Here are some books on street art available from Raincoast that you might be interested in:

Guerilla Art

Sebastian Peiter and Goetz Werner

Guerilla Art features interviews with graffiti-inspired street art pioneers Futura Ramm:ell:zee and Blek le Rat in which they discuss their own work, how street art was born out of the days of subway train graffiti spraypainting and tagging and how the new movement of street artists are doing things differently.

Rackgaki

Ryo Sanada and Suridh Hassan

Rackgaki covers the graffiti scene in Japan and showcases the creativity within this new and relatively unexplored form of contemporary Japanese art and illustrates the work of the major artists or writers working in Japan today.

Stickerbomb and Stickerbomb 2

Studio Rarekwai

Stickers are an essential part of the street art movement. Inexpensive and easy to produce, they act as a kind of informal business card for some graffiti writers, and a quick and effective promotional tool for many artists and illustrators.

The Stickerbomb books are collectable, fully-peelable sticker books featuring illustration, graffiti, and graphics. Both are filled with amazing collections of over 250 specially commissioned stickers by artists, illustrators, and graffiti writers from around the world.

Street Sketchbook: Inside the Journals of International Street and Graffiti Artists

Tristan Manco

From the leading authority on the graffiti and street art scenes, Street Sketchbook provides an exclusive look at the private sketchbooks of 65 international street artists, including Canadian artists TurfOne (Montreal), Royal (Ottawa), Luke Ramsey (Victoria) and Labrona (Ottawa).

Subway Art: 25th Anniversary Edition

Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant

The 25th Anniversary Edition of the seminal Subway Art is a large-scale, deluxe format hardcover, with 70 additional photographs and a fresh introduction and afterword. A book for collectors and the curious, it illustrates the passion, creativity, and resourcefulness of unlikely kids inventing an art form destined to spread worldwide and spawn the present-day street art movement.

(Calligraffiti video via Thinking Type on Twitter)

Filling everyday activities with poetry and awe, their designs address both pragmatic needs and the psychological yearning for refuge and contemplation, centering and escape, joy and comfort. 

Here's a sneak preview of the work featured in the book:

Set out in an A-Z style and written in a  conversational way, it provides useful advice on the stuff that designers face in real life every single day.

The book was recently reviewed by Liam Crean (a real life designer at Embloc!) at the awesome FormFiftyFive design blog:

It wasn’t love at first sight. I mean I liked the way it was presented, the mono-spaced type, alphabetically organised topics and the super-simple colour-plan, but I was expecting a more diversely populated reference manual—more like a design dictionary. Look up ‘invoices’, get a list of best practices. Look-up ‘bleed’, find some hard and fast rules. Look-up ‘book cover design’, get a winning formula. But this is not a how-to guide as such, nor is it conventional in the way it’s written. However those are the exact reasons why I’m really starting to like it. It’s a conversational directory of experiences, ideas and discussion themes. Instead of telling you what’s best and what isn’t, it draws on the vast and enviable experience of the author to describe those daily situations you find yourself in and offers another point of view... It’s a bit like consulting your favourite tutor, a helpful creative director, or the artworker at your preferred printer.

And, here's a neat video of author Adrian Shaughnessy (who also wrote the super useful How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul) talking about why he wrote the book:

How do you draw time? What does history look like?

Cartographies of Time by Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg is a fascinating history of visual representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Beautifully illustrated, the book features a wide variety of timelines and maps from medieval manuscripts and contemporary websites.

Here are a few of the incredible images from the book:

There is a short review of Cartographies of Time at Book Forum.

In James Sturm's new hisotrical graphic novel, Market Day, Mendleman, a proud artisan, has his life turned upside when he can no longer sell his expensive quality rugs.

Dave Howard has reviewed the book for the Books@Torontoist website:

Sturm’s style is economic and simple... But what is drawn is very expressive. [It] has evolved to use body language and objects to convey the characters’ feelings: Mendleman’s hat, the way it sits way high up at the back of his crown; the folds of a leather boot on a merchant’s table; the different caricature drawings of minor characters, with pushed-in noses, long faces, round eyes as dots, all very simple, but evocative. The economic use of colour stands out. There is a fantastical atmosphere – despite the starkness of the drawing style, there is a sense of the unreal.

James Sturm will be attending TCAF May 8th and 9th at the Toronto Reference Library.

Read a preview of Market Day here (PDF).

Here are some photos from the makers of the movie

Can't get enough? Here's the one from SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AND SEA MONSTERS

Founded in 2004 to celebrate the finest in English-language comics and graphic novels in Canada, The Doug Wright Awards are now some of the most important awards for comics in North America.

Selecting work released in 2009, this year’s nominees were chosen by a panel that included comics historian and author Jeet Heer, filmmaker Jerry Ciccoritti, cartoonist Chester Brown, Walrus comics blogger Sean Rogers, and writer and Sequential.ca publisher Bryan Munn.

The 2010 finalists represent "the finest, most thought-provoking work produced by Canada’s vibrant comics community." 

The Doug Wright Awards finalists for Best Book are:

• Back + Forth by Marta Chudolinska (The Porcupine's Quill)
• George Sprott: (1894-1975) by Seth (Drawn and Quarterly)
• Hot Potatoe by Marc Bell (Drawn and Quarterly)
• Kaspar by Diane Obomsawin (Drawn and Quarterly)
• Red: A Haida Manga by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (Douglas and McIntyre)

The finalists for Best Emerging Talent are:

• Adam Bourret, I’m Crazy
• Michael DeForge, Lose #1 (Koyama Press), Cold Heat Special #7 (Picturebox)
• Pascal Girard, Nicolas (Drawn and Quarterly)
• John Martz It's Snowing Outside. We Should Go For a Walk.
• Sully, The Hipless Boy (Conundrum Press)

The finalists for the 2010 Pigskin Peters Award (for unconventional, “nominally-narrative” comics) are:

• Bébête Simon Bossé (L’Oie de Cravan)
• Dirty Dishes by Amy Lockhart (Drawn and Quarterly)
• Hot Potatoe by Marc Bell (Drawn and Quarterly)
• Never Learn Anything From History by Kate Beaton
• The Collected Doug Wright Volume One by Doug Wright (Drawn and Quarterly)

The winners will be chosen by a jury that has in the past included cartoonists, writers, actors, directors, musicians and politicians. The 2010 Doug Wright Awards ceremony will take place on Sat. May 8, at 7 pm at the Toronto Reference Library as part of the Toronto Comics Arts Festival.

(And while I am obviously cheering for all things D+Q, YAY! KATE BEATON!)

So for St. Patrick's Day this year, why not ditch the green beer, and celebrate in true Irish style?

The Country Cooking of Ireland is a beautiful big cookbook, which will be sure to inspire you to put away the green food colouring for good. And OK, you're still allowed to wear your "Kiss me, I'm Irish!" apron while cooking. :)

FineCooking.com has excerpted a few recipes for you to sample:

• Irish Stew
• Colcannon
• Dingle Pies (pictured here)

There's a recipe for Corned Beef with Parsley Sauce on the Chronicle Books blog.

The Chicago Tribute also posted a recipe for something I'd never even heard of (or thought possible!): leek and oatmeal soup.

According to the author, Colman Andrews, the recipe he included in The Country Cooking of Ireland is "a modern version of the famous soup, also called brotchan (or brochan or brothchan) roy, or ‘the king's soup,' that is said to have been the favorite dish of Ireland's celebrated sixth-century spiritual and literary icon, St. Columkille. It is … quite possibly the oldest traditional Irish dish for which it is possible to reconstruct a recipe." Sounds intriguing!

What was your favourite thing your grandma baked for you as a child? Does your dad make brilliant BBQ? Does your best friend make a mean guacamole?

Moleskine and Foodista.com want you to share your favourite recipes passed down from friends and family. In the spirit of sharing, they're giving away a set of Moleskine notebooks, including the new Moleskine Passions Recipe Journal.

For all the details and to enter the contest, visit Foodista.com

P.S. Also be sure to check out the other titles in the Moleskine Passions series - and watch the fun video trailers for each book!

Other books in the Quirk Classic series:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

Android Karenina

Press kit to come... (and book to be released June)

And if you are a media contact who for some reason didn't get a a copy, please cotact me and I'll send one off. Please note I just sent these March 10.

~Danielle

The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon, has posted the first review of Daniel Clowes new book Wilson:

Wilson is a sharp strike right to the sweet spot of the brain where great comics are enjoyed; it's a late, great start to a 2010 that felt slightly quiet after the rush to publication by book like Footnotes In Gaza in the waning days of 2009. Like all the great steps forward in Clowes' long career, it mixes a fairly straight-forward reading experience with a skein of smartly-applied formal techniques that tease at what we're seeing, growing in clarity and force until they ultimately transform the book into a powerful meditation on a subject at which the reader of the first few pages could only guess.

Wilson is released in May and Daniel Clowes will be at the Toronto Comics Art Festival May 8th and 9th to launch the book.

Other D+Q artists at TCAF include Sonja Ahlers (The Selves), Marc Bell (Hot Potatoe), Chester Brown (Louis Riel), Keith Jones (Catland Empire),  Amy Lockhart (Dirty Dishes), Seth (George Sprott), and James Sturm (Market Day).

The creative team behind Pop Sandbox's Kenk: A Graphic Portrait will also be in attendance.

UPDATE!

Wilson also received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly last week:

Clowes (Ghost World) takes his particular brand of misanthropic misery to new levels of brilliance in this book, a series of one-page gags that show the divorced and lonely main character repeatedly attempting to engage with life, and then falling back into his hell of pessimism...Clowes offers another beautifully drawn slice of piercing social commentary.

Chronicle Books has received two finalist nominations for the International Association of Cookbook Professionals’ 2010 Cookbook Awards.  The IACP is like the Golden Globe Awards in the food publishing world (with the James Beard Foundation Awards being akin to the Academy Awards).  Out of hundreds of books that are submitted, it’s a huge acknowledgement from the food professionals on the nominating board to select just three cookbook titles per category as finalists. 

The two fabulous book up for this prestigious award are:

BAKING: SAVORY OR SWEET category:
ALL CAKES CONSIDERED

INTERNATIONAL category:
MASTERING THE ART OF CHINESE COOKING

Here's a great video on the book

As mentioned yesterday Daniel Clowes, author of the comic book series Eightball, the screenwriter of Ghost World and Art School Confidential, and illustrator for the New Yorker (!!!), is going to be at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival (TCAF) in May.

His new book, Wilson, (available in May from Drawn + Quarterly) is the darkly comic story of an opinionated middle-aged loner who loves his dog and quite possibly no one else. In an ongoing quest to find human connection, he badgers friend and stranger alike into a series of one-sided conversations, punctuating his own discursions with a brutal, self-negating sense of humour.

You can read a 5-page (PDF) preview of Wilson here.

It turns out that Pop Sandbox's first book, Kenk: A Graphic Portrait, is proving to be somewhat controversial. Perhaps this is unsurprising; Igor Kenk is, after all, a convicted criminal. But, as author Richard Poplak recently explained on his blog, the book is not about giving Kenk a forum:

I’m not in the business of providing my subjects with a soapbox. This is an in depth, very serious journalistic profile — much like the sort you see in expensive magazines — except with lots and lots and lots of pictures. I do not pay subjects for interviews — ever, under any circumstances...

Very simply, we are defined by characters on the extreme edges of our society. As much as I’d like to write about the upstanding citizens of the world — and the older the get, I happily realize these are in the vast majority — they can play a little dull. Kenk: A Graphic Portrait is as much about what it means to live on the fringes of a tightly regulated society as it is about bike theft.

As Richard says, Kenk: A Graphic Portrait is a journalistic portrait of an outsized figure and a changing neighbourhood and a city he operated in. It's constructed from 30 hours of documentary film footage (taken over the year leading up to Kenk's arrest), contemporary photographs and archival shots, and is a new take on the kind of feature length journalism that you used to see in newspapers and magazines. Kenk the man maybe a crook, but Kenk the book provides the all-important context.

After seeing a career counselor she came up with the plan of collaging, since she needed an income to help with the bills. While flipping through some old magazines at a garage sale she came up with the idea to cut and paste old magazine with captions of the the women were 'really saying', then glueing them onto wooden buttons. Then the Anne Taintor legacy begins. Anne has been producing such wonderful gift products for over 25 years; it's really inspiring to see her come up with such fun ideas!

Medicated and motivated.

Who says children need to eat every day?

Someone was going to have to set a bad example.

Now be a dear and fetch mommy her flask.

 

The phrases might ring a bell for any woman who has ever trolled her favourite gift shop for some private shopping therapy. They float atop Anne Taintor’s kitschy collaged accessories, the ones with beautiful women beaming dementedly from vintage
advertisements...Christened “the patron saint of female frustration,” Taintor has been churning out accessories for 25 years. The massive line of products – everything from postcards, luggage tags and pill boxes to mouse pads, air fresheners and flasks – now sells in 25 countries and earns Anne Taintor Inc. annual revenues into the seven figures.

 

This is my fave!! So totally true for me. I love it!

She has so many other quirky products which can be found at gift and book stores.

Here's a couple more items you will find:

2010 Wall Calendar: Anne Taintor

2011 Engagement Calendar: Anne Taintor (June)

The brilliant comics blog The Daily Cross Hatch has just posted part four of its amazing interview with James Sturm, founder of The Center for Cartoon Studies and author of James Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems and the forthcoming Market Day:

The graphic novel, it’s a long, arduous task... Market Day is clearly a book that wouldn’t exist if I didn’t do it. It’s much more of a personal statement for me. It feels more personal and I feel like I have much more ownership over it. I feel a little more vulnerable putting it out there, because this is you, this is your work, this is as good as you can draw, as good as you can write.

James will be appearing at TCAF in May with Daniel Clowes the author of Wilson, Chester Brown the author of Louis Riel, Seth the author of George Sprott, the team behind Kenk: A Graphic Portrait and a host of others.

Read Daily Cross Hatch's interview with James:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

Woo-hoo! 14 Gold medals and a sweet win against the US in OT! Congratulations to all our athletes: You did us proud!

Yay Canada! Yay Vancouver!

Thanks again to everyone to contributed to our 5 Things Vancouver posts during the Winter Olympics. They were all fantastic and it was great to get tips from people who really know and love the city. 

Just in case you missed any of the entries here's a complete list of the 30+ contributors:

• Anne Lee, Indigo Online
• Annemarie Tempelman-Kluit + Madeleine, YoYo Mama
• Bob Kronbauer, Vancouver is Awesome
• Bronwyn Logan, Blush Magazine
• Chris Wood, author
• Crystal Allen, Raincoast
• Craig Riggs, Turner-Riggs Workspace
• Danielle Johnson, Raincoast
• Darren Barefoot, Capulet Communications
• Erick Villagomez, Re:Place Magazine
• James Sherrett, AdHack
• Jamie Broadhurst, Raincoast
• Janice Beley, Arsenal Pulp Press
• Jesse Finkelstein, Douglas & McIntyre
• Jill Amery, Urban Mommies
• John Lekich, author
• Kate Trgovac, LintBucket Media
• kc dyer, author
• Kelly McInnon, Vancouver KidsBooks
• Kim Werker, crafter, writer, photographer, blogger
• Maria + Stefani, Dandelion KIDS
• Monica Lippingwell, reader, and uber-twitterer
• Monique Trottier, Boxcar Marketing
• Nick Bouton, Protagonize
• Peter Darbyshire, author
• Robin McConnell, Inkstuds
• Sean Cranbury, Books on the Radio
• Selina Rajani, Vancouver Opera
• Siobhan Long, Raincoast
• Spilt Milk Moms
  
• Thomas Wong, The Sunday Best

Thanks all, and if anyone still needs some advice on where to go in Vancouver, please check out Lonely Planet's Vancouver Encounter and City Guide, and Chronicle Books City Walks: Vancouver.

And don't forget to write down all your new discoveries in a Moleskine Vancouver City Notebook!

Photograph courtesy of 5 Things Vancouver contributor KP Werker

Kelly enjoys travelling (especially on the seat of a bicycle), building Lego with her nephews, sports and eating (although in the email accompanying her answers, she suggests that the last two are linked!).

"I love my job running Kidsbooks, along with my business partner Phyllis Simon, because it is so much fun getting everyone excited books and reading," she says.  Amen to that!

What’s your favourite book about Vancouver?
City of Glass... Doug Coupland…he nailed it.

Where’s your favourite spot to eat on a budget?
Go Fish but the line-ups are terrible on a sunny day.

What is the best thing to do with kids in Vancouver?
The Aquarium...hands down!

What’s your favourite bar?
Rodney’s….the crabcakes are westcoast comfort food.

What’s your favourite free thing to do in Vancouver?
Waterfront…Walk, run, bike...
 

Thanks Kelly!

Maria Livingstone and Stefanie Missler are the co-owners Dandelion KIDS, a modern kids shop that stocks hip baby clothes and stylish duds for boys and girls. The store was born over 5 years ago over a casual coffee when they discovered a shared childhood dream of wanting to have a shop. The doors have been open since Winter 2004 on Commercial Drive in Vancouver and, in April 2009, Maria and Stefanie opened their second shop Port Moody.

What is the single best thing about living in Vancouver?
Maria: The moist air, your skin never gets dry
Stefanie: All the great parks and beaches

What’s the one place everyone should visit?
Stefanie: Museum of Anthropology
Maria: dandelion KIDS! [SHAMELESS! ~Dan ;-) ]

What is the best thing to do with kids in Vancouver?
Super Sundays at the Vancouver Art Gallery

What’s your favourite bar?
The Narrow Lounge

Why should people live in Vancouver and not just visit?
Maria: It would be nice to have that city buzz, and that only happens when there’s lots of people.
Stefanie: To bring even more flair, sophistication and diversity to this great place.

Bonus:

What’s the most common misconception visitors have about Vancouver?
That it rains too much (it’s spring in February-let it rain!!) and “we’re a no-fun city”

Thanks Maria + Stefanie!