Books’n’zines

Yesterday I went to the London Art Book Fair at the Whitechapel Gallery; it was so amazing. Lots and lots of design inspiration & kept bumping into folks from work. Only managed to take a few pix before my camera battery conked out. Loves this for the gorgous endpapers – stripes seem to be the in-thing…

All kinds of books, every shape & colour, even books with holes in:

(With thanks to Amanda and her iphone for the pic.) Also this book published by the Dundee Contemporary Arts – catalogue for a gallery show – with gorgeous French-fold cover (is that a French-fold? I think so…)

How nice is that? And I love the way they've used the type along the join.

One stand where I found quite a few books that I liked was Trolley Books – new to me. They had this, which I liked very much:

And C-Photo magazine had a whole stand with all the back issues – I'd never seen them all together before. For 350 euros you can buy the whole set of 10, which considering they're 80 each is actually quite a bargain. They're such beautiful books…

Tearing myself away reluctantly, I went to see 'Publish And Be Dammned', a fanzines show being held nearby in a school off Bethnal Green Road.

There was quite a crowd

All too much of a squash to look at things properly, and also a little bit cliquey & hard to really get a sense of what people were trying to communicate. I guess a zine by its very nature is trying to appeal to a tiny niche audience, so it's not surprising that I found them a bit hard to get in to. I loved the fact that there were so many people out there producing such things. But I didn't pick anything up that I found hard to put down.