So. About the end of the world.

Your creative brain snack is served.

Before the Internet, there was the 1960s Dial-a-Poem Hotline - How to start a subculture - Messy Nessy's

He was so good at imagining overly complicated and outlandish contraptions that his name became part of the English dictionary in the early 20th century to describe anything with an unnecessarily elaborate design.

Let’s Entertain the Theory of the Tartarian Empire for a Moment - Inspiration Vault - Messy Nessy's

“So you’re like the Dr. Frankenstein of forgotten objects” I proclaim. “Exactly“, she grins. We both discover we’re obsessed with Americana kitsch and miniatures. Maïssa fills her studio’s shelves with wedding cake toppers, Mexican religious relics and tiny oddities to be moulded and transformed. When she was 12 years-old, she discovered the work of Joseph Cornell which inspired her to try building her own surreal scenes using the objects, toys and ephemera she had around her. 

One of the ultimate icons of modernity and mass production must be the famously infamous wobbly plastic monobloc chair. Found across the globe, from homes to hospitals, gardens to grasslands, base camp Himalayas to frosty Antarctica, this migratory masterpiece of furniture has followed humanity to the far corners of the earth like a faithful hound. Like its carbon-based users, it too has a rich and varied life full of tales to tell. Born shiny and colourful, taking pride of place on manicured lawns, populating waiting rooms and congregating in church halls alike, its life cycle inevitably lets it retire to camping expeditions or flea market stalls and ultimately to decay … peeling, with amputated legs and fractured arms, till it finds it its ultimate resting place in a landfill tomb. Gone from the world of sunlight above to the dark underworld, its plastic bones outlasting the most enduring dinosaur fossils.

Thierry Bosquet has decorated the world’s most iconic theatres. He grew up backstage at the opera house in Brussels where his grandfather was a director, before moving to Italy to make a name for himself as a set designer. “My parents brought me up by taking me to visit all the palaces and gardens in Italy, the most private, the most secret. At that time, these palaces were wonderfully abandoned. I loved it.” Now a legend in his field, the scenographer, decorator, costume designer and artist lives in Brussels, mostly retired from the theatre, and spends his time creating miniature models, quite unlike anything you may have seen before…

What put Southern Indiana on our radar? Mysterious utopian experiments and end-of-the-world 19th century religious cults of course! The beautiful historic town called New Harmony was once home to a esoteric doomsday group of German pioneers called the Harmonists, who had a taste for quirky architecture and kooky modern ideas like equal rights and free education. The community of artists, pacifists and idealists came for religious freedom, and also for the rolling hills, ripe for winemaking – naturally. The folks who founded this town had (mostly) pretty good intentions but it eventually all fell apart, albeit it not for lack of trying. While the utopian order is long gone, the town is still a curious place apart in Southern Indiana with a peculiar legacy. So let’s take a detour to find out why it’s worth a stop on your next cross country road trip.

A pair of charming 1807 French fashion print engravings, each depicting elegantly dressed figures in period Regency/Empire attire. Beautifully hand-coloured in soft tones and presented in warm wooden frames with dark inner borders. A decorative antique pair, perfect for a traditional interior, gallery wall, or collector of historic fashion prints.

What do you get the Lord or Lady who has everything? Why, a gilded salt cellar shaped like a ship – or a whole damn castle, dragons included – which was certainly the case with the above beauty, called “the Exeter Salt”. She deserves a hard zoom…

Hop over to Italy with me for a minute will you? In the countryside province of Parma (yeah, that place where the ham comes from), an unusual and one-of-a-kind museum awaits …

Straight out of a Jetsons cartoon, get a load of this Citroen U55 Currus Cityrama tour bus that ruled the roads of Paris in the 1950s. It’s futuristic design was ahead of its time and turned heads wherever it went. No one had seen anything like it before and even today this retro bus looks like something that landed from outer space.

They can be created by anyone with something to say, you just need to be passionate about something and have the desire to share it. Self-published, unrestricted pamphlets, high quality or low quality; zines can be used for expression, to inform, or to celebrate pretty much anything. Where does one find such cultural relics? Every city or town usually has that one place that’s still kinda cool enough to help distribute them; an independent bookstore, a café or a record shop. Since the beginning, zines have been made to pay homage to someone’s favourite band or subculture, to promote social and political change, or to champion a minority group. Using this medium, people have produced publications to celebrate queer culture and to subvert authoritarian rule, to promote an art movement or just to give a voice to the unheard, the only limits are the imagination of the creator.

f modern art has taught us anything, it is that anything can be considered art. Picasso’s and Braque’s curious peeling newspaper collages of the 1910s spring to mind as the opening act for the ‘Modern Art’ movement. It was at this point in time, in the early 20th century where ‘real’ art – the academic 19th century kind, with all its airs and graces and establishment-imposed ‘rules’ – and this new lighter, less formal and somewhat random approach, parted ways.

A vault of local secrets, insider advice and little-known urban anecdotes, this book is the result of over a decade of discovery in one of the most fascinating cities on earth.