THIS IS NOT AN ATLAS
by NICK FOSTER and WARREN HUTCHINSON
This Is Not an Atlas focuses on the strange preoccupation we all seem to have with “worlds”—Bargain World, Camera World, Movie World, even Walt Disney World. What’s the fascination with business owners naming their shop Something World? Are there any criteria that must be met for a business to deserve this distinction? The book doesn’t actually answer this question, but it does provide a visual case that this phenomenon exists.

As explained in the introduction, which also serves as the book’s cover, the idea came to Foster and Hutchinson on a bus ride through suburban London. They noticed three very different stores with world in the titles: “Although the three shops sold entirely different products, they had all been named in a similar way. The business names were incredibly uninventive ... Bed World, Cartridge World, and Exhaust World.” From this observation sprung a project that lasted seven years and traveled through 14 countries. “At times it bordered on the obsessive,” the authors explain, “not only for us, but also for our friends and families. Once you become aware of this uninspired naming convention, you just can’t help but notice them, from the West End of London to a tiny fishing village in Malaysia, ‘worlds’ are everywhere.”

As noted previously, Foster and Hutchinson invited friends and family to join in on the fun, and the “game” had several rules for the players: The business must be called “Something World” and not any other variation; the players could not use a phonebook or directory to find a “World” (“If you look a ‘World’ up and go and get it, it takes the fun away,” note the authors); if you don’t have a camera when you first chance upon a “World,” you can’t return to photograph it; and lastly, the photos had to be in landscape format, with no family or friends as the subjects—random passersby, however, were OK.

The result of this project is a collection that remarks on the random and obnoxious naming system many business owners adhere to. Claiming your store is a “world” is a pretty lofty ambition, even if you are the world’s most widely known cartoonist. And if you catch the bug and shops with this name start popping up in your daily life, the authors have included a blank page at the back of the collection so that you may start your own. $19.95, hardcover (casebound), 160 pages, Mark Batty Publisher

ANCIENT MARKS
by CHRIS RAINIER

You’ve seen many tattoos and tribal markings in National Geographic, even on the street, and have probably wondered what they mean or how they came about. Now there’s help in deciphering this strange language in Ancient Marks, by the widely known documentary photographer Chris Rainier. “Here was a compelling art form that was as riveting in its beauty as it was disturbing in the pain and suffering endured by those whose bodies it altered,” Rainier writes of his experiences photographing people around the world, which led to this book. “Beyond the marks were their meanings, the motives for undergoing significant pain to transform skin into striking canvases of color, form, and content. Cultural identity, societal order, ancestral heritage, spiritual connection—the more I saw, the more the meanings of the forms spoke to me.”

Ancient Marks contains brilliant black-andwhite plates of all types of body adornments from henna tattoos to scarification, with landscapes as the only commentary on this art form—only in his epilogue and list of plates at the end of the book does Rainier offer up his knowledge of the varied markings, giving the reader a chance to speculate. “Millennia after the dawn of man’s awakening,” Rainier concludes, “we continue to etch the geography of our bodies as we have always marked the landscape of the earth. In creating these sacred forms, we forge a critical element of human existence—our identity. … Man has marked the land with sacred gestures since the beginning. So, too, has he marked his body—to charge his skin with powers and spiritual meaning that it grounds him to the earth, his primordial origin.” $85, hardcover, 204 pages, Media 27, Inc.

ART OF MODERN ROCK: THE POSTER EXPLOSION
by PAUL GRUSHKIN and DENNIS KING

“Q: Why the poster explosion? A: Two things. One, the internet. It enables an international community to form. Two, the destructive force of the CD. CDs destroyed album cover art. Half the fun of going to the record store was looking at the cover art. No more,” noted poster artist Uncle Charlie says in the beginning of Art of Modern Rock. So true, and thankfully we still have artists out there willing to fill this void with their inventive, if not completely crazy, poster art.

From far out to funked up, this hefty book includes examples of the world’s .nest rock concert posters of the past 15 years. A sequel to Paul Grushkin’s Art of Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk, which is considered by many to be the bible of pre-1985 rock poster art, Art of Modern Rock focuses on the fusion of conventional printing methods with new digital technology advancements. And because of the death of the album in the mid-1980s and the consequential demise of LP cover art, rock poster art has not only .ourished, it’s expanded exponentially to become the premier source of visual expression in the world of rock.

“The maker of the modern-day rock poster knows the power of suggestion,” notes Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips in the book’s foreword. “What does the rock poster suggest? What does it want us to believe? The rock poster tells us there is a thing happening at a certain place in time. It gives this event meaning even before the event has happened. This is the power of the poster. Both before the event and beyond the experience it will turn out to be, the poster says, ‘The event will be like this, it will feel like this, it really will have this atmosphere, this philosophy, this identity, and a certain type of person will be there.’ And then the event happens and is over. Yet the poster, still living on, still having its purpose, is interpreted to say, ‘The event was like this, it felt like this.’” Coyne discusses later the important role posters played in the advent of his own rock band: “Maybe it was the different dimensions of the lettering or maybe it was the colors they used or maybe it was some strange unintentional miracle in the design of these .yers, but I believed in them and wanted to leap into them and infuse myself with them. In some respects the birth of what would end up being the Flaming Lips was conceived in those moments. Not by the posters alone, but seeing firsthand how one could create oneself.”

Authors Grushkin and King, both rock historians and experts on rock art, have divided the book into chapters based loosely on production and/or artistic techniques: The Silkscreen Movement, The Screen-Printed Rock Poster, Taking It to the Streets (the birth of the telephone-pole rock-band flyers, the punk genre’s answer to the overly smooth disco and stadium rock tour), Old School (tried-and-true, American, handcrafted workmanship), The Devil Made Me Do It (posters featuring devilish characters), Temporary Insanity (artist as madman), Power Tools (masters of the digital age), Industrial Strength (posters as commemorative items for large venues that don’t need advertising to sell tickets), Explosionist Theory (using minimalist graphic design to communicate), No Boundaries (rock poster art worldwide), and New Realities (pushing the boundaries of rock poster art). With more than 1,800 reproductions, this book is a must-have for anyone interested in the world of rock, illustration, or graphic design.

Explains Grushkin on the poster’s prominence in society: “Not even the ubiquitous medium of MTV, which has at best been only mildly curious about any new music until it is .rmly embraced by the mainstream, could exert enough in.uence to diminish the popularity of the rock poster. That’s why, in the poster medium, rock bands and musicians aren’t represented by one standard media-made portrait that’s seen over and over. Instead, the identity promoted by the rock poster is made up of thousands of singular impressions. This seems to me the essence of rock and roll. The music remains transcendent because each fan has his or her personal interpretation.” $60, hardcover, 492 pages, Chronicle Books