We’re loving this idea! Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh his creative outlook.
The Best Travel Books for 2018
We’re rushing headlong towards the end of the year, and here in Australia the weather is warming up beautifully – two things that make me think of holidays and travelling! For me, the prospect of resuming travelling (after an extended break) is filling me with anticipation – there are still so many places I want to visit! Whether you are a seasoned traveller, or one new to the game, there’s some excellent travel writing to inspire, entertain and inform you. Here are some of our favourites from this year:
Journeys of a Lifetime, Second Edition: 500 of the World’s Greatest Trips by National Geographic
Here’s all your travel inspo in one hit – the second edition of Journeys of a Lifetime, completely revised to mark its 10th anniversary. From iconic places to hidden gems, these destinations and routes represent the 500 favourite journeys of the travel writers at National Geographic. Covering every continent and mode of transport, Journeys of a Lifetime is particularly strong on adventurous trips – whether it’s cruising in Antarctica, trekking up Kilimanjaro or mountain biking in Transylvania. There are also thematic sections, with ideas for urban walks, food pilgrimages, hot new museums and more. Packed with maps, planning advice and amazing photography, this gorgeous book will provide inspiration and information for years to come.
Lonely Planet’s Ultimate Eatlist : the 500 Best Dishes to Eat on the Planet, Ranked by Lonely Planet
Ultimate Eatlist is another “500 Best” book that will be a great reference as well as inspiration. For many people (myself included), trying different cuisines is a favourite part of travelling, so the team at Lonely Planet has scoured the world for the most delicious, iconic and memorable eating experiences. From Laksa in Kuala Lumpur, BBQ in Texas to oysters in Tasmania, Ultimate Eatlist will show you what to eat, where to eat it, the history and culture behind each food, and why the experience will be special. Don’t read this book when you’re hungry!
Rooms with a View: the Secret Life of Grand Hotels by Adrian Mourby
The names of famous hotels – such as the Dorchester (London), Raffles (Singapore), and The Plaza (New York) – instantly evoke images of history, glamour, money, celebrities. These are also potent ingredients for gossip! Hotel historian and travel addict Adrian Mourby has collected wonderfully entertaining tales about 50 of these grand hotels around the world. Read about how the details of India’s independence were drafted in the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel in Delhi; or about the time Salvador Dali asked room service at Hotel Le Meurice in Paris to send him a flock of sheep. The Great, the Good and the Eccentric, including Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway and Elizabeth Taylor – all made appearances, and some times, history – in these grand establishments.
Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy’s Food Culture by Matt Goulding
Pasta, Pane, Vino is the latest book by Roads & Kingdoms, a crew that applies foreign correspondence-style journalism to food, music and travel (thereby elevating it to a new and impressive level). Matt Goulding travels across Italy and shows how food staples – pasta, bread, cheese, wine – remain anchored in tradition, whilst allowing new generations of artisans the scope to innovate for the future. Matt’s exploration of food is also the starting point for deep-dives into Italian history, politics and culture. Each chapter is like a short documentary that is both intense and intimate. Pasta, Pane, Vino will hit the spot If you like your writing insightful and intellectual.
The Kings of the Yukon: an Alaskan River Journey by Adam Weymouth
Adam Weymouth spent four months canoeing along the Yukon River, tracing the life cycle of the legendary king salmon. From the spawning grounds of McNeil Lake in the Canadian interior, he travels over 3,000 km to the Bering Sea – and each year, thousands of salmon make this same journey in reverse, against the current and uphill, back to their birthplace to spawn and then die. Along the way, he meets various locals, whose lives are entwined with the fate of the salmon. The Kings of the Yukon is a quiet, poetic book befitting a journey through such a remote, rugged area. The slow pace of canoeing allows Adam Weymouth plenty of time for reflection on ecology, sustainability, and the tension between conservation and cultural traditions.
A Year Off: a Story about Travelling the World and How to Make it Happen for You by Alexandra and David Brown
“Don’t Dream it, Do it!” is the message by Alexandra and David Brown – if you have ever dreamt of taking a year off to travel the world, then this is the book for you. A few months into their relationship, Alexandra and David decided to take a year off from work and travel together. Visiting 20 countries in 12 months is a big challenge for a new couple, and this book details the highs and the lows, the glorious moments and the sheer exhaustion. Alexandra and David also show how to plan and budget for such a trip, the conversations you need to have with your boss, how to manage the mundane stuff whilst on the road. Combining guidebook, travel essays and memoir, A Year Off will inspire you to finally take the plunge with that dream trip.
The Kindness of Strangers: Travel Stories that Make your Heart Grow edited by Fearghal O’Nuallain
Travelling is exciting because it takes us to new and distant places; however, in such unfamiliar places, without our usual support network, we become vulnerable. The Kindness of Strangers explores what it means to be vulnerable and to be helped by someone we’ve never met, someone who could have walked past, but chose not to. Contributors share personal stories of the kindnesses they have received from adventures around the world, from a warm and cheering bowl of soup, to a rescue from a dire situation. The Kindness of Strangers is not just a travel book, but one that reminds its readers that much good can arise from even the smallest of kind gestures. In doing so, it encourages readers to empathise and be kind too. All royalties go towards supporting Oxfam in their work with refugees – the most vulnerable travellers of them all.
The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid by Dylan Thuras
The team behind the bestselling Atlas Obscura has returned with a book, designed to inspire wanderlust in a younger generation! The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid is packed with fascinating and unusual information about 47 different countries spread across every continent. Besides distant and exotic places – such as the Crystal Caves in Mexico and Blood Falls in Antarctica – it also encourages young readers to explore and reveal the hidden wonders of their own environments. Designed to appeal to 8-12 year olds (the age when curious facts and amazing records really capture their imaginations), this is a beautifully-produced book that will be perfect for gifting.
#tuesdaychat
Ohhh give us some sun, sand and sea any day…though we’re also partial to a weekend in Prague, or Paris or a long holiday in Helsinki.
Where do you like to travel to?
Monday Inspo
We couldn’t agree with this quote more, there’s nothing that makes a holiday more fun than a great travel buddy.
Psst…this week on the blog we’ll be sharing our top travel books of the year.
Woohoo it’s Friday!
It’s here! We’ve made it to the weekend people! Now it’s time for reading, relaxing and fun with friends.
The Best Books Celebrating Art in 2018
The world of art can be a little intimidating, polarising, exciting and even sometimes a tad bizarre. The idea of walking into an art gallery to have a little look around may seem like the perfect day to some and yet like stepping into Alice’s wonderland for others. There are so many styles and while we think the best way to determine one that resonates with you is to spend time in a gallery looking at all genres, the second best would be to leaf through a book. Here’s a few of our favourites that have been released this year.
Pharmacy London by Damien Hirst
In 2005 Damien Hirst began photographing every pharmacy in the Greater London area. Shooting both the individual pharmacists behind their counters and the exterior views of the city’s 1,856 chemists, he took over a decade to complete the project. The images are brought together in their entirety in this extraordinary ten-volume artist’s book. Hirst’s career-long obsession with the minimalist aesthetics employed by pharmaceutical companies—the cool colours and simple geometric forms—first manifested in his series of Medicine Cabinets, conceived in 1988 while still at Goldsmiths College. For his 1992 installation Pharmacy, Hirst recreated an entire chemist within the gallery space, stating: “[Pharmacy] is like a contemporary museum. In a hundred years it will look like an old apothecary.”
When Artists Curate : Contemporary Art and the Exhibition as Medium by Alison Green
An increasing proportion of exhibitions are curated by artists rather than professional curators. In this ground-breaking book Alison Green provides the first critical history of visual artists curating exhibitions. The artist emerges as someone who carries a special responsibility for critiquing art’s institutions, brings considerable creativity to the craft of making exhibitions and, through experimentation, has changed the way exhibitions are understood to be authored and experienced. But the book also establishes a curious ubiquity to the artist-curated exhibition. Rather than being exceptional or rare, artists curate all the time and in all kinds of places: in galleries and in museums, in studios, in borrowed spaces such as shopfronts or industrial buildings, in front rooms and front windows, in zoos or concert halls, on streets and in nature. Seen from the perspective of artists, showing is a part of making art. Once this idea is understood, the history of art starts to look very different.
MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art by Juliet Samantha Friedman
Since opening to the public in 1929, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has amassed one of the most significant collections of modern and contemporary art in the world. The major exhibition MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art, presented at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, provides a unique survey of more than 200 iconic works in the MoMA collection.
This beautifully illustrated publication features insightful essays by curators Samantha Friedman (MoMA), Juliet Kinchin (MoMA) and Miranda Wallace (NGV), which together consider 130 years of radical artistic innovation. MoMA at NGV sheds light on art, design and architecture from the late nineteenth century to the present day, as well as on the many forces that have shaped the art world throughout this period.
Super Group by Richard Prince
While Richard Prince (born 1949) is most often discussed for his strategies as an appropriation artist—from the Marlboro cowboys in the 1980s to the Instagram portraits today—it is his own work as a painter that stands at the center of his approach: starting with paintings of jokes and cartoons, following up with, among other things, nurses and cowboys taken from the covers of dime novels, and freewheeling riffs on Picasso and de Kooning.
For his extensive new series Super Group, Prince uses objects loaded with meaning: the inner sleeves of vinyl records, which he collages on canvas and then overpaints with band names, abstract washes and funny figures. Richard Prince: Super Group presents 51 works in this new series, engaging with the question of how we define ourselves by our choices of objects, images and music.
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future by Tracey Bashkoff
When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than 1,000 paintings and works on paper that she had kept largely private during her lifetime. Believing the world was not yet ready for her art, she stipulated that it should remain unseen for another 20 years. But only in recent decades has the public had a chance to reckon with af Klint’s radically abstract painting practice, one which predates the work of Vasily Kandinsky and other artists widely considered trailblazers of modernist abstraction. Her boldly colourful works, many of them large-scale, reflect an ambitious, spiritually informed attempt to chart an invisible, totalising world order through a synthesis of natural and geometric forms, textual elements and esoteric symbolism.
Fashion Drive by Christoph Becker
In the modern age of fast fashion, this book provides an overview of clothing in art and subversive moments in fashion through painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and film. Fashion Drive looks at how artists have reacted to such creations as slashed clothing, codpieces, the crinoline and the dinner jacket. Fashion is often considered an expression of longing and an instrument for mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and this book takes an interesting peak into this often amusing world.
Enjoy!
Why must artists be poor?
Why do we accept that artists struggle to make a living? Hadi Eldebek is working to create a society where artists are valued through an online platform that matches artists with grants and funding opportunities so that they can focus on their craft instead of their side hustle.
Melbourne Life
At a lunch meeting one day in the late 1970s, some time before entre and main, architect Peter Mills and ad man Bruce Harvey started drawing their fellow diners, straight onto the paper tablecloths. That first lunch at the Waiters’ Club led to others, and soon they were embarked on an odyssey of lunches at Melbourne cafes with similarly sketch-friendly tablecloths. And here they all are…in a stunning book.
Click for more details here.
#tuesdaychat
The world of art is so varied and let’s be honest, some styles are a little tricker to get your head around! Fear not, we’ll be sharing our fav art books on Thursday to help you identify which approach appeals to you. We’re lovers of modern art, how about you?
Monday Inspo
It’s the start of another week and we’re dipping into the world of art. On the blog this week, we’ll share the best books celebrating art. But first up, here’s a little giggle to get you through your Monday.
