New York is home to a host of independent bookstores that offer illustrated books sure to stimulate the eye and the spirit. Today, DART tags three author events of interest.

Annie Leibovitz
A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005 (Random House 2006)
Friday, November 3, 7 pm
Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 West 21st Street
Please call 212.255.4022 for reservations.

Perhaps the world’s best-known photographer, Annie Leibovitz will appear to discuss and sign her new book A Photographer’s Life.

 “I don’t have two lives,” Annie Leibovitz writes in the Introduction to this collection of her work from 1990—2005. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Portraits of well-known figures — Johnny Cash, Nicole Kidman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Keith Richards, Michael Jordan, Joan Didion, R2-D2, Patti Smith, Nelson Mandela, Jack Nicholson, William Burroughs, George W. Bush with members of his Cabinet — appear alongside pictures of Leibovitz’s family and friends, reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early Nineties, and landscapes made even more indelible through Leibovitz’s discerning eye.

Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005, an exhibition of more than 200 photographs, continues at the Brooklyn Museum through January 21, 2007. It will then travel to the San Diego Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, the de Young Museum, Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, and London's National Portrait Gallery.

Photo above: Annie Leibovitz (American, b. 1949). Nicole Kidman, 2003. Photograph © Annie Leibovitz. Courtesy of Vogue.

David Sandlin
Double Book Launch:
Wonderfool World (Butler Gallery, 2006)
An Alphabetical Ballad of Carnality (Blab!/Fantagraphics, 2006)
Printed Matter, 195 Tenth Avenue at 22nd Street
Saturday, November 4, 2006, from 5-7 pm

David Sandlin's work demonstrates an idiosyncratic fusion of personal narrative with political and religious allegory, where the visuals draw on a range of sources from pulp fiction comics to ecclesiastical iconography.

Drawn in the tradition of the classic pulp comic tales, An Alphabetical Ballad of Carnality presents Carl Bob deVille's visits to various pit stops on the road to damnation, from adultery and avarice to venality and zealotry. Every letter of the alphabet gets titillating, tongue-twisting treatment in rhyme as each luridly illustrated page seamlessly segues to the next.

Wonderfool World is the most complete presentation of David Sandlin's work to date. Published on the occasion of a solo exhibition at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny, Ireland, the book includes interviews with the artists as well as essays by John Carlin, Dan Nadel, Carlo McCormick and a foreword by the Butler's director, Anna O'Sullivan.

For additional information, please contact Max Schumann, Associate Director at 212-925-0325 or at mschumann @ printedmatter.org

David Sandlin’s work is on view through December 17 at Art Moving Projects, 166 North 12th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Leanne Shapton
Was She Pretty? (Farrar Strauss Giroux 2006)
192 Books, 192 Tenth Avenue at 21st Street
Tuesday, November 14, 7 pm
Please call 212.255.4022 for reservations

Artist, writer and illustrator Leanne Shapton weaves together a voyeuristic tale of love, life, jealousy, insecurity, anxiety and peccaddillo.  Part graphic novel, part confessional, this brilliant, unusual book offers us an unflinching look at human relationships in all their oddity and wonder.

“Each spread includes one or more scratchy, black-and-white line drawings plus short, facing-page, poetryesque texts. Its content…explores conflicting feelings aroused in women by their boyfriends' ex-lovers. Shapton also captures a complex brew of nostalgia, lingering attachment, relief, rage and intoxication harbored by the men: they keep letters, hairclips, phone numbers—and are occasionally also honest with themselves.”  — From Publishers Weekly