Craig Mod’s Kissa by Kissa: How to Walk Japan is a paean to walking, Japan, and that post-war Japanese dish called pizza toast served up in Japanese cafés called kissaten (kissa, for short). Mod walked over 1,000 miles along the Nakasendo Highway, from Tokyo to Kyoto, and through the countryside where he’d chat with tomato farmers, cooks, and the aging customers of the kissaten he’d visit. Is it a photobook, a long photoessay, or something else entirely?...
Roberto Calasso wrote about “singular books” (i libri unici) when recounting conversations he had with Roberto Bazlen in his 2013 L’impronta dell’editore.1 Two co-conspirators of what would blossom into the respected Italian publishing house Adelphi Edizioni, a young Calasso and an aging Bazlen dreamed to publish unique, singular books. Singular books are books in which “it is clear that something has happened to the author and has been put into writing,” Calasso writes reflecting on the conversations with Bazlen....