CATALOGUE MY LEFT ONE

One conspicuous absence I have noticed from the usual Rare Book News sources is the announcement that NYU’s Riot Grrrl Archive is now open, what Maggie Serota’s neat article fittingly calls Academia, Girl Style Now:

“Sure, handmade zines and master copies from the movement do comprise an important component of the archive, but the collection boasts a vast variety of equally relevant and defining artifacts. To illustrate her point, Darms unfolds a navy-blue baby doll dress, and identifies it as the dress worn on the cover of Bikini Kill’s seminal Pussy Whipped album. Perhaps the collection’s most prized object is the actual filing cabinet used by Riot Grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna to catalog the various clippings, documents, articles and reviews related to Bikini Kill and other prominent figures central to the movement. “

POP CULTURE OF THE BOOK

Fig 2.1 Bowers, who was more intimidating than he looks.

Why keep a blog? Because let’s face it, the internet is at its finest when we use it to glorify other technologies– especially the very antique. And what is Pop Culture of the Book? By “pop culture of the book”, I’m dropping a truncated term: what I really mean is a “pop culture of the history of the book”, words I am using to license my own slipshod pasting together of things to talk about books. From the hit 1993 Disney film Hocus Pocus, to the  Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, nothing is safe. It’s about using flippancy with no less sincerity to illustrate a point; be it about the greatest articles of our cultural heritage, the odd provenance mysteries, binding oddities, et. al.

In the words of Benjamin in his entry on the “Collector” in The Arcades Project, this blog will be as “an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to assembly,” in anyway that it can. Early Modern books, since they are my special interest, will be screen-printed across the internet in amazing technicolor. Fredson Bowers will be my Liz Taylor; Aldus Manutius my soup can. It’s never been a better time to be into books for the love of it (everyone who tried to turn a profit is jumping ship), so here I am.