Text Art, Poetry & Literature

Still is a sequence of poems written by poet laureate Simon Armaitage in response to panoramic photographs of battlefields associated with the Battle of the Somme. Chosen from archives at Imperial War Museum, these astonishingly clear photographic images were ahead of their time. Still was published...

John Berger (1926-2017) was an art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to the BBC series of the same name, is hugely culturally influential and continues to be widely read today. Compelling and...

Rare & Collectible Lapwing & Fox is a series of conversations in the form of letters and small books sent between two friends, writer and critic John Berger and artist and film-maker John Christie.  As well as the close scrutiny of works by Giacometti,...

Ashes & Architecture pairs poems with images as a journey through creation, collapse, and reconstruction. Each poem mirrors a track from Inder's album of the same name, while each artwork reimagines its emotional architecture. Together they construct a dialogue between sound, word, and image -...

This newly published book pairs Marisa Culatto's 12 Untitled photographs with 12 haiku by Yuzo Ono written in response to the images. These works were originally commissioned by MOCA London as part of their 2020 WE (Web Exhibitions) program. Marisa Culatto Marisa Culatto spent a whole...

In 1982, East Germany's fearsome secret police - convinced that writers were embedding subversive messages in their work - decided to train their own writers, weaponising poetry in the struggle against the class enemy. The Stasi Poetry Circle reveals how a group of soldiers and border guards gathered for...

What has happened to fiction in the age of platform capitalism? Since it was first launched in 1994, Amazon has changed the world of literature. The "Everything Store" has not just transformed how we buy books; it has affected what we buy, and even...

Does the success of warts-and-all celebrity biographies betray our prurient, voyeuristic times? Or is a fascination with the lives and struggles of others a facet of human nature, reflected in literary tastes through the ages? Modern biographies, Andrew Brown argues, inspire by framing life...

A pictorial essay by the great art critic, novelist and long-time smoker, John Berger, and Turkish writer and illustrator Selçuk Demirel. This charming, illustrated work reflects on the cultural implications of smoking, and suggests, through a series of brilliantly inventive illustrations, that society's attitude...

From the court of Louis XIV to Tik Tok's Avant Apocalypse, psychoanalyst and clothes lover Anouchka Grose takes an unexpected look at fashion to unpick the hold it has on so many of us. But rather than insisting we give up on the thrills...

A love letter to old Hollywood, this is a book for anyone interested in film. Todd McEwen grew up in Southern California, so his head was hopelessly messed with by the movies. As the son of relatively 'normal people', Todd had no in with...

In his first collection of essays, Peter Guralnick dives deep into question at the heart of his body of work: What is the source of creativity? Spanning his decades-long career as America's foremost music scholar, this book brings us into the minds of the...

In August of 1970, 28-year-old Lou Reed quit the Velvet Underground, moved home to Long Island, New York, and embarked on a fascinating alternate creative path: poetry. Spending months in relative isolation, the musician refashioned himself, publicly vowing to never again play rock and...

Rare & Collectible Jim Dine (b.1935) has been making art for over six decades, producing paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, performance works, stage and book designs, poetry and music. This Goofy Life of Constant Mourning is a long visual poem - the result of years of...

This work, printed as a newspaper, lists every second of the day according to international standard notation ISO 8601. This is one day, any day and every day. The notations have been arranged to fit within a standard broadsheet newspaper format, a publication associated...

Digital Indigo Print on GF Smith Colorplan, Fedrigoni Splendorgel and Fedrigoni Sirio  This book plays with the language used in questionnaires that require respondents to indicate their level of agreement or disagreement by selecting a response from a symmetric scale to capture the intensity...

First published over 150 years ago, John Ruskin's only children's story, The King of the Golden River, is still relevant today, with its message about life, greed and the environment. Readers of any age will respond to young Gluck's adventures as he succeeds against...

Colin Sackett is an artist and publisher who since the 1980s has investigated the book as a primary form for the reading, notation and classification of landscape by text and image. Englshpublshing came from the notion of remaking, in the same order, everything that...

Wirelesslessness is an annotated examination of the structural and functional constraints of direction and meaning. The seven texts: Momentum, Stack, Volume, Fraction, Continuum, Radio, Reverb; occupy a page-structure where the autonomy of the single word or page, and the ephemeral nature of reading, demonstrate...

Discover Richard Burton's farewell note to Elizabeth Taylor, Helen Keller's letter to The New York Symphony Orchestra about 'hearing' their concert through her fingers, the final missives from a doomed Japan Airlines flight in 1985, David Bowie's response to his first piece of fan...