Speck:
A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things
Peter Buchanan-Smith

In Speck, Peter Buchanan Smith asks artists, designers, lawyers, writers, collectors, and photographers to explore our obsessions with the small objects that loom large in our everyday lives. To wit: Maira Kalman empties people's pocketbooks; Nicholas Blechman and Jesse Gordon trace the history of the oldest piece of dust; David Horowitz catalogs manhole covers; and Peter Buchanan-Smith unearths a 1966 high school yearbook and transcribes the inscriptions ("To a real sweet and cute guy with a great personality. Remember English III"). Speck also shows how "ordinary" people can fascinate as much as "ordinary" objects: an interview with shoe shiner Harry Kitt, Manhattan's last practitioner of the dry-shine; photographs taken by a blind man on a sight-seeing tour; and a barber's extensive collection of earth, water, and air from around the world ask us to rethink our assumptions abou the commonplace. "Some people would like you to think that design is elitist, expensive, and esoteric. Peter Buchanan-Smith and his contributors prove them wrong. Bby exposing the hidden magic in the stuff that surrounds us, he makes the ordinary extraordinary, and changes our understanding of what design is and what it can be."—Michael Beirut, Pentagram "Disturbing closeups of lipsticks; a collection of heartbreakingly earnest lost-pet fliers; painstakingly documented differences in the scribbles produced by Eraser Mate or Dynagrip pens all help make up Speck: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things. Peter Buchanan-Smith presents various odd obsessions of 25 artists in various media, and the result is this set of 200 color and 50 b&w illustrations of "projects" that come dangerously close to drawing charges of haphazard art making and are all the more engaging for it."—Publisher's Weekly


Peter Buchanan-Smith is Art Director of the New York Times Op-Ed page.
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Editorial Reviews

Irrelevant Collection, Australian Style:
"SPECK is everything a coffee table book should be: shallow, amusing and never too hard to understand." (Spring 2002)

CD Syndicated (Canada):
"This book means to have it all - and, oh God, it very nearly does. This is the most intellectually satisfying and entertaining book in recent memory: a giddy, heartfelt brow-creaser." (February 12, 2002)

Collecting Obsessions, Tangents (fun n frenzy filled website) U.K.:
"Theres a host of other collections waiting for you in SPECK, and they all make for fascinating, addictive reading texts. As an affirmed devotee of the idea that the most important, beautiful things in life are to be found in the details, I love this book unashamedly and unconditionally. I have pored over it for hours, absorbing these odd collections and the obsessions that lurk behind them and wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone with a modicum of interest in the off-centre and the slightly unhinged.

Bloody marvellous." (April 2002)

The Bloomsbury Review:
"Within these pages individual eccentricities are greater than the sum of their parts. SPECK, then, offers readers several things at once: an affordable artists book, a paginated cabinet of wonders, and a vade mecum of the small, but consequent and consequential, things of this world." (January/February 2003)

How:
"strange, fascinating and inspiring." (October 2002)

I.D. Magazine:
"The 200 color pictures and 50 black and white illustrations accompany 25 artists projects that run the gamut from the hilariously obscure to the heart-wrenchingly profound." (May 2002)

I.D. Magazine:
"Its small scale provides a compact format for appreciating items from emptied pockets and pocket books, as well as other unique and intriguing ephemera." (August 2002)

The Midwest Book Review:
"Packed with color photos and intriguing essays." (Spring 2002)

Lost-pet posters best part of new book on collectors, The National Post (Canada):
"SPECK seems like a catalog from an art show that was never mounted." (January 26, 2002)

From lipstick to alphabet letters, People collect just about anything, Farm & Dairy (Salem, OH):
"An old axiom is that nearly everybody collects something. An update of the phrase might be somebody out there collects nearly everything.

Just how collectible people can be is rather profoundly explored in the new book from Princeton Architectural Press, SPECK: A CURIOUS COLLECTION OF UNCOMMON THINGS." (May 2, 2002)

Newsday:
". . .if your own collection of collections is clamoring for mention. . . you might enjoy [SPECK]." (December 1, 2002)

Mighty Mites, Print:
"'I see SPECK as a filter of sorts: a way of telling stories about the negative space of a subject, the things we never consider, says Buchanan-Smith. As his own project attests, those perceptions are not immutable; they can change and evolve. And within certain contexts, ordinary things can take on profound, even devastating meaning." (March/April 2002)

Dwell:
"Theres no shortage of books that beautifully illustrate personal collections of random ephemera, but Buchanan-Smiths is somehow far more intriguing than most." (August 2002)

Inside Antiques:
"This very unique volume was compiled by Peter Buchanan-Smith the art director of the New York Times op-ed page." (May 2002)

Design Counts: The Ordinary is Often Extraordinary, Paper:
"[SPECK is] a cool new book out this month which looks at how extraordinary the ordinary can be, from lost animal posters to the footprint designs of sneaker soles." (May 2002)

Found: the ones that got away, The Business FT Weekend Magazine (U.K.):
"The wonders of the Infinite are not only the preserve of religious or philosophical debate. Viewed with a sufficiently sharp eye, the everyday order or disorder of things is a fascinating treasure house of small secrets, just waiting to offer up revelation, or at least amusement, to those who are prepared to look intensely closely.

That at least is the view of the contributors to SPECK, a labour of love by a group of artists, photographers and other visually attuned types brought together by Peter Buchanan-Smith." (May 11, 2002)

Eye:
"Every once in a while, a book comes along that you love so much you want to buy a copy for everyone you know. SPECK. . . is one such gem.

SPECK redirects our gaze to see the extraordinary and poetic in the ordinary." (#45, 2002)

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