With the rise of digital technology as a design tool and its acceptance as simply part of the tool chest for today's design studios, there has been a re-evaluation and return to exploring pre-digital typography. Design studios no longer flaunt their digital hardware, in fact quite the opposite. This attitudinal change toward digital technology has coincided with a growing fascination and re-evaluation of those pre-digital skills and processes that had been considered in recent years to be irrelevant. Mapping the rise of digital technology and examining the infinite possibilities it offers and the profound cultural and technical influence it has had in all aspects of visual communication. This text also focuses on our current post-digital age, in which the technology itself has become sufficiently common-place for us to fully recognize what it excels at and what it does less well. Reinventing Print focuses on those skills and processes which have been re-appropriated and irreverently liberated by a new generation of typographers, designers, and artists, raised with digital technology in their pockets and forever at their fingertips. In this post-digital age, traditional typographic craft is new, different and therefore exciting, potent and culturally subversive.

Reinventing Licentiousness navigates an overlooked history of representation during the transition from the Qing Empire to the Chinese Republic—a time when older, hierarchical notions of licentiousness were overlaid by a new, pornographic regime. Y. Yvon Wang draws on previously untapped archives—ranging from police archives and surveys to ephemeral texts and pictures—to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and desire that both reflects and shapes historical processes. On the one hand, since the late imperial period, pornography has democratized pleasure in China and opened up new possibilities of imagining desire. On the other, ongoing controversies over its definition and control show how the regulatory ideas of premodern cultural politics and the popular products of early modern cultural markets have contoured the globalized world. Reinventing Licentiousness emphasizes the material factors, particularly at the grassroots level of consumption and trade, that governed "proper" sexual desire and led to ideological shifts around the definition of pornography. By linking the past to the present and beyond, Wang's social and intellectual history showcases circulated pornographic material as a motor for cultural change. The result is an astonishing foray into what historicizing pornography can mean for our understandings of desire, legitimacy, capitalism, and culture.

Re-Inventing the Book: Challenges from the Past for the Publishing Industry chronicles the significant changes that have taken place in the publishing industry in the past few decades and how they have altered the publishing value chain and the structure of the industry itself. The book examines and discusses how most publishing values, aims, and strategies have been common since the Renaissance. It aims to provide a methodological framework, not only for the understanding, explanation, and interpretation of the current situation, but also for the development of new strategies. The book features an overview of the publishing industry as it appears today, showing innovative methods and trends, highlighting new opportunities created by information technologies, and identifying challenges. Values discussed include globalization, convergence, access to information, disintermediation, discoverability, innovation, reader engagement, co-creation, and aesthetics in publishing. Describes common values and features in the publishing industry since the Renaissance/invention of printing Proposes a methodological framework that helps users understand current publishing issues and trends Focuses on reader engagement and participation Proposes and discusses the publishing chain, not only as a value chain, but also as an information chain Considers the aesthetics of publishing, not only for the printed book, but also for digital material

From its beginnings, photography has been shaped by the desire to understand and explore the essence of the medium. Light, Paper, Process features the work of seven artists—Alison Rossiter, Marco Breuer, James Welling, Lisa Oppenheim, Chris McCaw, John Chiara, and Matthew Brandt—who investigate the possibilities of analog photography by finding innovative, surprising, and sometimes controversial ways to push light-sensitive photographic papers and chemical processing beyond their limits. A panoply of practices emerges in the work of these artists. Some customize cameras with special lenses or produce images on paper without a camera or film. Others load paper, rather than film, in the camera or create contact-printing with sources of light other than the enlarger, while still others use expired photographic papers and extraneous materials, such as dust and sweat, selected to match the particular subject of the photograph. All of the artists share a willingness to embrace accident and chance. Trial and error contribute to an understanding of the materials and their potential, as do the attitudes of underlying curiosity and inventive interrogation. The act of making each image is like a performance, with only the photographer present. The results are stunning. This lavish publication accompanies an eponymous exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from April 14 to September 6, 2015.

A delightful look at the history of the information wheel

Native to the Kalahari Desert, Hoodia gordonii is a succulent plant known by generations of Indigenous San peoples to have a variety of uses: to reduce hunger, increase energy, and ease breastfeeding. In the global North, it is known as a natural appetite suppressant, a former star of the booming diet industry. In Reinventing Hoodia, Laura Foster explores how the plant was reinvented through patent ownership, pharmaceutical research, the self-determination efforts of Indigenous San peoples, contractual benefit sharing, commercial development as an herbal supplement, and bioprospecting legislation. Using a feminist decolonial technoscience approach, Foster argues that although patent law is inherently racialized, gendered, and Western, it offered opportunities for Indigenous San peoples, South African scientists, and Hoodia growers to make unequal claims for belonging within the shifting politics of South Africa. This radical interdisciplinary and intersectional account of the multiple materialities of Hoodia illuminates the co-constituted connections between law, science, and the marketplace, while demonstrating how these domains value certain forms of knowledge and matter differently.

Featuring a global showcase of 100 of the craft’s most exciting and influential practitioners, Low-Tech Print is an exploration of hand-made printmaking techniques and how they are used in contemporary design and illustration. It examines the huge recent resurgence in the popularity of printmaking, with chapters on screenprinting, letterpress, relief printing and other printing methods. The book shows how practitioners develop a love affair with these hand-made techniques and use them to create beautiful contemporary designs, explaining the process behind each technique and its historical context. ‘In focus’ sections profile practitioners such as the ‘Lambe Lambe’ hand-made letterpress printers of São Paulo’s Grafica Fidalga studio and cult printing techniques such as Gocco (Japan) and Chicha (Peru). Low-Tech Print is a must-have for all design, illustration, craft and printmaking enthusiasts.