The box set edition of Something in nothing is a custom, screen-printed 3-ring binder containing the complete series of five issues, featuring the photography of Adam Swift Lucas along with found images and text excerpts. Each issue was published bi-annually from 2019 to 2021. The booklets are spaces to archive ideas, sketches, and studies. The content is mostly observations and impressions of the everyday that attempt to spotlight the something in nothing.

While the issues and binder were produced under the NOS Press imprint, by the time the complete set was ready to be launched — on the occasion of the 2022 Detroit Art Book Fair —  NOS Press had become Specific Ideas. The publication, published in a liited edition of 50 copies, won The Society for Typographic Arts 100 award in 2022.

gc16 by Mads Wildgaard (Bold Decisions) i used throughout.

The winner of the 2018 Slope Book Prize, Our Pornography and other disaster songs was chosen by jury member Ocean Vuong, who writes:

Our Pornography is a crystalline, dusky and charmingly stubborn American text whose power rests in its desire to complicate linear time into a constellation of epicenters. This myriad-voiced long poem embraces the detritus and paraphernalia of its moment, and ushers it all, like a river carrying the grit and sparkle, truth and secrets of its undertows, toward a future not yet accounted for because the present still promises discovery. And what discoveries here in these staccato and ruptured lines that, despite everything, find a way to offer the world anew.

The design relies on overlapping all-caps ITC Galliard for headlines, and the same typeface for the text.

Catalogue, front cover using partially tight set Helvetica.

Two catalogues and a pamphlet for The Chinese Exhibition – The Exhibition of Archaeological Finds of The People’s Republic of China, a travelling exhibition that was shown at various galleries and museums throughout the United States in 1974 – 75.

From A Compendium to Museum Studies (Ed. Sharon Macdonald):

Communist China, after its 1949 takeover, signaled a new diplomacy with America to its threatening neighbors, beginning with tours of lightning-speed games of “ping-pong” in 1971. A quarter-century after World War II ended and the Cold War began, President Richard Nixon’s visit famously “opened” American diplomatic relations with China in 1972.

In 1974, China sent the first of many exhibitions of national treasures to solidify its new diplomacy with America and to encourage positive public opinion during the Cold War matches. The Chinese Exhibition: The Exhibition of Archaeological Finds of the People’s Republic of China traveled to the East Coast in December 1974, to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; then to middle America, at the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; and ended its tour, in August 1975, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, on the West Coast of California (personal communication, Barry Till 2004).

A rare archaeological find, which the press called the “Jade Lady,” excited much admiration. Her mortuary suit from the second century bc was made of more than two thousand pieces of jade. It was sewn with gold thread by Western Han Dynasty master craftsmen for Princess Dou Wan. It was widely published and illustrated, an indication of the “Jade Lady’s” success in capturing the public’s imagination across America.

Catalogue interior, using Optima throughout.

A second catalogue shows miniature horsemen, as found in a grave. Typography (Latin part) uses Trump Mediaeval.

Pamphlet, front cover, using the same photograph (and type) as the catalogue, but with additional information.

Pamphlet, interior, using Optima, just like the catalogue.