The Art of Book Covers

Earlier this week, when I spoke with Kevin about Fuck Yeah Menswear, the notion of books as permanent works came up quite a few times and I was reminded of this video that I found a few weeks back while I was working on my post about Andy Spade.  In the video Spade gives a tour of his home in the Hamptons, which includes pieces from an art installation that he did about a decade ago titled, “An Argument for Looking at Books Instead of Reading Them.”  For the series Spade interpreted book covers as art, framing the covers and displaying them at Colette in Paris.  The internet, for better or for worse does have this sort of throwaway quality to it, which I suppose is why Spade’s work struck a chord in me, as it highlighted the physicality of books themselves.  In a way books are the opposition to the transitory nature of the internet, and as I write this from the library of my parent’s house, I like Spade, am drawn to the aesthetics of books.  The layout, the graphics, the very look of every page, and particularly the cover, is considered with much greater weight than what we’re used to dealing with on the internet.  Spade’s project worked as a different way of reading books that brought all these elements to the foreground   So, I decided to do my own take on his idea, with a collection of book covers from my parent’s library, spanning across genres and decades, as a reinterpretation of the book’s that have surrounded me for most of my life.