I just pre-ordered a copy of Library, which is being crowdfunded by publisher and art collector Glen Bray. This 800-page book reprints covers of "thousands of books, magazines, and pamphlets printed over the last century. Salvaged and archived by Glenn Bray, the contents of Library celebrate a vast array of high and low art – from a first-edition Hemingway to off-brand adult magazines of the 1960s, with everything sacred and profane in-between."
I've been fortunate enough to see Glen's collection a couple of times. He has tons of Szulkalski's work, EC comics original art, Carl Barks pages, underground comics original art., and much more. In 2014 Fantagraphics published a book called The Blighted Eye with a small sample of his collection.
Here's what Maus author Art Spiegelman said about Library:
"Glenn Bray — America's great collector of the 20th century's Ephemeral Arts — has spent his life (and most of his discretionary income) putting together this Grand Library of Babble. It's a Library where you've gotta judge all the books by their covers, cuz it's ALL eyeball kicks — an obsessively curated junkyard of book covers, pamphlets and other oddball paper detritus that escaped the recycling bin.
Bray takes you on a totally unguided tour of the inside of his head, and it's a wild ride down Maim Street! You'll travel from the perverse underbelly of High Culture to the heights of the Lowbrow-Degenerate-Sleaze Arts. And if you survive the end of our civilization, this giant brick of a book offers all the clues you'll need to figure out what made it worthwhile and why it crumbled."
If you like this kind of thing, don't miss out on the crowdfund campaign.
Here are a few pages from Library:
