The Book of Stamps

An album of artists' postage stamps issued by Cabinet magazine, continuing a lineage of artist-made philately that runs from Fluxus and Ray Johnson's mail-art circle to the present.

Edited by Sina Najafi and Jeffrey Kastner, the clothbound volume holds fifteen full-page sheets of limited-edition stamps, perforated, gummed and bound to be torn out and used. The contributing artists are Walead Beshty, Melissa Brown, Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, Spencer Finch, Carl Michael von Hausswolff & Leif Elggren, Jonathan Herder, Mikhail Iliatov, Emily Jacir, Julia Jacquette, Vandana Jain, Sandra Eula Lee, Line Up, Frank Magnotta, Michael Oatman and David Shrigley. An essay by the writer George Pendle sets out the history of the artist's stamp and its ambiguous relation to state postal authority. 76 pages, published by Cabinet Books, Brooklyn, in 2008.

Cabinet, the quarterly founded by Najafi in 2000, has published a small run of books and multiples extending the magazine's interest in classification, bureaucracy and the overlooked object. The volume joins the library's holdings on artists' multiples, ephemera and the printed edition as a work in its own right.