Official Release of City Notes: San Francisco
I’m proud to announce the official release of City Notes: San Francisco! This amazing book was created and written by Jesse Coburn, produced and designed by Martin Schapiro, with wood-engraved covers by Dave Marcoullier, and photography by Constance Smith.
I’ve posted the text from the press release below. For more information, please visit TerryWarnerPress.com
And please join us for the release party! Books will be available for sale on site.
Friday, June 10, 6 - 9 pm
The Ramp
855 Terry Francois St. @ Mariposa
City Notes: San Francisco is a book. The slender volume offers brief accounts of twenty-five sites that currently exist in San Francisco. Composed of a photograph and short text, each entry illustrates the contemporary conditions of the subject and reports on its historical formation. Waxed thread binds the pages to a pair of stained plywood panels. An illustration of the Golden Gate Bridge is engraved on the front panel. The bridge is depicted out of context: without the swirling waters of the strait, the soft lines of the Marin Headlands to the north, the city to the south.
No single theme unifies the contents of City Notes. Among the sites chronicled are an electrical substation, a car ferrycum- house boat, a water fountain disguised as a statue, a taxi driver, and a tiki bar. The places are at turns incongruous and peripheral, outlandish and obscure, extraordinary and banal. They bear traces of things that have long ceased to be. This quality could be found in the locales of any city. The subjects of this volume, however, are unique to San Francisco.
By some measures, City Notes resembles a guidebook. The sites are legally accessible to the public and, in the author’s opinion, worth visiting. Nearly all of them are free. In other respects, City Notes defies the parameters of the genre. Far from the unifying perspectives offered by most tourist literature, City Notes assembles twenty-five points of unresolved meaning into a tenuous and shifting constellation, which floats somewhere outside of the San Francisco that most know or imagine. It is of the city, but suggests another.
