Hope everyone had a lovely holiday! As the year comes to a close I thought this was a very appropriate book to post about. I have many friends who are scared of getting laid off right now. It’s happening to everyone- my friends at magazines, architecture firms, news organizations. They are constantly in fear of being without a job and not being able to find another one. The economy is very scary. And besides the economy there are so many other things to be worried about this coming year, too many to count- global warming, terrorists, wars, weird diseases. Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov has given us even more in his new book 99 Fears. Every page chronicles some sort of fear from flying in a plane to having writer’s block. Some are more abstract or seem to be metaphors for larger fears but I am able to relate each of them to my own life somehow, sometimes in a very dark comical way. Each “fear” has it’s own page. The drawings were originally exhibited at Documenta 12, drawn on thick textured paper with ink. And they have reprinted them so nicely that you can see all that paper texture and the rough edges of each piece of paper. The illustrations are very simple and graphic and the text always handwritten below. A very tiny round bodied man with little stick lines for arms and legs represents the human. He is rarely bigger than a quarter of an inch on the vast paper landscape. This collection is a nice comment on our fearful society and can give us a laugh about worrying…for now at least. Read more about Nedko here and buy the book here. Thanks to Phaidon for sending it over!

© Julia Rothman 2007