Status | Active |
---|---|
Founded | 1989 |
Founders | Laura Lindgren and Ken Swezey |
Country of origin | United States |
Headquarters location | New York, New York |
Distribution | Publishers Group West |
Publication types | Non-fiction books |
Nonfiction topics | Culture, social history, medical history, landscape, language, photography |
Official website | blastbooks |
Blast Books is a New York-based book publisher [1] whose catalog consists of non-fiction books which focus on cultural and historical subjects, often of an obscure or unusual nature. Many of their publications include archival illustrations and photography.
Blast has published titles by Michael Lesy, Thomas Bernhard, Gretchen Worden, Teller, John Strausbaugh, John Harley Warner, [2] , Drew Friedman, Suehiro Maruo, Hideshi Hino, James Edmonson, [3] Ken Smith, Arne Svenson, Steve Young, and others.
Blast has published two large-format photographic books about the Mütter Museum. The first, Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (2002), contains images of the museum's exhibits shot by contemporary fine art photographers, including William Wegman, Joel-Peter Witkin, Shelby Lee Adams, and Rosamond Purcell. The second, Mütter Museum Historic Medical Photographs (2007), focuses on the museum's archive of rare historic photographs, most of which were previously unpublished.
Hidden Treasure (2012) was published in conjunction with the National Library of Medicine, the world's largest medical library. The book features artifacts from the library's private collection, dating from the 13th through the 20th century, including color-illustrated medical books; rare manuscripts; pamphlets and ephemera; “magic lantern” slides; toys; stereograph cards; scrapbooks; film stills; posters; and more. [4] [5] Edmonson and Warner's Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine: 1880-1930 (2009) catalogued over 100 previously unpublished archival photographs of students at prominent American medical schools posing alongside dissected cadavers in their anatomy classes. [6]
Blast has produced three books in conjunction with the Center for Land Use Interpretation: Up River: Man-Made Sites of Interest on the Hudson from the Battery to Troy, by Matthew Coolidge (2008), [7] Around the Bay: Man-Made Sites of Interest in the San Francisco Bay Region (2013), and Los Alamos Rolodex: Doing Business with the National Lab, 1967-1978 (2016). [8] [9]
In 2000 Blast published "When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours!": Joe Teller – A Portrait by His Kid, by Teller (of Penn & Teller) and his father Joe. [10]
Blast's 2013 book, Everything's Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals , by former David Letterman comedy writer Steve Young and cartoonist Sport Murphy, offered the first chronicle of a neglected genre of music history: the theatrical productions staged by corporations to promote new products to their sales force. [11] In 2016, the book rights were acquired by Amblin Entertainment, who announced development of a film production starring Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig. [12]
Thomas Bernhard: 3 Days, published in 2016, chronicles a three-day park bench monologue by the Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet filmed by Ferry Radax for a 1970 documentary film about Bernhard. [13]
In 2017, Blast published The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler , [14] the first collection of previously uncirculated illustrations by a prolific and idiosyncratic artist who created a vast body of visionary work without public recognition during his lifetime (1931–2013). [15] [16] (Renaldo was the son of famous railroad designer Otto Kuhler.)
The following year, Blast published Robert McCracken Peck's Specimens of Hair: The Curious Collection of Peter A. Browne. The book is based on "an oddball collection of animal and human hair assembled by an obsessive 19th-century naturalist [which] was at one time deemed worthless by the Academy of Natural Sciences, despite including samples from 13 of the first 14 U.S. presidents." [17]
The company was established in 1989 by Laura Lindgren and Ken Swezey. Lindgren is a professional book designer who edits and designs Blast's titles.
Gray's Anatomy is a reference book of human anatomy written by Henry Gray, illustrated by Henry Vandyke Carter, and first published in London in 1858. It has gone through multiple revised editions and the current edition, the 42nd, remains a standard reference, often considered "the doctors' bible".
Sugita Genpaku was a Japanese physician and scholar known for his translation of Kaitai Shinsho and a founder of Rangaku and Ranpō in Japan. He was one of the first Japanese scholars in Edo to study the Dutch language and is credited with being one of the first Japanese physicians to study Western medical teachings in Japan.
The Visible Human Project is an effort to create a detailed data set of cross-sectional photographs of the human body, in order to facilitate anatomy visualization applications. It is used as a tool for the progression of medical findings, in which these findings link anatomy to its audiences. A male and a female cadaver were cut into thin slices, which were then photographed and digitized. The project is run by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) under the direction of Michael J. Ackerman. Planning began in 1986; the data set of the male was completed in November 1994 and the one of the female in November 1995. The project can be viewed today at the NLM in Bethesda, Maryland. There are currently efforts to repeat this project with higher resolution images but only with parts of the body instead of a cadaver.
Ruth Bernhard was a German-born American photographer.
Polish plait, less commonly known in English as plica or trichoma, is a formation of hair. This term can refer to either a hairstyle or a medical condition. It also relates to the system of beliefs in European folklore, and healing practices in traditional medicine in medieval Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that supported, matted hair as an amulet, or as a catchment for illness leaving the body.
The Mütter Museum is a medical museum located in the Center City area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It contains a collection of anatomical and pathological specimens, wax models, and antique medical equipment. The museum is part of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The original purpose of the collection, donated by Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter in 1858, was for biomedical research and education.
Christian Rudolph Wilhelm Wiedemann was a German physician, historian, naturalist and entomologist. He is best known for his studies of world Diptera, but he also studied Hymenoptera and Coleoptera, although far less expertly.
The National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM) is a museum in Silver Spring, Maryland, near Washington, DC. The museum was founded by U.S. Army Surgeon General William A. Hammond as the Army Medical Museum (AMM) in 1862; it became the NMHM in 1989 and relocated to its present site at the Army's Forest Glen Annex in 2011. An element of the Defense Health Agency (DHA), the NMHM is a member of the National Health Sciences Consortium.
Surgeons' Hall in Edinburgh, Scotland, is the headquarters of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (RCSEd). It houses the Surgeons' Hall Museum, and the library and archive of the RCSEd. The present Surgeons' Hall was designed by William Henry Playfair and completed in 1832, and is a category A listed building.
The Dittrick Museum of Medical History is part of the Dittrick Medical History Center of the College of Arts and Sciences of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. The Dittrick Medical History Center is dedicated to the study of the history of medicine through a collection of rare books, museum artifacts, archives, and images. The museum was established in 1898 by the Cleveland Medical Library Association and today functions as an interdisciplinary study center. It is housed in the Allen Memorial Medical Library on the campus of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio's University Circle.
War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq: A Series of Cases, 2003–2007 is a medical textbook published in July, 2008 by the United States Army and the Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Borden Institute, with a foreword by reporter Bob Woodruff, who was severely injured in the Iraq War in 2006. It has 83 case descriptions, focusing on new methods of treating blast trauma and penetrating wounds. The book includes graphic and controversial photographs of traumatic battle injuries to US military members and civilians.
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia is the oldest private medical society in the United States. Founded in 1787 by 24 Philadelphia physicians "to advance the Science of Medicine, and thereby lessen human misery, by investigating the diseases and remedies which are peculiar to our country" and to promote "order and uniformity in the practice of Physick," it has made important contributions to medical education and research. The College hosts the Mütter Museum, a gallery of 19th-century specimens, teaching models, instruments, and photographs, as well as the Historical Medical Library, which is one of the country's oldest medical libraries.
The Boston Medical Library of Boston, Massachusetts, was originally organized to alleviate the problem that had emerged due to the scattered distribution of medical texts throughout the city. It has evolved into the "largest academic medical library in the world".
The Burns Archive is the world’s largest private collection of early medical photography and historic photographs, housing over one million photographs. While it primarily contains images related to medical practises, it is also famous for photographs depicting 'the darker side of life'. Other themes prevalent throughout the collection involve death, crime, racism, and war.
Medical photography is a specialized area of photography that concerns itself with the documentation of the clinical presentation of patients, medical and surgical procedures, medical devices and specimens from autopsy. The practice requires a high level of technical skill to present the photograph free from misleading information that may cause misinterpretation. The photographs are used in clinical documentation, research, publication in scientific journals and teaching.
Anna Riwkin-Brick or just Anna Riwkin was a Russian-born Swedish photographer.
May Hyman Lesser was an American artist and medical illustrator.
William Keiller was a Scottish born anatomist who trained in anatomy at the Edinburgh Extramural School of Medicine and was appointed as the first Professor of Anatomy at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, a post he held for 40 years. He served as Dean of the UTMB Medical School and as President of the Texas Medical Association. Many of his anatomical drawings and paintings are preserved and displayed at the Blocker History of Medicine collection at UTMB Moody Medical Library.
Thomas Dent Mütter was an American surgeon born in Richmond, Virginia. Orphaned at the age of 8 and raised by a distant relative, he attended Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia (1824) and graduated with an MD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1831. Later he eventually took a position as an assistant to Dr. Thomas Harris at the Medical Institute of Jefferson College. At the age of 30, he became the Chair of Surgery at the Jefferson Medical College and held this position from 1841 to 1856, when he resigned because of gout and lung disease.
Renaldo Gillet Kuhler was an American scientific illustrator and outsider artist. He worked for three decades as a scientific illustrator for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and spent most of his life creating and illustrating an imaginary country called Rocaterrania.