Photobooks, zines, reviewed, etc...

Covers - Ofer Wolberger

I really like the latest book in The Photographic Project series. It’s a beautiful publication - staple bound, dark brown cover with silver lettering and gorgeous, thick cream paper throughout.

The book contains a series of photographs - or perhaps scans? - of book covers. A full catalogue of the covers included in the books follows the plates, and mine came with a large poster sized print of one of the covers featured in the book.

This book is particularly appropriate in the age of the digital hoarder. With bit torrent came a rise in people hoarding masses of digital content - far too much for any individual to consume in a lifetime. Enjoying consuming the media they collect is not the point - the objective is to simply amass as much as possible, trading with like-minded individuals online to fulfil a self-imposed, but, due to the never ending flow of music and film releases, ultimately futile objective.

Whilst it’s easy to mock and dismiss such a seemingly pointless hobby, is it really that different from the age in which books were collected, not to be read, but to be displayed? The age in which books could either be bought quite cheaply in a format designed for reading, or more expensively - leather bound - for display is not that far behind us, and the passion for collecting photography books that I share with you follows quite naturally from this.

Perhaps further investigation will reveal what Ofer is trying to tell us or share with us. The covers are arranged in alphabetical order by book title and I’ve already noticed that not every letter of the alphabet is accounted for. I’m interested to see what else I’m going to discover.

Maybe it’s not as complicated as that, but to me this is the joy of self-publishing. The artist here is accountable to no-one. If he has chosen to put out a book of book covers for no reason other than a personal desire to do so we should accept it as such and revel in the joy of living in an age in which this can be done.

Projects like this deserve our support, and I’m pleased to be able to recommend this particular series of books once again. Now I’m going to get back to flicking through it, savouring the old book covers.