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Andy Warhol, Publisher

Although we know him best as a visual artist and filmmaker, Andy Warhol was also a publisher. Distributing his own books and magazines, as well as contributing to those of others, Warhol found publishing to be one of his greatest pleasures, largely because of its cooperative and social nature.

Journeying from the 1950s, when Warhol was starting to make his way through the New York advertising world, through the height of his career in the 1960s, to the last years of his life in the 1980s, Andy Warhol, Publisher unearths fresh archival material that reveals Warhol’s publications as complex projects involving a tantalizing cast of collaborators, shifting technologies, and a wide array of fervent readers.

Lucy Mulroney shows that whether Warhol was creating children’s books, his infamous “boy book” for gay readers, writing works for established houses like Grove Press and Random House, helping found Interview magazine, or compiling a compendium of photography that he worked on to his death, he readily used the elements of publishing to further and disseminate his art. Warhol not only highlighted the impressive variety in our printed culture but also demonstrated how publishing can cement an artistic legacy.

176 pages | 43 halftones | 7 x 10 | © 2018

Art: American Art, Art--General Studies

Gay and Lesbian Studies

Library Science and Publishing: Publishing

Media Studies

Reviews

"We see, thanks to Lucy Mulroney, that Warhol imagined everything about a book—the copyedited pages, the aimless tape-recorded drumming-up of anecdotes, even the book tour itself—as a kind of art."

Alexander Nemerov, Stanford University

"In this engrossing book, Lucy Mulroney offers a bracing new account of Andy Warhol’s publication projects as they redefined the rituals of publishing, publicity, and print in America. Drawing upon extensive new archival research treating everything from the ‘coloring parties’ of the 1950s to the late photobook America, Mulroney demonstrates the range, intricacy, and above all the radically collaborative nature of these projects."

Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard University

"Taken as a whole, this work of scholarship fills some gaps in our knowledge about another side of Warhol's multifaceted career." 

Martha E. Stone | Gay & Lesbian Review

"Though one can find much about Warhol in print, reviews, and criticism, Mulrony is the first to chronicle the artist's self-publishing and handmade booklets in the pre–pop art days of the 1950s. . . . Well written and meticulously detailed, this book clearly depicts subversive parallels and oppositions to the commercial establishment."

CHOICE

Table of Contents

Introduction


1          One Blue Pussy
2          Fuck You
3          Three Bad Books
4          Young, Rich, Intelligent, and Willing to Spend!
5          I’d Recognize Your Voice Anywhere
6          America

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

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