Under the tree, on the shelf

The good folks at Atlas Obscura have put together a lovely list of book gift ideas, including offbeat guidebooks, strange history, and curious collections — compendia of wonder for the curious wanderer and adventurous wonderer.

No calendars, please

Earlier this year I wrote about how hard it was to find interesting, stylish, high-quality calendars year after year. Well, I wanted to warn you against showering me in calendar gifts this Christmas, because I found enough to tide me over for a few more years, at least.

Most exiting is the discovery that illustrator Steve Thomas, whose retrofuturistic space travel posters I showed off a while ago, offers a calendar of his shiny space art. I will have one for my wall.







For graphic inspiration, I adore the bold, bright prints in this Paper Source Art Calendar.






Etsy of course has loads of beautiful and unique art calendars, particularly of the postcard desktop variety. I like this charming Jardin Desk Calendar by MagnoliaMoonlight.






And this Objectification II Postcard Desk Calendar by SureAsBlue.






And this Screen Printed Botanical Calendar by annacote.






And this Animals of the Land, Sky, and Sea Desk Calendar by InkDropDesign.






And this Helvetica Typography Calendar by ovendoorowl.






And this Letterpressed and Silkscreened Calendar by ilee.






And this TTV Desk Calendar by ebonypaws.






And this Polaroid Calendar by AliciaBlock.






I'm in love with the stationary company Cavallini & Co., particularly their calendar offerings. They have great vintage art themes like travel, maps, plants, and animals.







I also made a few finds in photography calendars of abandoned places. In the slightly surreal category, there's the beautiful Retrospect Calendar by farhmboy, who explores out-of-the-way locales in his native Michigan.







In more moody ruins, there's the uplifting Abandoned Places Calendar by Richard Rizzo.







Then there's the beautifully photographed tribute to that ever-photogenic ruin, the Eastern State Penitentiary Calendar by 13 Black Cats Designs.







So please...no calendars! Unless you've found some great ones, too.

Into the underground

City of Ember is a new favorite blog. Taking inventory of the world's tunnels, bunkers, cellars, caverns, and other dark subterranean locales, like the catacombs under Paris, the lavish Wielicza Salt Mine, or Darvaza, the Door to Hell in Turkmenistan, it's like a lushly-illustrated travel blog for the underworld.









The Entrance to Hell is a great Flickr photo pool full of mysterious portals.











Take your own plunge into the underground in CHASM, a very simple but satisfying game in which you must pilot a ship through a deep, narrow tunnel. The only thing I could have wished for was an option to reverse the Y axis, as my fighter pilot instincts inevitably kicked in whenever things got hairy and I'd plunge straight up or down into a wall, completely intending to go the opposite direction. May you fare better than I.





Under New York is an urban exploration site dedicated to exploring the dark, abandoned parts of the city. Most of the sites involve the metaphorical underside of the city, but there are quite a few interesting subterranean expeditions under Tunnels & Bridges. While the pictures are small and too few, there are a few gems — most taken looking back at the world above.

The aesthetics of decay

Abandoned Places is a group Livejournal with a little bit of everything. A lot of nice amateur work from urban explorers, and some professional work by serious photographers, too.




Decayed Machinery, another group Livejournal. Lots of rusty cars, and some industrial sites.




Lapsed Modernist is the photoblog of an urban explorer. Not only is the work excellent, but she has access to some really nice locations.




The Unconscious Art of Demolition, a Flickr pool. A superb collection of mostly exquisitely textured and weathered walls.





Medianeras, another Flickr pool devoted to the remnants of demolished medianeras, dividing walls.




More at El arte de las medianeras.




50 Grams of Urban Loneliness, a Flickr photoset. These places are not really abandoned, but they are lonely. And beautifully photographed.





The Ghost Signs Pool. The past fading before your eyes. (I'm quite fond of the first one, by the way: "Blue Ribbon Tea".)





Opacity is the urban ruins photography of Motts. Very shiny and professional, great compositions, and many wonderful locations. Hard to choose samples -- I just about closed my eyes and clicked. And clicked and clicked.
Via Dream Tree.






The stunning photography of Shinichiro Kobayashi. Many excellent photos of gloriously decaying places from all over Japan.
Via the nonist.




I'd just like to add that many of these photos reminded me of places I've been in games -- I'm sure I've seen this room somewhere in Nova Prospekt in Half-Life 2, and this place certainly is from some corner or other of Riven's Boiler Island.




Undercity.org is the work of Steve Duncan, "a guerilla historian in Gotham". There's actually not that much history about the photos (stories and articles are in a separate section), but his beautiful shots of moody subterranean places, like old mausoleums and miles of subway tunnels, are testament enough.
Via the nonist.





Photographer David Maisel, has, among other records of decay and ruin (such as his "black maps", aerial photos of environmentally impacted landscapes, and the "library of dust" containing the cremated remains of asylum inmates), an excellent series of photos of the crumbling asylum itself.
Via Pruned.




Modern Ruins, photographic essays by Shaun O'Boyle. Numerous photo essays, each exploring a specific location running the gamut from hospitals and asylums to small dying towns to industrial sites.





Modern Ruins, the photography of Phillip Buehler. Many industrial and military subjects, like factories and airplane graveyards. His work includes a selection of panoramas presented in QTVR. He also has a small collection of Street Fossils.
Via the nonist.





Also, the nonist with some links on the subject of decay: notable among them are two articles by Brian Dillon, "Down in the Dump", in Frieze, and "Fragments from a History of Ruin" in Cabinet.

New Scientist invites us to "Imagine Earth without people": Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust. (You can also read the article at Archinect, where the page design is more soothing.)
I'm not really a fan of this sort of anti-anthropocentric naturist creed, but it is poetic, at least.
Via Side Effects, a blog about decay.

This book sounds intriguing; this book, which I spotted and flipped through in the MoMA bookstore, is a beauty.