Please join us to celebrate the publication of Baskerville’s Teardrop Explodes: A Selection of Books as Muses, a new book by John Morgan. John Morgan studio designed all the graphics, signage and publications for Raven Row from its opening in 2009 until John’s death last September.
Completed shortly before he died, the book presents John’s selection of 31 books as Muses. Chosen primarily for their visual appearance and associative value, they are books that touched him and his work as a book designer in some way or another. Collected together as a Library of Muses, they express all the contradictions and compound sensibilities found in John’s work.
The criteria for selection are numerous and variable. Some were chosen for the title alone, or for the colour or materiality of the book, for the feel, the weight, the lightness, the rightness, the wrongness, the modesty, the excess, the charm, the humour, the attitude or bite of a book, the memory it conjures. Each Muse has its own magic and energy. Some bring reverberations of romance, others of fear, anxiety, humour or tragedy. Some are heroic. Some fail in technique or just miss the mark; they are imperfect. Some are chosen as signs, others as votives for direction.
Baskerville’s Teardrop Explodes is the second title from Ten Thousand Angels Press, a publishing imprint founded in 2025 by John Morgan, primarily to publish the second edition of his project Usylessly, which explores the non-literary aspects of the 1922 edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and a long-researched study of the Gallimard Blanche series of books. Usylessly edition two was published in October 2025. Both titles will be available to buy at this event.
All welcome, no booking required.
