Eyepopping and seductive… the Brits do it again!

Last week, we featured London’s Laurence King Press, turning out sharp & useful books for graphic artists, architects, fashion designers, photographers — but Nobrow showcases young artists taking their art school training into creative territory like no other.  Nobrow’s signature printing and bookmaking techniques sprang from the necessity of low finance and a hunger to spawn a booklist and put young talent on display– and so their books, varied as they may be, are unmistakable and — as far as we’ve seen — always intriguing.

Take No Man’s Land by French artist/writer Blexbolex — a split-second scramble through a jungle of confusion, fear, desperation and self-delusion in the brain of “a hard-boiled detective (who) finds himself on the wrong end of a death sentence” as it refuses to yield to the inevitability of the bullet ripping through his cranium.  You’ll have to wait a couple of days to get it, as three copies arrive on Tuesday… but you can in the meanwhile pick up his pamphlet sized Abecedaria and Dogcrime, which presage and set the psychic stage for the full-length (200 pages, hardbound) No Man’s Land. Pamphlets with dustwrappers in a three spot color printing technique that sets a visual standard you’ll get lost in.

But Nobrow is far more than Blexbolex… check out Ada by Gertrude Stein as interpreted by Berlin-based artist Atak; Jon McNaught’s Dockwood; and Ugo Gattoni’s Bicycle — just a few of the strikingly original books this press has been producing since its inception in late 2009.