Leather-clad cover artists

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Fancy a Ruscha for your rucksack or a Baldessari in your briefcase? Then plan on popping by the Beverly Hills Smythson store tomorrow and snapping up one of its completely covetable, extremely limited-edition art diaries.The Bond Street purveyor of status stationery has collaborated with artists Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Rachel Whiteread and Gary Hume to create genuine works of art that can help you keep a handle on your genuine works of art — in a meta, M.C. Escher sort of way.
Each size (the 5.5-inch by 3.5-inch, 224-page “Panama,” $700, and 7.75-inch by 5.75-inch, 192-page “Mayfair,” $900, includes the same featherweight, pale blue, silver-edged sheets. And along with monthly and yearly (2009 and 2010) planners, there’s a compendium of art dealers, record prices, emerging art markets and extensive listings of art fairs, museums and galleries (edited by the London-based Art Newspaper).
But contrary to what our mothers always taught us, in this instance it’s what’s on the outside that really matters — each artist’s handiwork is translated into just 200 of each size book, bound in lambskin and individually numbered.
The glossy, simplified outlines of Gary Hume’s American Tan X 2006-07 and A Great Victory 2006-07 are re-created in colored leather inlays. Samples from Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (nets) 2002 series of etchings are rendered by dipping a digitally etched brass blocking die in silver, Baldessari’s ear and nose imagery is captured on vegetable-tanned lambskin, and a riff on Ruscha’s 1984 painting I Forgot to Remember to Forget is split into two diaries — the larger printed with “I Remembered to Forget” and the smaller “I Forgot to Remember.”
The Smythson store at 222 N. Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills is one of only two U.S. retailers stocking the line, (the other is in New York), but if you want to make sure your date with a cover artist is on the books, you might want to place a pre-order online at smythson.com.
-- Adam Tschorn
Smythson’s limited-edition art diaries made in collaboration with Ed Ruscha, top, and John Baldassari, bottom, are among those that go on sale Sept. 30. Only 200 of each size by each of four artists will be sold. Photos courtesy of Smythson of Bond Street.