On the occasion of the release of Exhausted Spectral Incantation, John Wiese’s 100th 7-inch record, Family Bookstore in Los Angeles will present a sound installation and a new monograph. The 150-page edition, titled 100 Seven Inch Records, graphically documents the last 13 years of his output in the format. Published through his imprint, Helicopter, it also features essays by Sam McKinlay and Brian Roettinger. The installation will run October 17 – November 8.

John Wiese is an graphic designer, artist and musician based in Los Angeles. These are excerpts from his Circle Snare edition released through No Fun Productions in Brooklyn. John has recorded countless albums for numerous independent labels collaborating with the likes of Kevin Drumm, Lasse Marhaug, Merzbow, Evan Parker, Bruce Russell, Smegma and Nico Vascellari.

BYG Actuel was a series of avant-garde/free jazz records put out on the French label BYG Records in the late 1960’s. The understated and repetitive designs now make for some of the most iconic record covers ever released, and the music is still considered to be some of the most extreme recorded.

Pelican Books, a former division of Penguin Books, published some really great book cover designs from the 1930’s through the 1980’s. See many more at Things Magazine (via Binky the doormat).

This is Charles Joseph Minard’s graphic representation of Napoleon’s march to Moscow during his Russian campaign in 1812.  In a single two-dimension image, the chart summarizes numerous factors that led to Napoleon’s failure.  One can see his army’s size and direction, their distance from Paris, and the temperature. Drawn in 1869, luminary of American statistics Edward Tufte has called it “the best statistical graph ever drawn.”  Click the image for a larger version.

The publication Trace a Face is the result of a collaboration between the Swedish design duo Konst & Teknik and Amsterdam-based graphic designer Jonathan Puckey.  Thirteen visual artists and designers were asked to literally trace a face using the Delaunay Raster, a custom-written Scriptographer image vectorization tool for Adobe Illustrator created by Puckey.  Some of the results are featured above and below. Trace a Face can be ordered at Konst & Teknik’s website.

Images (top to bottom): “Lazy Trace” by Martin Ström, “Hooded Britney” by Martijn Hendriks, “Electric Café, 1986″ by NODE Berlin Oslo, “John” by Florian Ludwig, and finally “Isabelle Dinoire” by Åbäke.

These images are taken from Slavs and Tatars‘ brilliant A Thirteenth Month Against Time. Released in a limited edition of 100, it can be downloaded as a pdf here.

Founded by Kasia Korczak and Payam Sharifi, and now working in collaboration with Boy Vereecken and Victoria Camblin, Slavs and Tatars’ work focuses on the area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China. This region – Eurasia – has tremendous geopolitical significance and has been dubbed “The Grand Chessboard” by Zbigniew Brzezinski.  Slavs and Tatars’ work is an equally playful and profound attempt to “map” Eurasia in all of its historical complexity.

Their excellent new book, Kidnapping Mountains, which will soon be reviewed in Read, has recently been released by Book Works.