Adobe Books lives on… we hope. The Mission’s beloved 23-year-old bookshop – which reported it would be going out of business multiple times last year – now has plans to stay open as a collective.

Adobe owner Andrew McKinley first reported his shop would be closing in spring of 2012, and then again late summer. His reason: an excessive rent increase for his storefront, in a building at 16th and Valencia Streets. Unless someone was planning to swoop down to be the store’s financial superhero, the proposed rent was too high and McKinley was sure he could no longer afford to keep the shop afloat.

Read more »

Crafters! Ghouls! Two adorable books appeared in the mail recently: Chris Marks' Horrorgami: 25 Creepy Creatures, Ghastly Ghouls, and Other Fiendish Paper Projects (Running Press, 128 pp., $13) and Hannah Simpson's Knitmare on Elm Street: 20 Projects That Go Bump in the Night (Running Press, 127 pp., $17).

Read more »

Perhaps it's indicative of our societal aversion to life's end that Jory John just finished an email interview with the Guardian. How else would one explain the meteoric success of his tiny book, lightly filled with illustrations of dinos, Yetis, and ponies bemoaning their dead friends in deadpan one-liners? Seriously, they he and co-author Avery Monsen hold Tumblr records, and Ellen DeGeneres once tweeted about them, and their book is now available in Catalan. Surely, in All My Friends Are Dead they have crafted the most Internet-ready nugget known to humankind. 

Small surprise then, that All My Friends Are Still Dead (Chronicle Books, 108 pages, $9.95) is now tromping about, introducing us to the rolling 'bot of eternal isolation, a Godzilla with daddy issues, and a real bitchy toothbrush-toothpaste duo. We hollered at John to find out how life has changed since he became a ruler of the Internet. Read more »

Mother, Brother, Lover
By Jarvis Cocker
Faber and Faber
208 pp., hardcover, $17
 
Books of lyrics — words uprooted from the music and set down naked on the page — are traditionally published with either self-congratulation or doubts by songwriters. Jarvis Cocker has some doubts.

Read more »

Beck
By Autumn de Wilde
Chronicle Books
176 pp., hardcover, $35
 
For more than a decade and half, pop culture photographer (and video director) Autumn de Wilde has chronicled Beck, the iconic songwriter and her personal friend, on tour, in the studio, and as he’s posed before the camera — the latter especially.

Read more »