Andy Warhol

In 1950s New York, before he became one of the most famous names of the 20th century, Andy Warhol was a skilled and successful commercial artist. During this time, as part of his strategy to woo and cultivate clients and forge friendships, he created seven handmade promotional books for valued contacts, featuring his own unique drawings and quirky texts and revealing his fondness for–among other subjects–cats, food, myths, shoes, beautiful boys, and gorgeous girls.

Decades later, with originals now changing hands for thousands of dollars at auction, TASCHEN presents an immaculate boxed series of these seven books, replicating Warhol’s originals as closely as possible down to the format, dimensions, and paper stock. With titles such as Love Is A Pink Cake, 25 Cats Named Sam, and À la Recherche du Shoe Perdu, the series reveals the artist’s quirky character as well as his accomplished draftsmanship, boundless creativity, and innuendo-laced humor.

The books make delightful play with styles and genres as much as with design, materials, and formats. The lithograph portfolio, A Is for Alphabet, devotes a page to each letter of the alphabet, with illustrations complemented by stumbling three-line verses that tell of strange encounters between man and animal is at once a Warhol twist on a children’s book and a covert celebration of gay love. Wild Raspberries, meanwhile, is a spoof cookbook with a cornucopia of adventurous recipes on 19 portrait-format pages of instructions and illustrations.

About the Author

The editor Reuel Golden graduated in politics from the University of Sussex, UK, and is the former editor of the British Journal of Photography. He has edited various titles for TASCHEN including The Rolling Stones, Her Majesty, Harry Benson: The Beatles, Age of Innocence: Football in the 1970s, and the New York and London editions of the Portrait of a City series.

About the Editor

Nina Schleif is a German art historian, Americanist, and curator. In 2013, she initiated and curated the first exhibition anywhere on Andy Warhol’s oeuvre in books at Museum Brandhorst in Munich. She also edited and coauthored the exhibition catalog Reading Andy Warhol. Backed by a recent Smithsonian fellowship, she has written a monograph on Warhol’s 1950s drawings that will be published in 2017.