Art is work
I like big, showy, sumptuous art books, the kind that you have to sit in a chair to leaf through. I like well-rendered contemporary comics, and I like oversized photography collections, and I like thoughtful explorations and exegeses of data visualization and page layout, and I like handsome monographs of graphic artists and designers, and I like compilations of contemporary design and illustration.
I only have two problems with these books: I can't afford them, and my house is already full of them.
So, now I'm looking for some other people who have the same interest and the same problem.
I'm thinking of pooling resources - putting money in a pot to share a collection of the kind of big ol' art books that it's hard to find in the libraries of Orange County. The focus of the collection is books that are beautiful objects of themselves, and in particular that are relevant to applied art and graphic design.
I started trying to make lists of categories, but found that anything I wrote was reductive. Instead, I'm appending a list of bookmarks at the end of this page. If you leaf through them, they form a pretty good overview of what I'm talking about.
Here's my best attempt at an outline.
Forty people put in $100 a year apiece; five of them put in an additional $100 as well. The resultant $4500 is the year's budget, from which art books are bought on January 1 and July1. The five who paid $200 apiece are that year's collection developers, who make up the actual list and do the ordering.
The collection is tied to southern Orange County, becaseu that's where we live. Somewhere west of Central Valley and east of Middletown. Maybe, when a person moves away and won't be participating any more, she gets to select a few to take away. Maybe not – maybe we're founding a proper membership library.
I'm open to ideas about location. My first thought is that there must be some unused, non-residential space somewhere, but that's not necessarily true. Maybe $1000 a year goes to renting a shelf somewhere. Maybe the books get donated to a public library that agrees to host them as a collection.
What aren't we interested in? Here are the categories we probably wouldn't spend our money on:
Books that have been purchased by an RCLS member library.
ILL works very well, and we're not looking to duplicate the efforts of the more ambitious collections.
Art history / Old masters.
It's not a value judgment on any of the work to say that
A) the people who want copies already have copies,
B) plenty of these collections drift in and out of The Strand's ten-dollar section, and
C) we'll have plenty hard time narrowing down lists of contemporary artists and designers; no one wants to start having arguments about whether Paul Klee is "better" or "more valuable" than Claude Monet. As with any rule, it will be made up by exceptions (monographs by commercial artists like Milton Glaser and Paula Scher come to mind, and maybe collections by living 'fine artists' like Richter.)
Eventually, maybe this leads to shared artists' resources in Orange County, like group software licenses, studio space, even the dreaded networking breakfasts. I don't know. Right now, I just know that my Amazon wish list is about to topple from sheer scale.
If this is interesting – if you think you'd like to be part of it, or you think the idea has some potential but you'd like to refine it, or you just think we're a laughingstock worth keeping on your radar – please drop me an email. If there's any interest (like, any interest at all), I'll set up some kind of group discussion board where we can start hashing it out.
These aren't all candidates (a bunch of us already have copies of a bunch of these), but they're all thematically right.