What a year, phew! It’s been a rather good one for us.
We have sold thousands and thousands of fantastic books, and presumably brought joy into the lives of a lot of art lovers in the process. Thanks, you’re welcome. Oh yeah, we’re also not far off hitting 2000 tweets since January. So as you can see, this year social media has become an important part of our lives – just check out our new Instagram page too.
So, what else is worth celebrating? Well, in May we graced Tate Modern’s epic Turbine Hall with our lovely books on show at the Offprint London Art Book Fair. Later in October we were busy hanging-out with our sales reps and publisher friends in Frankfurt at the International Book Fair. Then just a few days afterwards we the hosted renowned design critic and writer, Alice Rawsthorn for a special Design Manchester event to promote her new book. Now, that was particularly cool.
In 2018 our Top 3 Bestselling new titles have been: the brilliant critical anthology Alice Rawsthorn: Design as an Attitude, the graphic designer’s dream resource Color Library: Research into Color Reproduction and Printing, and the esoteric yet fascinating and ground-breaking Radical Essex.
Our fabulous mother ship, HOME arts centre has produced two excellent titles this year. John Walter: CAPSID is a beautifully realised catalogue published for Dr. Walter’s major exhibition at CGP in London and here in Manchester. Published in the seminal HOME Artist Film series Andrew Kötting’s new big screen work, Lek and the Dogs has just arrived in DVD and Blu-Ray formats (available to order from us any day now). The film has been afforded some great reviews and endorsement, not least this one from expert film critic, Mark Kermode — “When it comes to immersive cinema, few film-makers can hold a candle to British maverick Andrew Kötting.”
Maybe you’re curious to know what our personal favourite titles are from over the past 12 months? Well, here we couldn’t resist sharing them with you…
A Volume of Fanatics (Glasgow) — Suz’s choice and she says, “Our use of words is one of the human traits that I am fascinated with and this thesaurus (a collaboration between Richard Wentworth and Victoria Miguel) just celebrates the love of words.”
Lisa Milroy: Here & There — Claire’s choice and she says, “Parasol unit make beautiful books, and Lisa Milroy makes exciting paintings. Also, she taught me at art school!”
Steven Zultanski: On the Literary Means of Representing the Powerful as Powerless — Jim’s choice and he says, “A fascinating pocketbook. Anything that’s full of literary references whilst challenging authority at the same time, gets my vote. Zultanski does this with smart, critical elegance.”
Sincere thanks to our innovative client publishers, indefatigable sales reps, brilliant distribution partner NBN International, and of course, to you, our dedicated Art Book Lovers.
As for 2019, what are we ‘looking forward’ to? Well, to find out you’ll just have to wait and read our blog in the New Year…
Picture credit: taken from the book, Tom Hengen: Habitat published by Kerber Verlag, 2018.