A good book, a true book, is a brave one. It comes alone. Such is Materialising Colour, a brilliant new title, from Phaidon, presenting the color sense, the color history and philosophy of Giulio Ridolfo. Ridolfo is perhaps the most acclaimed design colourist in the world - it is not every table that might even know what that could mean. He is a metaphysic to color, an anthropologist to color, an explorer and historian and botanist to color. He sees colour as music, as a garden, as a story, as a context, as a moment in time, as a food and physic. He is the doctor that you call when you must have the colour be perfect. The famous Danish textile company Kvadrat has taken his work to the heart of their production. To Ridolfo, colour is the breath of the land, of the seasons and the soil and the water and the light - and that is the breadth of this book. Traveling from Friuli, his home in Northern Italy, to quarries and the Scandinavian sea, to Denmark and India, he hunts, almost as a forager, for the intimate conditions of colour. It is the long way, the complicated, long way to the soul of things. This is such a book.

Silver or black - designed by Jasper Morrison, brushed aluminum,sturdy, full, direct. This pen you can feel the design, a quiet beauty. $79, in a fancy box

This is the Lamy standard bearer, the 2000 series. Brushed stainless steel, eraser and cleaning needle, $70, in a fancy box. (Also available in fountain pen and rollerball editions)

A Sketchpad, spiral bound, 120 pp, 90 gsm, A4, loose and ready to sketch

20 historical paper clips

Sold as a box of twelve, we have carried this pencil for many years - the brilliant color, soft graphite, attached black eraser. You might give one away, but only to someone you like. $24 box

Spiral bound, 150 sheets, 120gsm, 9"x12". A new series for Fabriano, bringing a heft of pages to draw from. $40 pad

60 sheets detachable, 140 lb 300gsm, 9"x12", perfect weighted, textured surface, 25% cotton, acid free. $40 pad

From Barcelona, the first issue of Archives, that has sold out several times now - the wonderful work of Flores & Prats, color fotos of ten projects, incl the Morning Chapel at the Biennale, and the Sala Beckett.

2020, 264pp, 170 color, exh catalog MFA Boston and THe Getty Museum LA, Christine Kondoleon, cloth, $65 “Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments.” For all of his life, Twombly had collected ancient fragments, beginning with his first trip to Rome in 1952. He would buy Etruscan things in flea markets - he would volunteer and work at Roman excavation projects, to gather parts and pieces. His apartments and studios were staged with antiquities, seasoned in their way with the sense and color of Mediterranean culture. This is a catalog to align a bit, the Twombly modernism, with the history that he needed so near, the soil that he loved. He lived his life on ancient Roman ground, and painted upon it.

2020, two volumes, boxed, 224 pp, 40 color, 32 duo tone, $55. “I began using chess and the hunting of wild mushrooms as a balance to my involvement with chance.” Cage began his mushrooming in Carmel, in 1934, when he was a starving artist and local dishwasher. His hunting lasted his entire career, across the country, in dozen of States. The first volume gathers, like foraging, assorted writings and photographs by Cage involving mushrooms. The second volume is a reproduction of a 1972 portfolio, The Mushroom Book, that Cage did with Lois long and botanist Alexander Smith. Superb color illustrations of mushrooms, folded within excerpts and notes. “Much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom”

publ Milan January 1,1961, Bruno Alfieri, slipcase, Eng/Fr/Ital "The crisis in architecture in America seems to coincide with the critical recovery of the pre-eminence of its artistic and inventive values.” A remarkable study of early 60s American design, from a European view. It includes Rudolph and Kahn, Yamasaki and Stone, George Nelson and Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies and Gropius and Breuer, chairs and schools and housing, Saarinen and Neutra. The issue concludes with The Young’s, a kind of madmen review of the new architects, all men. Blake, Lundy, Franzen. And then Kappe, Goff and Soleri, from the far West. Scully, McCoy, Portoghesi all contribute - it is to look at, in black and white, architecture in America.

USA, 188 pp French texted An amazing issue of review, from the best magazine of the time, of America, 1967. There are 100 pages of photos of architecture - Salk Institute, University of Colorado, houses of Sellers, Venturi, Jacobsen, Esherick. And then a full panorama of MLTW, from Moore’s own house, to conclude at Sea Ranch, with remarkable photos from Morley Baer. It is America, the sure and bold, wooded and unfurled. There are thirty or so gatefolds of the fotos, as if it could not be otherwise expressed or contained. The second part of the issue presents Le Pop-Art, of Lichtenstein, Segal, Oldenburg, Warhol, Wesselman, Rosenquist. Ending with the question - what can it be like to be an American.

Louis I. Kahn, Makers of contemporary Architecture, 1962, Vincent Scully, 128 pp cloth, first edition. Scully knows Kahn perfectly, so this is a perfect view of the first half of Kahn’s work. The Salk is only in drawings at the time, The Richards Medical is being honored. It is the start of the 60s - as Richard Wurman, in Kahn’s office would say, Lou Kahn owned the 60s.