The Funk & Wag from A to Z

This striking, oversized book, designed to evoke encyclopedias, is a highly creative amalgam of collage with a political bent and poetry. From 2011 to 2012, American artist Mel Chin (b. 1951) extracted all of the images from a twenty-five-volume set of Funk & Wagnall’s Universal Standard Encyclopedia (ca. 1953–56) and began visually re-editing. Thousands of images rendered by photomechanical reproduction that served a populist, mid-century encyclopedia are reconfigured with 21st-century hin...