Books published by The Ice Plant

A charming collection of vintage photographs of readers lost in thoughtWhere do our minds go when we read books, magazines and letters? Do we seek an escape, a portal to another world? A secret, a truth, a pleasant distraction? Voyagers, edited by Melissa Catanese (author of Dive Dark Dream Slow), consists almost entirely of anonymous black-and-white snapshots of people in various postures of reading in living rooms, on beds, at the beach, eating breakfast.We can't see what these readers are thinking, but Catanese occasionally breaks the hypnotic typological rhythm to reveal a new photographic element--a pyramid, a starry night, sunlight blindingly glowing through a window--giving us brief glimpses of the readers' potential narrative journeys.A wordless book with the size and feel of a vintage paperback found at a flea market, Voyagers reminds us of the power and intimacy of our relationship to reading devices, and evokes an exotic nostalgia for our recent predigital culture.As with Catanese's prior books (Dive Dark Dream Slow [2012], Hells Hollow, Fallen Monarch [2016]), the images were judiciously selected from the collection of Peter J. Cohen, a celebrated trove of more than 20,000 vernacular photographs from the early to mid-20th century. Gathered from flea markets, dealers and eBay, these images have been acquired, exhibited and included in a range of major museum publications.

Clothbound in delicate pinstripes with a red ribbon bookmark, the diary is designed so that it can be started on any day of the year, even on a leap year!"THIS book belongs to," reads the frontispiece of the little red diary, followed by the words "Florence Wolfson," scrawled in faded black ink. Inside the worn leather cover, in brief, breathless dispatches written on gold-edged pages, the journal recorded five years of the life and times of a smart and headstrong New York teenager, a girl who loved Balzac, Central Park and male and female lovers with equal abandon...The diary was a gift for her fourteenth birthday, on August 11, 1929, and she wrote a few lines faithfully, every day, until she turned 19. Then, like so many relics of time past, it was forgotten... for more than half a century inside an old steamer trunk, plastered with vintage travel stickers that evoke the glamorous golden age of ocean liner voyages. The trunk in turn languished in the basement of 98 Riverside Drive... until October 2003, when the management decided it was time to clear out the storage area." --The New York Times Brought to you by The Ice Plant in collaboration with Shopsin's General Store, this charming, pint-sized and extremely well-designed diary, inspired by a 2006 story in The New York Times, lets you keep track of your life with just a few lines every day for five years. Each page of the diary is devoted to one day of the year and subdivided into five sections-so that as time goes by, past entries can be read as new ones are written. Clothbound in delicate, nubby pinstripes with a red ribbon bookmark, it is designed so that it can be started on any day of the year, even on a leap year. In the back of the diary are pages to record books read and places traveled. An ideal gift for sophisticated nostalgics, new parents, dreamers, schemers and plain old lovers of good design.