Blast Books is a New York-based book publisherBlast Books website 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,John Harley Warner faculty page at Yale School of Medicine Drew Friedman, Suehiro Maruo, Hideshi Hino, James Edmonson,James Edmonson faculty page at Case Western Reserve University Ken Smith, Arne Svenson, Steve Young, and others.
Background Blast Books was founded in 1989 out of the collapse of the publisher Amok Press, which Swezey had founded with Adam Parfrey in 1986. After the publisher collapsed, Parfrey founded his own independent publisher, Feral House, also in 1989. Swezey described Blast Books as a more "grown-up" version of Amok Press.
On March 30, 1989, Stuart Swezey (Ken Swezey's brother) and Brian King of Amok Books (related to but distinct from Amok Press) wrote a letter to LA Weekly saying that Amok Press was defunct. In response to Stuart Swezey and King, Parfrey and Ken Swezey penned a letter to the LA Weekly that denied they were defunct, and said that Feral House and Blast Books would be imprints of Amok Press. This was not the case and both publishers succeeded Amok Press.
Selected publications 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Medical Photographs (2007), focuses on the museum's archive of rare historic photographs, most of which were previously unpublished.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.Zuger, Abigail, "Art and Artistry of Our Anatomy", The New York Times, July 16, 2012Mason, Betsy, "Rare, Beautiful and Disturbing Objects from the National Library of Medicine", Wired, April 2, 2012 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.Zuger, Abigail, "Snapshots From the Days of Bare-Hands Anatomy", The New York Times, April 27, 2009
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), 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).Meyer, Robinson, "The Traveling Salesmen of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex", The Atlantic, January 15, 2016
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.Scharper, Diane, review, The New York Times, January 28, 2001
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.Gara, Tom, "When Businesses Sang: An Ode to the Corporate Musical", The Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2013 In 2016, the book rights were acquired by Amblin Entertainment, who announced development of a film production starring Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig."Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Hairspray Shaiman & Wittman Set Original Musical With La La Land Marc Platt At Amblin," Deadline Hollywood, December 15, 2016
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.Knipfel, Jim, "To Make Oneself Understood is Impossible: Thomas Bernhard Speaks," The Believer, December 22, 2016
In 2017, Blast published The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler,Publishers Weekly review of The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler, September 25, 2017 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).Renaldo Kuhler websiteFoster, John, The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler (review), Raw Vision #96, p.71 (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."Brady, Shaun, "Academy of Natural Sciences curator of presidents’ hair will exhume the odd lot Wednesday," The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 12, 2018
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.Knipfel, Jim, “When You Photograph a Moment, You’re Photographing the Death of That Moment,” The Believer (interview with Michael Lesy), 2021 In 2022 Blast published another book by Lesy, Walker Evans: Last Photographs and Life Stories.Dickerman, Kenneth, "The Last Photos Made by a Legendary American Photographer," The Washington Post, November 7, 2022
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.Deaths of Artists, at BlastBooks.comSaraniero, Nicole, "Mysterious Scrapbooks Full of Artist Obituaries Found in the Met Archives", Untapped New York, May 2024
Founding 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.
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