TWO BOOKS: THEN AND NOW

The Last Magazine (Paperback)
by David Renard (Author), Steven Heller (Contributor), Jan Van Mol (Contributor), Rankin (Contributor), Robert Sacks (Contributor) (from Universe/Rizzoli)



Print is dying, so our current crop means we're watching the Last Mags -- a supernova, if this were music it would be Sleater-Kinney and Blonde Redheads and Arcade Fire and Reigning Sound and Beck's The Information slamming inside the heads of today's most insistent graphic designers.

Free Press: Underground and Alternative Publications, 1965-1975 by Jean-Francois Bizot and Barry Miles


These were the "glory days," and this brief snatch is mostly tragic, makes you ache for the piles of newspaper disintigrating in a thousand anonymous attics around the world, trickling out slowly on ebay but with little or no noise, some of it more newsworthy today than it was even back then, with graphics to make the first book's authors blush. Wolfe complained about where the great unwritten novel of the sixties was -- of course, that fiction happened AS rock'n'roll... but the soundtrack was the alternative paper, an irresistible onslaught of freedom and protest and dissent that shames today's anti-war movement. T-shirt slogan: "I never thought I'd miss Nixon..."

ALSO:

Word that both Rolling Stone and Playboy will be published in DVD format by the same folks who digitized the New Yorker. Long Live Print.