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Staff Picks: Keith Haring’s Journals, ‘Library’

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This Week’s Reading

I could spend days nosing around the Guggenheim’s online publication archive. The museum has digitized a number of its rare and out-of-print publications and made them available for free. What bounty! Even in black and white, the abstract compositions in the 1940 catalogue for “Art of Tomorrow,” one of the Guggenheim’s first shows, still look revolutionary. —Nicole Rudick

Of the many books I received over the holidays, the only one I have read cover to cover is the new edition of Keith Haring’s Journals. Self-analytical but never narcissistic, the artist writes insightfully about art, death, and his generation: “It’s not an easy time to be alive and maybe an even more difficult time to die.” —Artie Niederhoffer

I moved to Berlin when I was twenty-one, just out of college, and I laughed aloud in recognition when Gideon Lewis-Kraus, in his forthcoming A Sense of Direction, described living in the city as “an infinitely long weekend with your parents out of town … The old crimes licensed you to ignore the claims of the past; the low cost of living licensed you to ignore the demands of the present; and the future was something that would happen when we moved back to New York, where many of us would once more live in uncomfortable proximity to our actual parents.” —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn

I’ve been reading Tom Clark’s blogging on Vanitas—check out “Clean.” —Sadie Stein

I can’t help but admire Trong G. Nguyen’s Library. Since 2007, the New York–based artist has been rewriting books, word for word, on individual grains of rice. Very little is lost in translation. —Eliza Martin

I’ve been very distracted by Letterheady today. Gertrude Stein and Ray Bradbury both had particularly appealing stationery. —Emma del Valle

If you’re interested in multifaceted companies, read Interview Magazine’s chat with Jean Touitou, the founder of A. P. C. clothing. Touitou is a sharp man, and he sheds light on his journey to the top. He began his career in fashion at age twenty-six, about which he says: “Basically a man at twenty-six is like a woman at sixteen … An adolescent.” —Jessica Calderon