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Medical Photographs (2007), focuses on the museum's archive of rare historic photographs, most of which were previously unpublished.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Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine: 1880-1930 (2009) catalogued over 100 previously unpublished archival photographs of students at prominent American medical schools posing alongside dissected cadavers in their anatomy classes.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]
In 2021 Blast published Michael Lesy's Snapshots 1971-77, a selection of vintage color photos found in a dumpster behind a photo-processing plant in San Francisco and others from a Cleveland drugstore’s trash. "While sitting in those dumpsters, these may have been nothing but simple, banal, discarded personal snapshots — weddings, birthday parties, people posing with new cars or the 12-point buck they just shot — but to see them through Lesy’s eyes they take on an unexpected beauty and profundity," wrote reviewer Jim Knipfel in The Believer . [18] In 2022 Blast published another book by Lesy, Walker Evans: Last Photographs and Life Stories. [19]
Deaths of Artists, published by Blast in 2024, compiled a collection of almost 3,000 artist obituaries originally printed from 1906 to 1929, as found in scrapbooks held in the archives at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. [20] [21]
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.
Marcus Elieser Bloch (1723–1799) was a German physician and naturalist who is best known for his contribution to ichthyology through his multi-volume catalog of plates illustrating the fishes of the world. Brought up in a Hebrew-speaking Jewish family, he learned German and Latin and studied anatomy before settling in Berlin as a physician. He amassed a large natural history collection, particularly of fish specimens. He is generally considered one of the most important ichthyologists of the 18th century, and wrote many papers on natural history, comparative anatomy, and physiology.
Ruth Bernhard was a German-born American photographer.
The Mütter Museum is a medical history and science 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 museum, founded with a gift from Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter on December 11, 1858, was for the education of medical professionals, medical students, and invited guests of College Fellows, and did not become open to non-Fellows until the mid-1970s. The College of Physicians of Philadelphia is itself not a teaching organization, but rather a member organization or "scientific body dedicated to the advancement of science and medicine".
The Wellcome Library is a free library and Museum based in central London. It was developed from the collection formed by Sir Henry Wellcome (1853–1936), whose personal wealth allowed him to create one of the most ambitious collections of the 20th century. Henry Wellcome's interest was the history of medicine in a broad sense and included subjects such as alchemy or witchcraft, but also anthropology and ethnography. Since Henry Wellcome's death in 1936, the Wellcome Trust has been responsible for maintaining the Library's collection and funding its acquisitions. The library is free and open to the public.
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 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.
John Bernhard is a Swiss American artist and photographer best known for his surrealist nude studies. Rather than merely showing women's bodies, Bernhard overlaid elements of the earth through projections and worked with myths of metamorphosis as a subtext for his model photography. The resulting images include allusions to the material by which the models are absorbed or into which they disappear.
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, founded in 1875 in Boston, Massachusetts, was originally organized to alleviate the problem of scattered distribution of medical texts throughout Boston. It has since evolved into the "largest academic medical library in the world".
Kinect: Disneyland Adventures is a 2011 open world video game developed by Frontier Developments and published by Microsoft Studios on Kinect for Xbox 360, with a remaster for Xbox One and Microsoft Windows developed by Asobo Studio released in 2017 as simply Disneyland Adventures. It takes place in a recreation of Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California, circa 2011, with themed games in place of many of the rides, while motion controls are used to play the game.
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.
Kate Zambreno is an American novelist, essayist, critic, and professor. She teaches writing in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and at Sarah Lawrence College. Zambreno is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.
Mario Santoro – Woith is an Italian photographer working in the field of experimental photography, xerography, printmaking and self-publishing artist's books. He is based in Todi (Umbria).
Archive of Modern Conflict (AMC) is an organisation and independent publisher based in Holland Park, London, England.
Preston is My Paris Publishing (PPP) is a photography-based project that creates publications, site-specific installations, live events, digital applications, education, writing, talks and workshops. It was started in 2009 by Adam Murray and Robert Parkinson as a photocopied zine with the intention of encouraging the exploration of Preston as a subject for creative practice and to focus more attention on the city. It has been described as "politically and photographically aware", "photographing and publishing a view of a disregarded, ordinary Britain" "in a playful way".
May Hyman Lesser was an American artist and medical illustrator.
Marian Osgood Hooker (1875–1968) was a physician and photographer in the early 20th century. She is known for her photographs of rural Italy, published in several books including Farmhouses and Small Provincial Buildings in Southern Italy. She was also the first woman to climb Mount Whitney.
Odette England is an Australian-British photographer whose artwork has been exhibited internationally. She often uses family photographs in her practice.
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.
Heroic Children: Untold Stories of the Unconquerable is a 2015 non-fiction book by Hanoch Teller. The book recounts the true stories of nine individuals from Jewish communities across Europe who survived the Holocaust as children. It is the 28th book by Teller, a prolific writer of inspirational books who is also a senior docent at Yad Vashem. The cover design won the 2016 Benjamin Franklin Book Award from the Independent Book Publishers Association.