This Week on eBay: Ink and Death

Now that St. Valentine's Day is over, and your teeth are rotten and your blood sugar is totally screwed up from all that candy - wait, was this Valentine's Day or Hallowe'en? - now it's time to come down off the sugar high with a heavy dose of pain, in the form of needles filled with ink, piercing your pretty skin.  Yes, tattoos!

We have not one, but TWO tattoo-related publications up for auction on eBay this week, and both feature Don Ed Hardy, one of the most recognizable names in the tattoo world.  And we've got death, too, in handy coffee-table book size.

Tattoo Time #1: New Tribalism, Edited by Don Ed Hardy
Rare and out-of-print, this is the second printing of the first of Hardy's influential series of tattoo journals, published by Hardy Marks, the company he started with his wife.  "New Tribalism" features the history of tattooing from many cultures; an interview with Paul Rogers, one of the greats of the Western Hemisphere's tattoo society; and MANY beautiful photos, both black-and-white, and color.  This is super-high-quality stuff, printed on thick paper, with in-depth writing and fine photography.  Students of American cultural studies, anthropology, and photography should check it out.

Forever Yes: Art Of The New Tattoo, forward by Don Ed Hardy
Another gorgeous book of photographed tattoos, nearly all in color, printed on thick paper.  This book is the companion to the eponymous art exhibit that appeared at Santa Monica's Bryce Bannatyne Gallery in 1992, featuring photographs, taken by the likes of Bobby Neel Adams, Vicki Berndt, Cat Gwynn, Masato Sudo, Shuzo Uemoto, Robert Mapplethorpe, Mari Kono and more, of tattoo art by Fip Buchanan, Fred Corbin, Don Ed Hardy, Horijin, Horiyoshi III, Davy Jones, Michael Malone, Kevin Quinn, Laura Vida, Hideo Uchiyama, and more.   This is some hot stuff.

Evidence, by Luc Sante
Okay maybe you had no candy on Valentine's Day.  Maybe you have no sweetheart.  And you spent that treacly holiday alone, buried in a snowbank.  Salve your psychic wounds and bring back your youthful glow by flipping through a book filled with nostalgia-inducing, sepia-toned (well, okay, black-and-white) photographs of corpses.  Lots of corpses. Dead people always make the broken-hearted feel better!  Here's what happened: when Luc Sante was going through the NYPD's archives, researching "Low Life," he discovered a cache of New York City crime-scene photographs (murders and suicides) taken between 1914 and 1918.  There were no stories attached to these pictures, as the NYPD trashed most of the accompanying archives, supposedly by dumping them in the East River.  So, Sante tries to piece together who these dead people were, what happened to them, and where.  Fascinating stuff, and sadly, this book is OUT-OF-PRINT.  Get 'em while they're, um, cold.

Comments

[lee]

Luc Sante wrote an essay on urban death for some project years ago. it's WELL worth seeking out to read. Harpers put it in an issue. all his stuff kicks ass. ''Low Life'' is essential reading for all urban dwellers.

[lee]

here ya go:

http://www.bon-a-tirer.com/volume1/ls2.html

[Fatherflot]

"Low Life" is fantastic. Walking around downtown NYC becomes an entirely different experience, with the Duane Reedes and Burger Kings devolving back into the blind tigers, opium dens, flop houses, dime theaters, and Tammany club houses that once stood there.