Looking to indulge your geek tendencies? Let us introduce you to the season’s must-have coffee table book, a little double-shot of nostalgia known as Lego Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary, which hit stores this week.
Acting as a comprehensive catalog of all LEGO Star Wars sets (and spin-offs) from the last decade, the book breaks down the facts and features behind every single ship and minifigure ever released. We recently caught up with the book’s author, Simon Beecroft, who was kind enough to speak to us about the various features. For a look inside the pages of the Visual Dictionary, watch the video below…
Never let it be said that Brooklyn author John Wray doesn’t know the value of a good book. “Girls like it when they see you bring a novel out of your messenger bag,” he says. And if only one book makes its way to your bag this year, Wray’s heady footrace of a novel, Lowboy, deserves the look (click here to buy it on Amazon).
Before we included Lowboy in our 2009 Style and Design package, we hopped on the phone with the half-Austrian, half-American writer as he was working on his next book at an European writer’s colony. He spoke to us about his nomadic childhood, his writing process and why being an author won’t get you more girls. Read the Q&A below…
It’s hard to make a commercial for a book that’s actually entertaining (okay, this one is pretty awesome), but we should have known Louis Vuitton would figure out a way. To breathe life into their new book Louis Vuitton: Art, Fashion and Architecture, the French masters hired artist Camille Scherrer (who created this amazing “Magic Book” video last year) to animate an ad. The book, which is a retrospective of the brand’s history of artist/designer/photographer/architect collaborations, drops in September and features the likes of Takashi Murakami, Miss.Tic, Stephen Sprouse, Annie Leibovitz, Marc Jacobs, and over 70 others. [SlamxHype via High Snobiety]
Tune in to Complex.com every morning at 8 AM for your daily “Wake N’ Watch” video.
People can assume what they want, but there’s more to us at Complex than kicks, women and Twitter fights. It takes brains to be this fly, and we’re well-read like whoa, despite how this entire sentence is written. Not only do we have impeccable taste in literature, but we’re passionately devoted to making you a better person (or at least helping you pretend to be one), so we rounded up our favorite reads in recent memory in hopes that we can convince you to take a few books with you to the beach, on vacation, or wherever else you’re spending the last month of summer.
All are paperback, which means easy transport, and all have the official Complex co-sign. $150 for a pair of shoes that’ll be out in three months vs. $15 for a book that just might change your life? Get your paper up!
FUN FACT: Vans has been holding it down for over 40 years and started making special customizaions in the early days of the company (when iD was still something that Freud talked about). Shoppers could bring their favorite fabric by the factory, and the Van Dorens would put together a pair of shoes for them that week. You can design your own Vans through the company site today.
WHY COMPLEX IS CO-SIGNING IT: While the kids are going nuts because Vans is O.G. skate, affordable, and there are about a billion colorways to choose from, this book breaks down a history of the company. History is boring, right? Author/curator Doug Palladini pre-empts your study hall whining by giving you the tales from the super heroes’ mouths. Chapters with skaters Tony Alva, Steve Caballero and John Cardiel; surfer Joel Tudor; music legends’ tales from the Warped Tour; and a photo essay on Frenchman Dimitri Coste’s crazy collection each show a facet of the company that you wouldn’t know otherwise. When it comes to reading we need a lot of pictures to look at, and this does the trick with 208 pages that include photographs by champions of the lens CR Stecyk, R. Grant Brittain, Art Brewer, and Trevor Graves.
Although we consider ourselves fairly well rounded individuals, we're always looking for ways to better ourselves. At first when this new book What A Man Should Know, Vol. 1'J.Crew's first foray into a men's guide'fell into our laps, we were worried that it was a long-winded outline on how to correctly crease our khakis. But it turns out the book offers principals about the basic knowledge a man should have, in fashion and everywhere else.
The WASPY shop tapped author Max Blagg to lay out 50 fundamentals for dudes to follow if they want to “raise cocktail conversation to a whole new level.” You'll be able to get the handy step-up guide at J.Crew's new Tribeca Men’s Shop or online for $20. If you buy one at the Men’s Shop, you'll also get your choice of a limited edition necktie. See the ties and our 5 favorite tips from the book below…
Okay, so for some reason a company has bought the stage rights to American Psycho and is planning to turn it into an ’80s musical. And we’ll be frank: we don’t understand this AT ALL.
Sure, some movies have worked on Broadway–Legally Blond, Shrek, The Producers–but those are all broad comedies. We’re talking about a movie that was adapted from an actual, no-pictures, BOOK. Two severed thumbs down, American Psycho: The Musical. And in case any of you would-be impresarios are considering adapting other books-that-became-movies into musicals, take our advice and don’t do it. Especially not these five book/movies…
It's been 15 years since Japanese street fashion label A Bathing Ape chin-checked cool guys who thought they'd seen and worn everything. The brand still generates unmatched blog buzz with everything from key chains to varsity jackets, but now the first official chronicle of the company is coming to bookstores.
Aptly titled A Bathing Ape, the 368-page book takes a look back at Bape's design history, through pictures of products like G-Shocks, all over printed hoodies, and sneakers, along with the celebrities like Kanye West, Pharrell and T.I who wear them. The book will be distributed by Rizzoli International Publications and will retail for $60.00 in November. Check some preview pages after the jump.
The Fourth of July weekend is supposed to be about cookouts, fireworks, and sharking, but if you’ve had enough outdoor fun and want to post up at the crib with a good book, you could do worse than Jeremy Fish’s latest, Once Upon A Time…
The SF-based artist/skate mogul/Aesop Rock pal has compiled some of his favorite drawings, photographs, and paintings in a leather-bound tome that retails for $50. Highlights include a foreword by the aforementioned Def Juxer and a section devoted to photos of people who’ve gotten tatted up with Fish’s work. Pick it up at Upper Playground stores or online and check a few pages from the book after the jump.
As longtime comic book heads, we’ve always had a place in our heart for a well-rendered female form, whether She-Hulk, Jean Grey, or Witchblade (big up to our dude Mike Choi!). Of course, mainstream comic art has its limits'limits that have long been crossed in erotic art from the Kama Sutra to R. Crumb and Playboy’s Little Annie Fanny. And now those transgressions have been lovingly cataloged by Tim Pilcher, whose Erotic Comics: A Graphic History from Tijuana Bibles to Underground Comix comes out this month.
More than just a visual history, the book reads like a labor of love; images from pre-Depression nudie comics to modern-day Mexican sensacionales are presented along with insightful essays that make the book perfectly suitable for a coffee-table centerpiece (albeit an intesnsely NSFW one). After the jump, check out some relatively tame images from inside the book.
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