© Josema Cutillas
To celebrate the Concéntrico International Festival of Architecture and Design, the Berlin-based art collective Plastique Fantastique encircled the Instituo Esudios Riojanos in Logroño, Spain, with a gigantic faux gold ring. Unfortunately, RINGdeLUXE will only be in place through May.
First-time author San Conniff Allende’s new book Be More Pirate: Or How to Take On the World and Win is all about audacity and risk taking. To prove that he walks the walk, Allende, disguised as a contractor, plastered an eight-meter-long pink fluorescent advertising banner for the book across the facade of the London headquarters of his publisher, Penguin Random House. No word yet on the response to the guerrilla marketing campaign from the publishers.
If you can’t live in New York City, or even visit whenever you want, the next best thing may be this brand new periodical about NYC life. Civilization, which is co-edited by Richard Turley, Mia Kerin, and Lucas Mascetello, is a magazine in a broadsheet newspaper format, with a decidedly old-school layout and design aesthetic.
The aim of Civilization is to provide an antidote to disposable digital media, while exploring the nitty gritty realities of New York City life in the 21st century. Issue #1 features stories about the music scene, shopping, eating, drugs, terrorism, sex, shoplifting, dancing, and much more. If you can’t get a copy in person, it’s possible to buy one online.
William Carlos Williams
Every year, the city of Amsterdam spends millions of euros cleaning up tons of used chewing gum. To bring attention to this disgusting and expensive problem, the Iamsterdam tourism marketing organization collaborated with the Gumdrop company, design firm Explicit Wear, and Publicis One to create the Amsterdam Gumshoe, a sneaker made from 20% recycled chewing gum collected from city streets, parks, and attractions. The sneakers, which have a map of Amsterdam on the soles,will be available for purchase from Amsterdam shops in late June.
French artist Thierry Mandon uses video, performance art, and installations to reflect on the poetic nature of everyday existence with a twist of absurdist humor.
I don’t remember if I found the Open Door Bookshop on my first or second visit to Rome, but I do recall meeting the store’s founder the writer and journalist Charles Nopar. Secluded on a lovely street in the picture-postcard Trastevere neighborhood, the Open Door is an Aladdin’s cave of treasures for book lovers, packed floor to ceiling with secondhand and antiquarian titles. Although the forty year-old bookstore specializes in English language books, you can discover some great possibilities in Italian and French as well. The only problem is that you won’t want to leave and get back to your tourist itinerary once you start browsing.
A French “reading and conversation book” for American soldiers prepared upon the entry of the United States into the First World War. This volume belonged to David S. Blondheim, at that time an associate professor of French and later a professor of Romance philology at Johns Hopkins University. Blondheim’s penciled notes suggest he might have used the book to prepare lessons for soldiers during his affiliation with the Army Educational Commission for American Soldiers Abroad from 1918-1919.
Algernon Coleman and A. Marin La Meslée, Le soldat américain en France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917).
Travel Between The Pages 