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Unpacking my Library • The Alienation Effect • Owen Hatherley • 2025

This is a terrific new book.

The European émigrés contribution to mid-century modernism in the UK has usually been described, up until now, in relation to architecture and painting. And generally with the caveat that the European style and approach was resisted...

This book tales a wider view and examines the role of photographers and publishers in scoping a new kind of image and print culture which, broadly speaking, gave expression to a set of ideas and values which were aligned with post-war social-democracy.

The starting point for this would be Stuart Hall's famous essay, from 1972, which describes the social-eye of Picture Post. In this essay, Hall identified the photographic weekly, its editors and its photographers as having constructed a new visual language that aligned with the emerging political values of post-WW2 reconstruction.

Owen Hatherley has applied this same idea beyond Picture Post, and looks a bit more generally at the emergence of relatively inexpensive illustrated books as part of the WW2 publishing boom and thereafter.

For example, the famous Britain in Pictures series of illustrated essays is presented as a sort of British iteration of print-culture constructivism (as per the early Soviet period), and with photo-mechanical colour reproduction by Adprint, a company that later became Thames and Hudson...

The founding orthodoxy of European modernism identified a cultural phenomenon that connected Mocow, Berlin and Paris, with New York; and more-or-less passed Britain by.

Quite a lot of my own writing has been about similar themes in British graphic design. For example, I have written about the safety propaganda produced by RoSPA as being part of this broader expression of the values first identified by Stuart Hall.

I'm delighted by the publication of this book. Well done Owen.

If you are interested in the illustrated books from Britain during the middle part of the 20C, you might enjoy these short essays about

Cookery Books https://www.are.na/block/3162642

Guide Books https://www.are.na/block/3162647

Garden Books https://www.are.na/block/3162638

Children's Books https://www.are.na/block/3162640

Illustrated Books for Grown-Ups https://www.are.na/block/3162645

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Unpacking my Library • Resistance • Steve McQueen • Turner Contemporary • Margate • 2025

Not just a book about images; but a book about how images change people and the world...

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Things I Like • The Modern Face • c1970

I saw these faces on a magazine from about 1970...they look almost Georgian (18C). I don't mean that the faces look exactly as faces from that period (although they seem to); but that they were obviously from a distant past. In a slightly different style they could even be from Roman Pompeii...

That made me think about how much the face, and the image culture that shapes it - fashion, technology and of desire, has changed.

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Things I Like • Type as Type/Type as Image/Type as Pattern • John Lewis • 1970s

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Things I Like • Stencil Cut Letters • 2025

Ivy League digger...Romney Marsh 2025

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Things I Like • Numbers of Magazines • c1970

Fifty, and ranged left

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Things I like • Numbers on Magazines • c1960

Seventy Thousand!

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Glass Berio Ravel...orchestral street sounds

Days and Nights in Rocinha (1997), by Philip Glass, is an orchestral composition. Glass describes it thus, Rocinha is a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro famous for its lively cultural life and especially its “samba school” (Whose appearance is the highpoint of the “Carnival” every year). I often visited Rocinha during the weeks before “Carnival” and have always been moved and delighted by its unique environment. Days and Nights in Rocinha is my musical impression and tribute to this place.

The piece, by Glass, is structured in the style of Bolero (1928) by Ravel. Bolero is probably Ravel's most famous or well-known orchestral piece. Ravel developed Bolero as a structured repetition of an insistent theme, that gradually gets bigger and louder as more of the orchestra join in.

There's a kind of energetic madness in Ravel'swork that is missing in that by Glass. Rocinha remains controlled, and slightly locked-down throughout.

I was thinking if only ot could be a bit more like Ravel, and then I recalled Luciano Berio's (1975) reworking of Boccherini's, Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid (Night Music of the Streets of Madrid) (18C). The Berio combines the different versions of the originals, and provides for a slightly fragmented and layered version.

Charles Ives was a pioneer American modernist in orchestral music, at a time when US musical culture was still pretty under-developed.

America has always done popular music really well…but it took a long time for its serious orchestral music to become something that could stand alongside the German, French, and Italian, traditions in Europe.

The Juilliard School, America’s first conservatory school, was only established in 1905! The school was first set up as the Institute of Musical Art, before being endowed by Augustus Juilliard, and others, during the 1920s.

Ives was the son of a military band instructor and he spent much of his childhood watching parades and listening to marching bands. That’s not so bad. Don’t forget that American marching bands have tunes by JP Souza (1854-1932), the March King.

Anyone who has watched a marching band will understand that, as the band marches up-and-down, it has to turn on itself…that means that, briefly, there is music coming from two directions, at least…that’s a new and exciting noise.

This fragmentation is the same kind if insight as cubism and as understanding that the straight-on view of the the theatre stage is a bit limited…we don’t hear the world symphonically, we here it as fragments that we assemble into a coherent gestalt.

Ives was one of the first people to try and describe this fragmented perception of life, and sound, through music. You get the same thing in the European later Romantics, especially Gustav Mahler…but the Europeans tended to do it with bits of folk song and traditional tunes.

In its original 18C form, the Boccherini is quite formal and stately…it is music to process and promenade by…In Luciano Berio’s new interpretation, the street becomes much more dynamic and messy…that’s great; with bits of tune coming from everywhere.

What I really want is Glass, with more Berio, and a lot more Ravel.

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Unpacking my Library • Modernist Graphic Design in Britain • McLaren + Pritchard • 2024

What a lovely book. Designed so as to perfectly express the ideas represented therein...Slightly amazed to see my name in the index, and to realise that I been a very small part of this great adventure; ongoing. Terrific.

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Things I Like • Enamel Badge • Rennies • 2024

Blue enamel shop badge with anchor trademark, and guilloche wave. Beautifully and traditionally made for us by Gomme, in Birmingham.

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Things I Like • Paper Samples • GF Smith •2024

We received a lovely paper-sample book from GF Smith. The pink and yellow remined me of the Mexican modernist architecture of Louis Barragán. The shape of the book, reminded me of the Schröder House by Gerrit Reitveld, in Holland.

I love the this idea of architecture expressed in the miniature everyday. Perfect.

Communication design as architecture without walls

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Unpacking my Library • Pop-Up • France • 2024

This pop-up book has just arrived. It's a charming series of keep-fit style exercises, animated through paper engineering. Great flat-colour and typographic style too. A really lovely thing by Marion Bataille, and just published. TOP, thumbs-up!

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Unpacking my Library • LMN catalogue • 2024

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Things I Like • CGT Enamel Badge • 1950s

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How Brexit Started...

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Unpacking my Library • Lund Humphries • Artmonsky Arts • 2022

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Unpacking my Library • Department Store • MADS Paris • 2024

The department store as mind-palace and inter-action, fun-palace and think-belt (Cedric Price), or proto-Pompidou...Threshold moments and the architecture of experience