Glenn Bray Library

You CAN judge a book by its cover! A wild celebration of the world of publication, LIBRARY is a semi-moveable feast of bibliomania. Within these covers lurk thousands of books, magazines and pamphlets printed over the last century. Salvaged and archived by Glenn Bray, the contents of LIBRARY celebrate a vast array of high and low art - from a first-edition Hemingway to off-brand adult magazines of the 1960s, with everything sacred and profane in-between. Reproduced in shocking color, LIBRARY is a cracked kaleidoscope of the world of print, where the cover is king and the stuff inside is just an afterthought. 800 pages of heavy-duty brutal beauty, curated by one of the world's foremost collectors and publishers of the odd, overlooked, and fantastic in comic illustration and art. Per Steven Heller in Print More than a maven, Glenn Bray is a brazen collector of comics and culturally off-the-wall things. He is among a pack--if not the most prolific hoarder and chronicler--of what norm-society refers to as "disruptive." This includes any once-and-or-forever-unsavory cache of folded and gathered pages that individually or en masse breaks or has broken accepted conventions and mores. Among Bray's favorites is genius work by Harvey Kurtzman and Basil Wolverton, paintings and drawings by comic pioneers such as George Herriman, and funky-funk from early to contemporary sources. His library is an immense and enviable wellspring, a demimonde of objects by murky creators who for decades have gnawed away at the inner organs of polite society. During COVID, Bray was locked in quarantine with gazillions of books, newspapers, troves and troughs of various off-kilter treasures, which he decided to start scanning one at a time until he had what amounts to a Los Angeles Bibliotheque Nationale of yellowing vintage classics and Jurassics. Published in a limited to 500 copy run, Library is a "dump" of preserved and pickled commercial ma