We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Four of the most alluring words in the English language combine to make up the title of this volume: Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia. If that isn’t a recipe for a vast treasury of arcana, we don’t know what is.

The book is made up of photographs, drawings and text compiled over the course of 33 years in an infamous St. Petersberg prison by one of the prison guards, Danzig Baldayev. As the publisher puts it, “The tattoos were his passport into a secret world where he became something of an ethnographer, recording the secrets of a closed society. The tattoos are artful, distasteful, sexually explicit and sometimes simply strange, reflecting the lives and mores of the convicts.”

You can say that again. Skulls, daggers, medieval knights, babies, a horned Lenin and a grinning Al Capone are some of the images that populate the world of Kresty prisoners. Nihilistic and weird and occasionally beautiful, the tattoos form a private language that Baldayev, by virtue of his collection, has given us a glimpse of.

Marc Jacobs Advertising 1998-2009 by Juergen Teller published by Steidl

When a book weighs more than five pounds you can really call it a book anymore, can you? A book is something to tote around in your back pocket and read on the bus or when waiting for the dentist. A book is not something that requires two people to carry it.

So we can’t really call Juergen Teller’s massive volume Marc Jacobs Advertising 1998-2009 a book. More like a tome. Or a treasure chest, really–– a trove of images featuring everyone from Kim Gordon to Cindy Sherman to Meg White to Harmony Korine, shot in Teller’s signature loony style. In terms of bang for buck, the book is a solid investment: you could spend days flipping through it and still discover details you hadn’t seen before. We don’t usually think of advertising as something to be preserved for the ages, but Teller’s collaboration with Marc Jacobs has always been much more than that.