Weekly New Releases

For this holiday weekend, we can think of no better book to feature than MFA Publications’ Art in the Americas: Conflict, Culture, and Exchange in the Eighteenth Century, contrasting works from the collection of MFA Boston in order to disrupt concepts of old world versus new, colonizer versus colonized, tradition versus innovation. Pictured here, a storage jar by David Drake, 1857. Co-editor Ethan W. Lasser writes: “In 1857, far from Boston, on a plantation in Edgefield, South Carolina, the enslaved potter Dave (who later took the name David Drake) etched a short poem into the shoulder of a stoneware storage jar. Dave worked under particularly precarious conditions. In South Carolina on the eve of the Civil War, it was illegal for enslaved people to read and write. Yet, like [Paul] Revere, Dave inscribed his name and the date alongside a strongly worded inscription that spoke truth to power: “I made this Jar = for cash / Though its called Lucre trash.” With these lines, Dave announced his role as maker and challenged those that undervalued his labor.”

LA Showroom Summer Sample Sale, Save 75–85%!

Beat the heat! Join us for cold drinks and cool books, Saturday, July 11 from 11 AM–4 PM! Our Los Angeles Showroom is making room for a new season of books with a blowout sample sale featuring an amazing selection of discontinued titles, as well as newer books on art, photography, design, fashion, architecture, music, film and popular culture—all at up to 85% off!

Sometimes a publisher just gets it right. This week, it’s MoMA, whose new survey of Modernist architecture in post-colonial West Africa, Architects of Liberation, captures the euphoric energy of the region’s most visionary designers and builders after hard-won independence. Pictured here, La Pyramide in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, built 1968–73 by architect Rinaldo Olivieri and engineer Riccardo Morandi. “La Pyramide is a hallmark of the Abidjan skyline,” Mallory Cohen writes. “A fifteen-story, truncated pyramid outfitted in aluminum sunshades, the building was a product of the ‘Ivorian miracle’—a period of immense economic prosperity driven by cocoa and coffee exports. La Pyramide was designed as an African market for a new age… [featuring] three underground levels containing a parking garage for 1,800 vehicles, a supermarket and a night club, followed by two floors of boutiques. The upper levels were dedicated to offices and a small number of studio apartments, with the twelfth floor reserved for a restaurant with panoramic views of the surrounding city and Ébrié Lagoon.”

“They’re all freaks. Outsiders, untouchables. They’re like biographies, the kind of people you’d like to know about. Really interesting and fucked up. It’s what you want to read, the kind of people you stop and notice.”⁠ So Greer Lankton⁠ is quoted in Pride Month Staff Pick Could It Be Love, published by Magic Hour Press in collaboration with the Greer Lankton Collection and The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. Featuring 100 color photographs by Lankton of her iconic doll sculptures in uncanny, real-life scenarios—some glamorous, some humorous, some heartbreaking—this gem of a book also collects an assortment of portraits of Lankton herself, shot by Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar and David Armstrong during her short lifetime, with text by Hilton Als. Featured here, Grandma Tillie.

Back in print at last after a decade-long drought, Kelli Anderson’s delightful This Book is a Camera follows closely upon her breakout 2025 pop-up typography history, Alphabet in Motion. Here, Anderson provides all of the materials necessary to make a DIY pinhole photograph, including a fold-out 4x5-inch analog camera, a lightproof bag, five sheets of light sensitive paper, development instructions requiring only household ingredients and a companion lightmeter app. For paper nerds, photo enthusiasts and the child at heart.

“I am the firmament computer, I am the sky computer, I am the orbit computer, I am the space computer. Inspector gadget Lee Scratch Perry, the upsetting upsetter, who make music better.” So said Lee Scratch Perry, and so he is quoted by John Corbett in Lee Scratch Perry: Black Ark, back in stock after the immediate sell-through of our first shipment in May. Weighing in at 667 pages and featuring printed edges that replicate Perry’s handwriting, this must-have archive collects and collages nearly 300 photographs and handmade articles of ephemera from Perry’s infamous Kingston studio and gathering place. “Due to the perpetual twists and turns of an overactive mind that was driven by unseen spiritual forces, the Black Ark’s décor was seldom static,” David Katz writes. That wild genius is reflected in every spread of this historic preservation project.

“When I first handled clay … I can’t explain it. It might have felt like someone who was holding their baby for the first time. Immediately, something happened to me. I don’t know why I’m making what I’m making … I have no clue. I don’t know what it’s going to be.” So said the sculptor, activist and Church of the Open Door minister Reverend Joyce McDonald in 2024. A former performer and addict who tested positive for H.I.V. in 1995, the Reverend Joyce McDonald now counsels women in prison and shelters, while exposing and unearthing her own traumas and triumphs in clay. Her work is the subject of a major exhibition at the Bronx Museum, on view through January 11, 2026. Pictured here, one of several figures titled Halleluya Ladies (1998).

Today, as all the city, all the country and all the world celebrates NYC and the New York Knicks, (!!!!!!!), we could think of no better image to feature on our homepage. Designed by Michael Doret in 1991, the official Knicks logo might be the most iconic symbol in the world on this day. Definitely in New York City. We are in awe and in ecstasy.

Featured image—of an SG-100 graphic equalizer, Aurex stereo amplifier model and Aurex AT-1000MK II audio digital timer from the collection of Japanese artist, designer, musician and creative director NIGO—is reproduced from new release NIGO: From Japan with Love, published to accompany the current exhibition at The Design Museum, London. Collecting key items and ephemera from NIGO’s personal collection—from childhood toys to iconic post-war American streetwear to his own designs for A Bathing Ape, Kenzo, Nike, Nintendo and other brands—this 224-page paperback documents the deep-cut cultural references that informed one of the most influential designers across contemporary culture. This stereo system, for example, belonged to NIGO’s brother. “It’s like catching air,” he says of the creative process. “Not an easy thing to define!”

Out now in an expanded edition, Christopher Rawlins’ perennial summertime best-seller, Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction is, technically, a serious, scholarly architecture book on one of the great overlooked designers of the twentieth century. It’s also a sexy and expansive cultural history of the narrow but mighty barrier island that has become forever known as a joyful, permissive summer paradise for queer New Yorkers of every stripe. “In rediscovering Gifford’s architecture, I also found a portal to a lost generation,” Rawlings writes, “truncated by AIDS and winnowed by the passage of time, but still resonant with artistic and cultural significance.” Pictured here, Water Games (1937) by Herbert List.

The world has lost one of the great figurative painters of the twentieth century, and one of its most influential Pop artists. Featured here, David Hockney’s 2020 iPad drawing “10th September 2020,” from a series made in his later adopted home of Normandy, France. “I even caught the new moon,” he says of this work, in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist. “The last full moon was a fantastic moon, bigger and brighter than anything, and it cast shadows on the grass. And I got that down. I woke up at 4 A.M. for a pee, saw it out of the window, grabbed the iPad and drew it. Then I went back to bed an hour after drawing it.”

Featured photograph—made by Milton H. Greene in 1955—is from new release Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait, published to accompany the centennial exhibition on view now at National Portrait Gallery, London. Collecting 225 reproductions and essays by a host of contemporary writers, this book goes beyond the triumph and the tragedy to the “tilted fairytale” of the universal. “Marilyn has something for everyone,” Lena Dunham writes. “If you feel you are caged by male perceptions of your beauty, she is a cautionary tale. And yet if you feel your body is too big, too wild, or too different, she let the curves that spoke louder than she could show through clingy fabrics. If you feel you are not taken seriously by the powers that be, Marilyn is someone who never became the actress, poet or painter she was in her private time. And if you want to prove that a sex kitten can powerfully shift the culture, there she is, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the president who happened to be her erstwhile lover. … She is everywhere. And despite being everywhere, with something for everyone, she had something just for me. Her story was a tilted fairytale I could wear like a locket, believing—as so many have believed—that the ways in which I saw her were different.”

Featured spreads are from Pride Month Staff Pick Love & Lightning: A Collection of Queer-Feminist Manifestos, co-published by Valiz and Girls Like Us magazine. “‘Manifesto’ is always, already slipping away from us,” editors Jessica Gysel and Sara Kaaman write in their Introduction; “morphing, changing, in never-ending transformation. A text is a portal to a specific time, place, and lived experience. Compressing wild writing and revolutions and dreams into neatly designed, typeset pages will always feel a little bit like violence. The violence of uniformity, the violence of anthologizing. But we do this work for the archives—for those who come after us, to find these words held together. The reaching never ends: reaching for a different world, reaching for peace, reaching for fair wages, reaching beyond capitalism, colonialism, extractivism. Reaching into the earth, for soil to kiss. Love is in the reaching. Dry tinder burns easily. What dries us up? Capitalism and all that—‘an utter bore.’ All that’s needed is a strike of lightning. A spark. Consider this book a spark. Use it to burn. Soft fires in your heart, large fires to make heat and change.”

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