LA ANONIMA

So my friend Tano has started a publishing house called LA ANONIMA. It's put out some really incredible books. I've been writing blurbs and descriptions for some of the titles. Here are a few:

ENDLESS SUM by Cayetano Ferrer


Endless Sum is a book about land and sun. Recounting a year’s worth of travels and art, Cayetano Ferrer presents a series of ideas, tales, and images in a constellation of themes featuring desert architecture, sun worshipping, atomic power, the coincidence of symbols and names, the boundlessness of the space, the predictable rupture of glaciers and casinos alike. Endless Sum is about walking with enough attention to discover resonances between unalike things. Scale is left out in favor of meaning. Glaciers become suns, invisible babies crowd-surf and like the reflection of sky on ocean, the land we occupy is the light we chase.


CASTAWAYS CAST AWAY published Anonymously

This book has only one word in it: castaways, whole and shattered. It appears on top of the falling building that is this book’s protagonist. Each turn of the page progresses into a suspended moment of the Castaways’ destruction. Backed by a dusty setting sun, chainlink fence, palmtrees, and their craned-neck metal cousins, the casino recedes to rubble, projectiles and pluming smoke. By stretching time Castaways becomes a synchedote for Las Vegas and its cultures. This dilation allows for a closer look emphasizing the spectacular, the garish and even the unintentionally beautiful in monumental demolition and waste.






EXPLOSION/IMPLOSION by Cayetano Ferrer



Explosion/Implosion is a set of compelling images detailing a forgotten history of the twin birth of the Las Vegas strip and atomic power. Girls in mushroom cloud bathing suits welcome readers to a desert oasis of irradiated pools, Stardust and Sands. Moving from postcards sent from this once-frontier to frames of their mirrored demise, Explosion/Implosion chronicles what for fifty years made the Nevada desert so bright.




A FIELD GUIDE TO CASINO CARPETS by David G. Schwartz



A Field Guide to Casino Carpets is fantasy text forged from real sources. It is an invitation to inhabit an architecture in a new way, a mode of engaging what is built to be background noise. It functions as a key for interpreting the minor details as the tell of a chaotic consumer culture and its bombastic aesthetics. A text on the moral necessity of ornament and how to make a useful pattern, William Morris’ “Some Hints on Pattern Making,” introduces dozens of Dr. David G. Schwartz's photos of carpets in Las Vegas casinos. Juxtaposing these fragments of living and dead casino décor with Morris’s 1884 text forces the us to consider the use and fact of “barbarous waste” evident in even the floors.



You should buy them all, or at least peruse the flash previews available on the website. These are intricate and dense works which function more to unravel than to explain.