Preview our Fall 2023 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
PLANTHOUSE, INC.
The Floral Ghost
By Susan Orlean and Philip Taaffe.
This one-of-a-kind collaboration between acclaimed author Susan Orlean and celebrated artist Philip Taaffe unites the literary and the visual, the nostalgic and the optimistic, and brings greenery to your bookshelf. Taking inspiration from the rapidly dwindling "flower district" of New York City, Orlean and Taaffe offer tandem musings on the conceit of "the floral ghost." Orlean’s essay, one of her first botanically themed writings since she penned the widely lauded The Orchid Thief, reflects on a poignant moment when she first visited the district in its resplendent heyday. Her text is accompanied by Taaffe’s colorful silkscreen monotypes—a bouquet of paper and ink recalling the unique yet universal nature of time passing and petals fading. An evocative rendering of both the memories of youth and the ephemeral nature of the cityscape, The Floral Ghost makes an elegant gift for every aspiring writer, artist and dreamer who moves to a city to make his or her mark or who admires its mutable glory from afar. Susan Orlean (born 1955) is the bestselling author of eight books, including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; My Kind of Place; Saturday Night; and Lazy Little Loafers. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. Her 2011 book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, was a New York Times bestseller. Orlean has been a staff writer for the The New Yorker since 1992. She lives in Los Angeles and upstate New York. Philip Taaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1955, and studied at the Cooper Union in New York. He has exhibited worldwide since his first solo exhibition in New York, in 1982. Taaffe has traveled widely in the Middle East, South America and Morocco, where he collaborated with Mohammed Mrabet on the 1993 book Chocolate Creams and Dollars, translated by Paul Bowles. His work is in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Taaffe lives and works in New York and West Cornwall, Connecticut.
Featured image is reproduced from The Floral Ghost.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Broadly
Lauren Oyler
[Orlean's] piece goes beyond her initial wonder at the idea of "a district of flowers" to wax nostalgic, but never sentimental, about a part of New York that many young writers today will never get to experience.
The New York Times
Joseph Akel
As much a celebration as it is a eulogy for the flower district.
Hyperallergic
Allison Meier
The district itself may also never return to its former lush glory, like a flower cut at its peak, but The Floral Ghost captures one day of its thriving history through one person’s ephemeral memory.
Brooklyn Magazine
Sharon Steel
A slim, intimate volume, accompanied by a series of vivid monotypes.
Artdesk
Kelly Rogers
In an elegant coupling if the botanical and the poetic, bestselling author Susan Orlean and painter philip Taaffe combine their arts to create an organic storytelling moment inspired by New York City's dwindling flower district.
"The first time I ever visited the Flower District was late in the afternoon on a hot day so many years ago that even my memory of it has crisped around the edges," Susan Orlean begins her wonderful new collaboration with painter Philip Taaffe, launching tomorrow at Rizzoli. "This was when Manhattan was a very different place than it is today, when the city still rumbled with manufacturing and trades; when it was still a clutch of sovereign business regions: the luminous gleam of the Lighting District; the damp and tangy-smelling Meat District; the Notions District, its windows paved with buttons and rick-rack; other districts of clothing, of fish, of dishware. Men with ropey arms and dour expressions moved up and down the streets of those neighborhoods day and night, wheeling carts, delivering a pallet of goods here, picking up a container there, threading between the traffic that barely squeezed by." continue to blog
"I was new to the city then—another callow girl hoping to make something of myself here—and the place amazed me. Not long after I had moved to town, a friend invited me to visit him in his new loft. He said it was in the middle of the city. “I’m in the Flower District,” he explained, and even as I heard the words I couldn’t imagine what they meant. A district of flowers? It sounded oxymoronic, coupling commerce with frippery. Manhattan didn’t seem to me like a place where flowers arrived and left in bulk; Manhattan flowers seemed like they would appear only in artful arrangements in the lobbies of buildings or at the maître d’s stands in fancy restaurants." —Susan Orlean, who will appear in conversation with Philip Taaffe tonight at Rizzoli. continue to blog
TONIGHT at 6PM, Rizzoli Bookstore, Planthouse and ARTBOOK | D.A.P. present New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean and painter Philip Taaffe in conversation—in celebration of their elegant new collaboration, The Floral Ghost. Book signing to follow.
continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 6.5 x 6.5 in. / 36 pgs / 33 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $22.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $30.5 GBP £20.00 ISBN: 9780986281495 PUBLISHER: Planthouse, Inc. AVAILABLE: 3/22/2016 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Planthouse, Inc.. By Susan Orlean and Philip Taaffe.
This one-of-a-kind collaboration between acclaimed author Susan Orlean and celebrated artist Philip Taaffe unites the literary and the visual, the nostalgic and the optimistic, and brings greenery to your bookshelf. Taking inspiration from the rapidly dwindling "flower district" of New York City, Orlean and Taaffe offer tandem musings on the conceit of "the floral ghost." Orlean’s essay, one of her first botanically themed writings since she penned the widely lauded The Orchid Thief, reflects on a poignant moment when she first visited the district in its resplendent heyday. Her text is accompanied by Taaffe’s colorful silkscreen monotypes—a bouquet of paper and ink recalling the unique yet universal nature of time passing and petals fading. An evocative rendering of both the memories of youth and the ephemeral nature of the cityscape, The Floral Ghost makes an elegant gift for every aspiring writer, artist and dreamer who moves to a city to make his or her mark or who admires its mutable glory from afar.
Susan Orlean (born 1955) is the bestselling author of eight books, including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; My Kind of Place; Saturday Night; and Lazy Little Loafers. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. Her 2011 book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, was a New York Times bestseller. Orlean has been a staff writer for the The New Yorker since 1992. She lives in Los Angeles and upstate New York.
Philip Taaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1955, and studied at the Cooper Union in New York. He has exhibited worldwide since his first solo exhibition in New York, in 1982. Taaffe has traveled widely in the Middle East, South America and Morocco, where he collaborated with Mohammed Mrabet on the 1993 book Chocolate Creams and Dollars, translated by Paul Bowles. His work is in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Taaffe lives and works in New York and West Cornwall, Connecticut.
