Jason Reed and Barry Stone, Boom and Bust, Shapco, Minneapolis, 2025

Cover with slipcase

Cover without slipcase

This artist' statement below sums up well this interesting work about this unique Texan petro-landscape:

"Boom and Bust depicts a 40-mile stretch of highway between Midland and Odessa, Texas. This roadway serves as the backbone of the extraction industry in the Permian Basin, the most productive oil field in the world. Inspired by Ed Ruscha, we made hundreds of photographs from the back of a pickup truck of the unrelenting scroll of man-camps, pumpjacks, and oil outfitters collectively known as the 'Petroplex.'"

Accompanied by two essays (Marcia Bjornerud and Rebecca Bengal) that explore both the geology of this area and the place of the American highway within the culture of the USA with Bengal concluding her piece with:

"The truest picture of Permian time is a single continuous photograph, an ancient and unknown story, one that travels backward and forward, folds in on itself, and opens up again."

128 single-sided pages, individually 8.5" x 5.5" and when unfolded 58ft 8inches.

Back cover with magnetic slipcase

Andrew Mockett, A Chapbook of English Tat, 2006

Front cover

This beautiful publication is a 25% sized handcolored facsimile of the original screenprinted 2002 edition. The "tat" in the title is Brit slang for something cheap, or of bad quality or simply tacky. The "Chapbook" in the title references the sources of the imagery in this publication as coming from what were known as Chapbooks, which were small run and cheap publications for the masses utilizing woodcuts and illustrated with popular subject matter such as "...almanacs, children's literature, folklore, ballads, nursery rhymes, pamphlets, poetry and political and religious tracts". [wikipedia] Chabooks had their heyday from the 16th century to the 18th century when they were gradually replaced by newspapers. 

If you look carefully at the individual pages you will notice that the reader was encouraged to cut out the image and fold the bottom strip in order to make the image stand upright ready for placement on the mantelpiece over the fireplace!

Mockett is a British artist, designer, teacher and illustrator with a particular interest in Pop imagery and design, and his works have been collected by institutions such as the Tate Modern, the V&A and the Yale Centre for British Art. 

13 single-sided pages, individually 4" X 4.75", and when unfolded 4ft 4".

Back cover