Generally it isn't nearly as hard to track down books, so the whole "second chance" concept doesn't apply as strongly. That said, some art books do vanish and become extremely expensive. It took quite a while to finally track down a copy of Alex Janvier's catalogue (perhaps because most of them got shipped back to his studio, which is where I got my copy*).
While the postage was a killer, I did manage to get a copy of The City by the photographer Lori Nix, even after it was OOP everywhere else. The one I got might even have been one of the last ones available directly from the publisher.
I wasn't as lucky with this Michael Wolf catalogue that Bau-Xi was stocking, though I do have a couple other books by Wolf.
One that got away that still bugs me from time to time is a small Sarah Sze monograph that the MCA in Chicago carried. I have several other books by her, but I just wish I had picked that up back in the day.
Now one that was not my fault, as it were, was there was an interesting catalogue of an art exhibit held out at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. I kept trying to get a hold of it, and I think the publisher never actually published the book, even though several libraries (in Vancouver at least) said that they had pre-ordered it. Somewhat amusingly, one of my favourite paintings was by Freida Kahlo and that turned up fairly recently in a different art book that I picked up (though I would really struggle to remember off the top of my head which one).
There was another book that I had ordered from a Vancouver gallery, because it wasn't quite ready at the time of the exhibition and then they were going to mail it to me, and anyway I never got it, which was annoying, given I had already paid for the book!
I have managed to pick up nearly all of Jane Dickson's official monographs (like Jane Dickson in Times Square** and Peepland) though there are a few (quite pricey) very small gallery publications like Night Driving or Paradise Alley. I have debated picking them up, but it turns out that Karma is publishing a very extensive (over 400 page!) monograph on Dickson at the end of Nov., and I assume it will have a lot, if not all, of the paintings from these recent gallery publications. I did find out that Hot! Hot! Hot! is (surprisingly) still in print from Howl Arts, so I decided I might as well pick that up on my visit to New York next week. I will try to remember to call Karma just to see if there are any advance copies of their new book as long as I am in town, but I assume that will not work out, and I'll just order a copy later (and not let it drag so long that it goes OOP).
I do recall on my last trip to Seattle, there was a copy of Craig Nova's Turkey Hash sitting outside a bookstore in Pike Place Market on their bargain shelves (for $1 I think). The bookstore had closed but oddly enough had left the books outside! I was so, so tempted to grab it, and I definitely would have if there had been a slot to drop $1. I even bugged someone that worked in Seattle to get it for me later, but they wisely ignored me. Anyway, I was poking around in BMV a couple of months later and got Turkey Hash and The Geek, so that worked out ok, though I did pay more than $1. I found a couple of other Nova books with cheap shipping to Canada, so I ordered those as well. (I had read a lot of Nova in my 20s and am feeling like revisiting him, I guess.) On this trip to New York, after I stop by Howl Arts, I should also be able to go to Mercer St. Books and the Strand. I'm still sort of on the lookout for Nova's Trombone and The Congressman's Daughter and maybe The Good Son as well. I don't have a whole lot of other books I am looking for, and I am going to try to keep everything in one small backpack, so I really can't go wild while in the bookstores, as tempting as that always is. In fact, I was thinking of bringing a few books along, but maybe I should only bring one book for the plane/train and then just supplement with whatever I do get at the Strand. I have to remember that Hot! Hot! Hot! will also take up a fair bit of space, and I'll probably need to take my laptop along though maybe not the charger, so the laptop is going to be jammed from the start. That said, I might still get the Nova books and maybe Joy Williams's Taking Care if I see it and one or two other random books in the Vintage Contemporaries series.
* I eventually bought one of his paintings as well, and I am finally going to pick it up from the framers tomorrow after a very long wait.
** This is one of those annoying cases where I ordered a book fairly early because I didn't want to lose out, and then the price dropped pretty significantly. I don't know why that happened in this case, and I don't really expect this to happen with this new Dickson publication.
No comments:
Post a Comment