New Books: Contemporary Artists Series

The Contemporary Artists Series from Phaidon publishing have always been gems scattered throughout our collection, but now a whole new slew of artists in this excellent book series have arrived! Here are but a few of the newest additions:

NEW BOOK: DARWIN'S CAMERA

Fun fact: Darwin was the first to publish a photographically illustrated science book. While photography was still in it's infancy, not trusted as an objective medium, Darwin showed the public how awesome photography can be. He did it with Expression in the Emotions of Man and Animals, in which he was the first to photograph things that happen too rapidly for the eye to see. A must-read for people interested in photo history.

NEW BOOK: THE BOOK OF SYMBOLS

This book is your one-stop guide for visual symbols and archetypes. Unlike the dusty old encyclopedia books on symbols with the simple line drawings (which are definitely rad too), this book contains photographs of both ancient and contemporary art. Whether your interest be cyclops, unicorns, mirrors or rain, this volume contains a wealth of written and visual information. Plus it has little ribbon bookmarks, making you truly feel as though it's the New Age Bible.

DOCUMENTS OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Documents of Contemporary Art are all over the place these days, and for good reason. For one, they look really cool. How often do you encounter a book series without a painfully bad sense of design? Even art book series typically look like they're going out of their way to appear un-fun.

Two, there's an anthology for almost everything you could possibly be interested in, and if there isn't there probably will be.

Three, although some (or a lot) of the essays are a bit esoteric, the breadth of different authors guarantee that there are some real goodies in there.

And because the library is so rad, we have almost all of them.