Matthew Picton’s Map Sculptures of Cities Made of Books about the City

From Hunter S. Thompson to Wagner, or what Ulysses has to do with news headlines from 9/11.

As a hopeless lover of maps and cities, and even more so of books about maps and books about cities, I was instantly enthralled by the work of Oregon-based British artist Matthew Picton, whose stunning paper sculptures of cities are made of books and other textual materials related to the respective city, taking the art of book sculpture to whole new level of meta with subtle, thoughtful commentary through the selection of the specific texts.

Jerusalem created from The New Testament, The Torah, The Armenian Bible and The Koran

Photo by Ron Jaffe

Dresden in 1945, made of Wagner's score for The Ring, 2010

Photo by Ron Jaffe

Portland created from the covers and text of the novel The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LaGuin and the DVD covers of the films Dante's Peak and Volcano; the work has been smoked

Photo by Ron Jaffe

London in 1666, created from the book covers of The Plague Years by Daniel Defoe

Photo by Ron Jaffe

Dublin on June 16, 1904, created from text from James Joyce's Ulysses

Photo by Ron Jaffe

Lower Manhattan created from headlines that accompanied the 2001 World Trade Center attacks and DVD covers of the film Towering Inferno and book covers of the novel The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

Photo by Ron Jaffe

Las Vegas in 1972, created from texts from Hunter S. Thompson’s 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'

Photo by Ron Jaffe

If’re a fellow bibliophile with a soft spot for the intersection of cities and cartography, don’t forget these 5 essential books on maps and 7 essential books on cities.

via roomthily

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Missed Connections Illustrated: Visual Paeans to Modern Love

Reverse-engineering serendipity, or what ice skating collisions have to do with fish market romance.

You might recall Sophie Blackall, known for her distinctive children’s book illustration, as one of the brains and brushes behind these brilliant design makeovers of the mundane. Since 2009, she has been capturing Craigslist missed connections in her delightful illustrations and unmistakable style of Chinese ink and watercolor, brimming with charm, romanticism and soft whimsy. Now, Blackall joins our running list of blogs so good they became books: Missed Connections: Love, Lost & Found collects the best of these poetic visual what-if love stories, each told in a shorthand “missed connection” ranging from the lyrical (I Gave You My Umbrella but the Wrong Directions) to the warm-and-fuzzy (We Shared a Bear Suit) to the shared love of the tragicomic (Ice Skating in Central Park We Collided).

Every day hundreds of strangers reach out to other strangers on the strength of a glance, a smile or a blue hat. Their messages have the lifespan of a butterfly. I’m trying to pin a few of them down.” – Sophie Blackall

Both playful and profound, Blackall’s delicate drawings — many of which are available on Etsy as prints — immortalize the ephemeral with a wink and a wand, breathing into these mundane encounters a kind of magic that transforms them into open-ended modern-day fairy tales.

In the book’s fascinating introduction, Blackall explores the history of missed connections, both her personal fascination with them and our larger collective memory across time:

For centuries the lovelorn have carved messages in tree trunks and rolled letters into bottles and cast them out to sea. On the 19th of January, 1862, the following appeared in The New York Times:

‘If the young lady wearing the pink dress, spotted fur cape and muff, had light hair, light complexion and blue eyes, who was in company with a lady dressed in black, that I passed about 5 o’clock on Friday evening in South Seventh Street, between First and Second, Williamsburg, L.I., will address a line to Waldo, Williamsburg Post Office, she will make the acquaintance of a fine young man.’

Some of the illustrated messages were written by their smitten authors moments after the encounter took place, and others decades later. Some are written to an impossible love interest, a person famous or dead or forbidden for one reason or another, and some lament the loss of a familiar lover. Hopeful, pensive, lonely, drunken, optimistic — they span the entire spectrum of human emotion.

Missed Connections: Love, Lost & Found weaves some much-needed romance and magic into the fabric of the daily grind, reverse-engineering serendipity with equal parts imagination and humor to deliver a chorus of rare and wonderful paeans to modern love.

Images via Sophie Blackall

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Lewis Mumford on the City: Rare Footage from 1963

What Dutch highways have to do with Canadian documentaries and the psychology of protests.

Last week, we explored 7 essential books about cities, perhaps the most influential of which was the 1961 volume The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by prolific author, philosopher and urbanism icon Lewis Mumford. In 1963, the National Film Board of Canada produced six 27-minute documentaries for a series entitled Mumford On The City. In this rare surviving footage of the series’ closing titles, Mumford articulates the ideology of urbanism long before it reached its contemporary tipping point and presages essential issues we grapple with today as we try to understand and optimize our cities, from transportation to communication to violent protest.

The city multiplies man’s power to think, to remember, to educate, to communicate, and so to make possible associations which bridge and bypass nations, cultures. This mixture, this cosmopolitanism, is the chief source of the city’s vitality. And we must enlarge and enrich it as we move towards a new urban form.”

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