmappable kernels. As she herself puts it in the book's opening couplet: "What is this place./But that's a sucker's question." With an evocative cover by Tony Fitzpatrick, Abracadabra is filled with elegant writing that accepts no limitations on its acts of imagination.

Kenward Elmslie's way with words cuts a singular swath through a polymath variety of forms. This collection of poems and ephemera treats language sometimes as paint to be thrown on canvas, sometimes as a series of fascinatingly odd concrete objects and throughout, Elmslie takes full advantage of the word's status as an infinite well of signification. Elmslie's work navigates between the comic and the serious, between the personal and the political, and between the oblique and the straightforward so deftly that the reader is left breathless. Nite Soil is yet another great book by one of today's leading radical poets.

In The New Society for Universal Harmony, Lenore Malen uses pseudo-documentary photos, video and audio transcriptions, “testimonials,” case histories, and arcane imagery to archive the functioning of her own reinvention of the utopian society established in Paris in 1793 by the followers of Franz Anton Mesmer known as La société de l'harmonie universelle. Malen's New Society comes out of her long-term installation project and live performances of case histories and treatments performed at the fabricated Society imagined in Athol Springs, New York. The book expands the scope of the project to include original fiction and essays by “fellow Harmonites” Jonathan Ames, Geoffrey O'Brien. Pepe Karmel, Nancy Princenthal, Irving Sandler, Susan Canning, Barbara Tannenbaum, Jim Long, Mark Thompson, and others, plus a first-person account of Malen's discovery and two-year involvement with the Society. The “Treatments” offered at the New Society and documented in the book have been adapted from Mesmer's original proscriptions; adding to the book's authority, Malen adopts personas including scientific corroborators, curious journalists and people whose lives have been forever changed by the Society. This work is often light-hearted and humorous, but by Malen's deft and thorough adherence to the actuality of her conceit she turns serious attention to a visible shift in U.S. cultural and political society towards blind discipleship and the seemingly overwhelming need to believe and to belong. The New Society examines our own culture's yearning for the perfect cure; what the Harmonites undergo and report is darkly funny and frequently impossible gesturing at the illusive search for spiritual peace and universal harmony, a search made more desperate in the social, political and ecological climate we live in.

The Purification of Fagus Sylvatica Var Pendula is emblematic of Paul Etienne Lincoln's inquiry into the origin and production of memory--and our ethereal relationship to that intangible evidence of our consciousness. In this pursuit Lincoln has employed diverse forms and themes, ranging from examination of historical figures to detailing anything from New York City infrastructure to “household” machines that dispense gin-and-tonics (mixed at varying strengths). Comprised of photographs, diagrams and text, The Purification records the series of experiments and performances which detail the afterlife of a specimen of local vegetation. The book begins: “Situated at the perimeter of Weeping Beach Tree Park in Queens, New York, was a small pavilion looking on to a stump of the oldest Weeping Beach in America. In 1847 Samuel Bowne Parsons, a Quaker and a nurseryman, purchased a shoot of Weeping Beach, Fagus sylvatica var pendula, in Belgium while traveling in search of unusual plants. On his return to the United States he planted the shoot at the site of the stump, then part of Parson's Nurseries. Every Weeping Beech in America is descended from this one tree. Regrettably, the stump is all that remains, as shortly after this venerable tree's 150th anniversary in 1997 it died and was cut down. The tree had, however spawned seven progeny, which still grow in a circle around the original beech.” Over the past two decades, Lincoln has committed himself to creating complex installations, recordings and documentation on a wide range of subject matter. The Purification follows Lincoln's investigation of the Weeping Beech as a way of detailing the process of examination and history writing which is ever shifting and defining the world around us.

As If It Is At All compiles Simon Cutts's "transferable" (i.e. realizable in various media, whether print, sculpture, artist's book, etc.) poems of the past decade, in the fashion of such previous books as Seepages (The Jargon Society, 1989), and A Smell of Printing (Granary Books, 2000). Frequently made in the Concrete idiom, or similar, and with an appetite for concision, clarity and gentle wit, Cutts's writings advocate and palpably savor the pleasure of domestic attentions and immediate amusements: calyx of tobaccorolled ina small tarpaulinof rubberslung betweena pocket adanaThis volume is a celebration of daily increment and incident, of friendships and particulars. Included are collaborations with Erica Van Horn and works for electronic formats.

A Book of Glyphs is a facsimile reproduction of legendary author, musician and Fugs founder Ed Sanders’ first book-length work of glyphs, which he created in Florence, Italy in 2008, using colored pencils and a small sketchbook. Though each piece stands on its own, collectively the 72 glyphs convey, with characteristic humility and humor, many of the themes explored by Sanders over his long and diverse career, including history, myth, activism and pacifism. The glyph--“a drawing that is charged with literary, emotional, historical or mythic and poetic intensity”--has been a dimension of Sanders’ poetry since 1962; he cites Zen rock gardens, the markings on Egyptian tombs and the typographic designs in John Cage’s writings as influences in the development of the form. Sanders’ name for the original notebook is “Smile-Book of Grace-Joy,” which aptly describes the range of concerns explored in this important and joyful work.

Brakhage's Childhood recounts the story of visionary American filmmaker Stan Brakhage's (1933-2003) life up to age 12. In 1983 Stan and Jane Brakhage began a series of interviews wherein Stan described his life and Jane took notes. Each session yielded a chapter and each chapter usually a place. After each interview Jane organized, wrote and edited the stories. After two years they had 23 chapters in 100,000 words. "He had the most amazing memory I had ever encountered," says Jane, who writes: "This is a biography of a child, taken from the memory of that child grown up. I can only assume that we stopped the interviews, stopped the book, stopped the marriage, at exactly the right moment. Stan and I worked together a lot in his medium; this time, we worked together in my medium." "In the end," writes Tony Pipolo in the afterword, "[Jane] created a masterly fiction about a fiction that reveals undeniable truths, assuming an autobiographical posture at once commanding and equivocal, a chronicle of semi-Dickensian misery offset by plainspoken observations about an American childhood bearing the mark of its author's writing style, demonstrated in books written during and after her life with Stan Brakhage." Brakhage's Childhood is a remarkable achievement conceptually, intellectually and aesthetically, and provides crucial insight into the early life of one of America's most inspired and complex experimental filmmakers.