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The Quiet Case for Collecting Art Invitations Walk into any serious ephemera collector’s home and you’ll eventually find a shoebox, a flat file, or a slim archival portfolio filled with printed invitations to gallery openings and museum exhibitions. To the uninitiated, these look like the kind of thing you’d toss without a second thought — a folded cardstock announcement that did its job the moment the date passed. But to a growing number of collectors, art historians, and archivists, printed exhibition invitations are among the most undervalued categories of collectible ephemera in the art world. What Exactly Is an “Art...

Wim Crouwel / The Gridnik   For examples of the many Crouwel designs www.ftn-books.com has in its inventory please click here and search for “crouwel” and find over 600 Wim Crouwel related items. The Gridnik: The Life and Quiet Rebellion of Wim Crouwel Amsterdam, 1967 The room was too quiet. Wim Crouwel stood beside a wall of proofs, watching people who normally had opinions about everything struggle to say anything at all. He had just shown them a new alphabet — one he had built not from centuries of calligraphic tradition, but from a grid. No curves. No diagonals where a diagonal wasn’t strictly...

Willem Sandberg The Man Who Tore Up the Rulebook: Willem Sandberg and the Reinvention of the Museum For the many Sandberg items www.ftn-books.com has available, click here   Walk into Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum today, and you’re standing inside an idea that one man spent thirty years fighting for: that a museum should be alive, welcoming, and unafraid of new art. That man was Willem Sandberg — a self-taught typographer, wartime forger, and the director who turned a sleepy Dutch municipal museum into one of Europe’s most influential homes for modern art. Sandberg’s story is unusual because it refuses to sit in one lane....

Anthon Beeke With Anthon Beeke i complete the large blog stories on the great dutch graphic designers from the last 80 years. For many Beeke related books and posters please search with “beeke” at www.ftn-books.com or click here The Shameless Eye: Anthon Beeke and the Art of Making Amsterdam Blush There’s a particular kind of designer who doesn’t just make images — he picks fights with them. Anthon Beeke was that designer. For fifty years he stalked Dutch public space with posters of naked bodies, bandaged museum directors, and typography built entirely out of women lying on a gymnasium floor, and he did...

STEDELIJK MUSEUM Amsterdam   ww.ftn-books.com has probably the largest collection of Stedelijk Museum related material in the world. Nearly a 1000 items available. Search for “stedelijk museum ” at www.ftn-books.com or click here The White Cube Revolution: Why the Stedelijk Museum Is Europe’s Most Important Contemporary Art Museum Walk into most 19th-century European museums and you’ll find dark, ornate rooms stuffed with gilt frames, velvet ropes, and an unspoken rule: art is sacred, and you are a guest who should whisper. Then walk into the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam — and understand why it broke that mold entirely, and why the ripples are still...