You CAN judge a book by its cover!
A wild celebration of the world of publication, LIBRARY is a semi-moveable feast of bibliomania. Within these covers lurk thousands of books, magazines and pamphlets printed over the last century. Salvaged and archived by Glenn Bray, the contents of LIBRARY celebrate a vast array of high and low art - from a first-edition Hemingway to off-brand adult magazines of the 1960s, with everything sacred and profane in-between.
Reproduced in shocking color, LIBRARY is a cracked kaleidoscope of the world of print, where the cover is king and the stuff inside is just an afterthought.
800 pages of heavy-duty brutal beauty, curated by one of the world's foremost collectors and publishers of the odd, overlooked, and fantastic in comic illustration and art.
$30,769
supported of $25,000
192
supporters
$100
LIBRARY Hardcover book
143 claimed
9x12" hardcover, 800 pages. To all printed media & pop culture fanatics: THIS IS IT - YOUR ONLY CHANCE TO OBTAIN A COPY of this historic collection by Glenn Bray, as the print run to fulfill for this campaign is the only one planned.
$130
LIBRARY Signed by Glenn Bray
41 claimed
9x12" hardcover, 800 pages. Bookplate signed by Glenn to be attached into the book. To all printed media & pop culture fanatics: THIS IS IT - YOUR ONLY CHANCE TO OBTAIN A COPY of this historic collection by Glenn Bray, as the print run to fulfill for this campaign is the only one planned.
$250
LIBRARY Retailer/Museum/Library Bundle
23 claimed
5 copies of LIBRARY at 50% discount. THIS IS IT - YOUR ONLY CHANCE TO OBTAIN COPIES of this historic collection by Glenn Bray for your shop/museum/library, as the print run to fulfill for this campaign is the only one planned. Write us at hello@wearezoop.com if you require assistance or wish to discuss setting up a custom bundle to claim.
$1,233
Stuart Ng Books Custom Bundle
1 / 1 claimed
Retailer Bundle
This book project was undertaken partially due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-2021. Since we were hunkered down in our bunker (home), I thought it’d be a good time to revisit my library upstairs and eyeball some of the books & magazines that I hadn’t looked at for quite a while.
In doing so, I started seeing visual threads of connections between oddly paired covers. What ended up in book form was the result of an almost year-long pursuit of connecting the dots, visually. Some pairings “make sense” more than others, but some don’t even try. That’s the way it should be, no?
I started sharing review copies with some peers, and will let them take it from here:
"Glenn Bray has a once-in-a-generation eye for the shocking sicko alien beauty/ ugliness that lies at the far edges of 20th century American culture. His LIBRARY will make you feel like you’ve been lied to your whole life, like you’ve seen only what they wanted you to see."
- Dan Clowes
“Glenn Bray puts the ‘F’ in ephemera!”
- Matt Groening
"In my town, growing up, was a scary hole in the wall that was a newsstand. I peeked in a few times. Someone was sitting behind a tattered curtain listening to a ‘learn french’ record with copies of the Midnight News pinned to a clothesline. Little boys and girls went in the door and traded their lunch money for grotesqueries. Glenn must’ve gone in there a bunch."
- Gary Panter
“Glenn Bray—America’s great collector of the 20th century’s Ephemeral Arts—has spent his life (and most of his discretionary income) putting together this Grand Library of Babble. It’s a Library where you’ve gotta judge all the books by their covers, cuz it’s ALL eyeball kicks—an obsessively curated junkyard of book covers, pamphlets and other oddball paper detritus that escaped the recycling bin.
Bray takes you on a totally unguided tour of the inside of his head, and it’s a wild ride down Maim Street! You’ll travel from the perverse underbelly of High Culture to the heights of the Lowbrow-Degenerate-Sleaze Arts. And if you survive the end of our civilization, this giant brick of a book offers all the clues you’ll need to figure out what made it worthwhile and why it crumbled.”
- Art Spiegelman
"There are many different sorts of collectors. Freud attributed the condition to bad toilet training, but he was often something of a kill-joy. Of course, at one end of the spectrum there are The Hoarders, those who turn their homes into dangerous obstacle courses, with treasures and trash combustibly mixed together. Anyone who ever walked through Bill Blackbeard's large Victorian home, The San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, a three-story house with only narrow paths between the stacked-high bound volumes of newspapers absolutely everywhere but the bathroom (for fear of water-damage), might have diagnosed him with that pathology. Though discerning and prescient (Bill knew the difference between trash and treasure better than most everyone) he tried to collect it All... and it has served my art form well.
• Frank Young and I worked on the book for a better part of a year and he produced the first layout.
• Blue Trimarchi went over his layout & made it more regimented.
• Scott Dunbier mainly forced us to stop trying to print the book on demand and approach Zoop instead.
Obviously, I know that much of this material is controversial, but please don’t come crying to me about how racist, sexist, pro-this or anti-that some of the images are. They were produced at a time in history when they were acceptable. I’m not condoning the fact that they were published, but we must acknowledge the fact that they WERE, and rather than hiding these images forever, I feel it’s of the utmost importance that current and future generations get to see them, so they won’t inadvertently repeat history.
This book is complete and will be going to the printer within a month after the end of the campaign. From there, expected delivery time to our fulfillment center is roughly four months from approve-to-print date, but with the current state of international shipping there may be delays. We're aiming for an end-of-2022 delivery date and Zoop will keep supporters updated throughout this process.
We passed out $25k funding goal today, June 16th -- thank you to all of the supporters!
Here's the latest from Glenn:
He's been working with Blue on making some final revisions & edits to the book & is now completely satisfied with the results.
Blue came up with the idea for the signed plate. It’s a pocket that will hold a Samplerman re-working of the JOLLY TWISTERS book seen in the middle of LIBRARY. We’ll have it printed postcard size (4” X 6”) and Glenn will sign the white side, then place into the pocket.
Check it out!
Hello everyone and welcome to the campaign! We're very excited to present this book to you from the acclaimed bibliophie and Eisner Award nominated Glenn Bray!
We've gotten some feedback wondering why no signed copies were available, so we conferred with Glenn and agreed to strategize a way for some signed bookplates to be creatively inserted into the book - so we just added that reward now.
To the supporters who have come out in force the past day, THANK YOU for making this launch so special -- let's all spread the word and have some fun over the next 4 weeks!
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Please e-mail us at hello@wearezoop.com and we'll get right back to you!
You could e-mail us at hello@wearezoop.com with that info during the campaign if you'd like to get it out of the way. Otherwise, we'll be reaching out to all supporters of rewards that require feedback shortly after the campaign is over.
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No - this is it! We're essentially your in-campaign pledge manager. If you are interested in supporting these creators, this is the time to do it! And it's the exact reason we allow you to purchase as many rewards as you want during the campaign!
Rewards are the priority items that the creators have chosen for the campaign. Add-Ons are meant to be secondary items that are 'unlocked' after you buy something from the Reward level. There are no restrictions on buying Rewards, but you can only buy Add-Ons if you've bought a Reward. Zoop sets this up under the direction of the creators. Some may choose to only have Rewards, some may choose an even balance of Rewards and Add-Ons, and others may choose to only have one or two Rewards with the rest of the items being Add-Ons.
Yes! We encourage you to get more than 1 item! That could be multiple copies of the same reward, or you can mix and match rewards! There is no limit, unless otherwise stated in the reward description.
