Books published by Blast Books,U.S.

In the summer of 1971, Michael Lesy and a friend found most of the snapshots in Snapshots 1971–77 in a dumpster behind a gigantic photo-processing plant in San Francisco. The photos were in the trash because the machines that printed them made them so fast — duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates — that the people on the processing line couldn¿t stop them.Week after week, Lesy took home thousands of snapshots from the dumpster. He studied them as if they were archeological evidence. By the end of the summer, he¿d formed his own collection of images of American life.He took that collection with him when he returned to Wisconsin to finish his graduate work in American history. His understanding of the snapshots from California as reflections of the troubled state of American society influenced the PhD research he was doing in Wisconsin — research that became the American classic Wisconsin Death Trip (1973).Over the next six years, Lesy added to his collection of California snapshots with hundreds of snapshots that had been left unclaimed and then discarded by a photo processor in Cleveland. While Lesy looked through other people¿s lives in pictures, the world was coming apart at the seams. The Vietnam War, the murderous rampage of the Manson Family, and the Attica State Prison uprising filled news headlines — and the general public carried on their lives, with hope and abandon and everything in between: chaos, cruelty, familial bonds and breaks, materialism, lawlessness, unwitting humor.Lesy¿s collection of snapshots from the 1970s is a time capsule of things familiar and alien. Now, fifty years later, everything and nothing about our lives has changed.In Wisconsin Death Trip Lesy pulled back the curtain of ¿the good old days¿ to reveal the stark reality of American life from 1890 to 1910. The anonymous images in Snapshots 1971–77 serve as prophesies of present-day broken dreams, toils, and tribulations.

No matter who we are, old or young, fashion conscious or style indifferent, we are all aware of hair. To a nineteenth-century amateur naturalist named Peter A. Browne, hair was the single physical attribute that could unravel the mystery of human evolution.Thirty years before Charles Darwin revolutionized understanding of the descent of man, Browne collected hair from as wide a variety of humans and animals as possible in his quest to account for the differences and similarities between groups of humans. The result of his diligent, all-consuming specimen-collecting passion is a fastidious, artfully assembled twelve-volume archive of mammalian diversity kept in the archives of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia since the mid-1800s.By the time of his death in 1860, Browne had assembled samples from innumerable wild and domestic animals, as well as the largest known study collection of human hair hair from people from all parts of the globe and all walks of life: artists, scientists, abolitionist ministers, doctors, writers, politicians, financiers, military leaders, and even prisoners, sideshow performers, and lunatics. His crowning achievement was a gathering of hair from thirteen of the first fourteen presidents of the United States. The pages of his albums are distinctly idiosyncratic, captivating, and powerfully evocative of a vanished world.Browne's albums narrowly escaped destruction in the 1970s and remain a unique and fascinating manifestation of the avid collecting instinct in nineteenth-century scientific endeavors to explain the mysteries of the natural world.

A sumptuous monograph presenting for the first time the extraordinarily imaginative and delightful work of visionary artist Renaldo Kuhler (American, 1931¿2013).The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler catapults a thrilling new discovery into the pantheon of the most accomplished visionary¿or ¿outsider¿¿artists. Like Henry Darger, Howard Finster, George Widener, and Adolf Wölfli, Renaldo Kuhler was an exceptionally gifted artist and possessed an imagination all his own. By day Kuhler was a self-taught scientific illustrator under the employ of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, for which he created thousands of wonderfully precise illustrations of myriad natural history specimens¿reptiles, fish, turtles, and the like. Renaldo Kuhler was an unusual individual, as was instantly clear from his appearance alone. Six-foot-four, with a white beard and ponytail, he wore a custom-tailored uniform consisting of a sleeveless Kelly green suit jacket with wide, black, notched lapels, epaulets, and brass buttons, a matching suit vest, yellow flannel dress shirt, a fleur-de-lis Boy Scout neckerchief, and tight-fitting knee-length shorts (¿cotton-blend lederhosen¿). However, unbeknownst even to family, friends, and coworkers, Kuhler was more than an eccentric, gifted scientific illustrator. He was a prolific visionary artist, who, as a teenager in the late 1940s, invented an imaginary country he named Rocaterraniäafter Rockland County, New York, where he had lived as a child. For the next sixty years, in secret, he illustrated the nation¿s entire history and the prominent characters of its populace.Rocaterrania is a fantastical world, a richly illustrated amalgam of Kuhler¿s personal cultural and aesthetic fascinations. Situated just north of the Adirondacks in New York, at the CanadäUnited States border, Rocaterrania is a sovereign nation of immigrants, from Scandinavia to Eastern Europe. Kuhler invented a complete world populated by a royal family and a succession of leaders resembling historical Russian figures, Women reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich and Janet Leigh play important roles as do bearded men of a seeming Hasidic Jewish heritage, men bearing curious physical similarities to American presidents, and neutants¿individuals neither male nor female. Amid forests, mountains, lakes, and rivers, Kuhler¿s imaginary country is made up of provinces and cities filled with distinctive Rocaterranian architecture and well-planned railroad and metro systems. Its government is unique, and it has its own religion, Ojallism, and its own evolving language and alphabet. With an organized labor service, a prison system (modeled after a New Jersey state penitentiary), a university system, a Rocaterranian Olympics, and an independent movie industry, Rocaterrania is a nation bustling with dozens of characters and their intrigues.Initially meant to be an escape, Kuhler's Rocaterrania became a secret lifelong obsession, an intricately coded, metaphorical account through Rocaterraniäs tumultuous history, which dovetailed with Kuhler¿s own struggles for independence and freedom.Renaldo was the son of the German-born industrial designer Otto Kuhler, renowned for his Art Deco¿era streamlined trains; his Belgian mother had little patience for her son, who was ostracized and bullied throughout his life for being ¿different.¿ The Kuhler family moved in 1948 from Rockland County, New York, to a remote cattle ranch in the Colorado Rockies¿an unbearably isolated environment for the teenaged Renaldo. Retreating to his sketchbooks, journals, and watercolors to invent his imaginary nation of Rocaterrania, young Kuhler wrote, ¿The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive.¿The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler is filled with more than 400 illustrations in pencil, ink, acrylic, oil, gouache, watercolor, colored pencils, and markers, demonstrating Kuhler¿s phenomenal draftsmanship and wide range of style¿from delicately shaded graphite works to comic-book ink drawings. Complementing Kuhler¿s impressive artistry is his gift for analogical thinking, which flowered in his appropriation and reimagining of personalities, places, and events from world history to form a cohesive and fully imagined world. After decades of secrecy, Kuhler eventually first shared his work and the story of his imaginary country with filmmaker Brett Ingram, whom he met by chance in the mid-1990s. In 2009 Ingram released Rocaterrania, a feature-length documentary with prized footage of Kuhler at home and at work, and talking about his creation. With The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler Ingram has written the complete story of Rocaterrania as relayed to him over time by Kuhler, resulting in a fascinating, highly entertaining first and major book about this rare, newly discovered, full-blown visionary outsider artist.

The imaginations of many Cold War scientists were fed by science fiction literature, and companies often promoted their future capabilities with fantastical, colorful visions in ads. This collection presents nearly 200 entertaining, mind-boggling pieces of space-age eye candy.