A few recent books of interest for the collector's bookshelf: "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury," edited by Elizabeth Armstrong (Prestel).
Anyone interested in mid-century modern will want to own "Birth of the Cool," a beautifully designed and illustrated exploration of culture and taste in California in the 1950s.
The book takes its name from the cool jazz idiom originated by Miles Davis et al and taken up with special enthusiasm on the West Coast. But that's just the springboard for the contents of the book. The primary thrust is the emergence of cool among California visual artists, from painters like John McLaughlin to architect/designers like Charles and Ray Eames, to photographers like Julius Shulman and William Claxton, to animators such as John Hubley. Chet Baker is here and Mr. Magoo and even Barbie in a celebration of a moment when European modernism and American hipsterism collided on the Hollywood Freeway and fell in love.
"The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film, c. 1900" by Lynda Nead (Yale University Press).
There have been several exhibitions and catalogs lately that explore the interplay between photography and early motion pictures, and more traditional forms of art such as painting. In this book, British author Lynda Nead investigates the impact that film, still in its infancy, had on other art forms at the turn of the 20th century, for example forcing painters and graphic artists to think about representing motion in new ways.
She demonstrates too how developments in celestial photography opened up our understanding of the universe by giving astronomers a new tool with almost limitless potential and by paradoxically reducing the unthinkable immensity of galaxies to images a few inches across that could be reproduced in publications aimed at the general public. This is a serious tome - not for the casual film fan.
"Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series," edited by Ingrid Mossinger and Kerstin Drechsel (Prestel).
Who knew? While we were hanging out listening to our Dylan records and CDs, old Bob was busy with his sketch pad and art supplies, and now we have a coffee table book displaying 170 of the colorful and expressive results. These are painted variations of drawings he did over a period of eight months between 1989 and 1992, which were published in 1994 but never publicly shown. For the current publication and German exhibition, the drawings-portraits and interiors, landscapes and figure studies - were digitally transferred to art paper and painted by the balladeer in watercolor and gouache. Several art historians, including the granddaughter of Pablo Picasso, offer their considered opinions.
"Classic '80s Home Video Games" by Robert P. Wicker and Jason W. Brassard (Collector Books).
Who doesn't have a vintage video or game or two - one of the original Ataris or Colecos - stashed away somewhere and wondered if they could now be considered valuable antiques? Well, this colorfully illustrated identification and value guide is here to tell you what is and what isn't - and for most part, the news isn't too encouraging.
There are a number of exceptions, such as the fairly obscure "Off Your Rocker," valued at $150, "Crazy Climber" - complete, with metallic silver label ($550), a complete, boxed "Quadrun" ($850), "Great Escape," "Wall-Defender" and "Z-Tack" all for the Atari system and all valued at $450; Version I of "Boing" ($375), Selchow & Righter's word game "Glib" ($375), Adult Software's "X-Man-Universal Gamex" ($350) and some rare mail-order premiums, such as "Chase the Chuck Wagon," offered by the Ralston-Purina dog food company But as far as the hundreds of other more well-remembered games - the "Mario Bros.," "Ms. Pac-Mans" and "Donkey Kongs" - think more in the range of $5 to $20. The authors do provide loads of useful background information as well.
Linda Rosenkrantz has edited Auction magazine and authored 18 books, including "Cool Names for Babies" and "The Baby Name Bible" (St. Martin's Press; www.babynamebible.com). She cannot answer letters personally.
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