The End is Near! Visions of Apocalypse, Millennium and Utopia
by Roger Manley
10" x 10", 196 Pages

Winner of the 1998 Benjamin Franklin National Book Award for Best First Book

Essays by:
The Dalai Lama
Howard Finster
Stephen Jay Gould
Rebecca Hofberger
John the Divine
Roger Manley
Adam Parfrey

Paperback:$29.95
Hardcover:$55.00

First gathered in a critically-acclaimed exhibition at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, The End is Near! offers the largest collection of visionary art ever assembled on the subjects of Apocalypse, Millennium, and Utopia. Many works included here were shown for the first time in this exhibit and have never appeared in print. Alongside these powerful, challenging, and at times obsessively elaborate works of art, The End is Near! presents some of the most provocative and innovative minds of our time probing the mysteries of the year 2000, the coming age, and the end of the world. Harvard scientist Stephen Jay Gould, Georgia's famous visionary evangelist Reverend Howard Finster, Apocalypse culture expert Adam Parfrey, and Nobel Prize recipient His Holiness the Dalai Lama join curator Roger Manley and dozens of gifted, world-renowned visionary artists in the quest for ultimate knowledge.

The End is Near! reveals a strong spiritual kinship between these brilliant minds of today and major luminaries of the past like Hieronymus Bosch, William Blake and Emmanuel Swedenborg. It hints at shared understandings between self-taught contemporary visionaries and such ancient prophetic traditions found in Classical Greece, Aboriginal Australia and the seers of the Holy Scriptures. Included in The End is Near! is the entire Revelation of St. John the Divine, perhaps the most influential and widely referenced -yet rarely read- work on the ultimate fate of humanity and the universe.

The End is Near! should become compulsory reading for anyone intrigued by the mysteries, depths, and triumphs of the human spirit.

"Without question, the slickest, classiest, heaviest, headiest 1998 outsider art publication. One might be tempted to call it the contemporary zeitgeist of outsider art."
- Michael Bonesteel, The Outsider

"The obsessiveness, the intensity and yes, sometimes the just plain madness that characterizes what's called Outsider Art also account for its extraordinary vitality and the direct impact of these images on the viewer. The End is Near should put to rest any questions of whether "outsider" art should be studied, collected, or shown in museums at all.
- John Strausbaugh, New York Press

The End is Near features the work of the following visionary artists:

William Adkins | Z.B. Armstrong | Bill Bruley | Frank Bruno | Harry Leroy Brunson | Tom Carapic | Pierre Carbonel | Joe Coleman | John Day | Anthony Dominguez | Yanko Domsic | Edmond Engel | Paul Esparza | Howard Finster | Tim Fowler | Mary Mac Franklin | Victor Joseph Gatto | Robert Gie | Patrick Gimel | Hugo Hempel | Arnold Hendrickson | Oskar Herzberg | Henry Hill | Chris Hipkiss | Vojislav Jakic | Norbert Kox | Albert Krehlik | Paul Laffoley | Charles Keeling Lassiter | Frederick William Lawrence | Stuart Little | McKendree Robbins Long | Moog (Peter Meyer) | Neter (August Natterer) | Ellis Nelson | Kendall Polster | Stephen Powers | Irwin Rabinov | Royal Robertson | Xavier Schelkle | Hans Schoenleber | Christine Sefolosha | Paul Shimmack | Bob Smythe | John Sowell | L.C. Spooner | Vonn Stropp | Stanislav Szukalski | William Thomas Thompson | Philip Travers | Eugene Von Bruenchenhein | Grant Wallace | Melvin Milky Way | Perley M. Wentworth | Sanford A. Winslow | Tony Wise | Anthony Yoder | David Zeldis | Konrad Zeuner

dilettantepress.com/books/end.html

Starstruck
Photographs from a Fan
by Gary Boas
8" x 8", 300 Pages

Selected by Artforum Magazine as "Best of 2000"

Essays by:
Carlo McCormick
Michael Musto

$20 Flexibound

Starstruck unearths the spectacular photo archives of one of the most obsessively devoted fans of our time.

Beginning in 1966 at age 15, Gary Boas would travel from his small town of Lancaster, PA to New York City, where he would sit for hours outside the theaters, parties and restaurants and wait in hopes of photographing famous people. Using his Brownie Bullseye camera, he captured everyone from silver screen goddesses and Broadway legends to forgotten local beauty queens; from rock stars to politicians; porn stars to the Pope. Boas¹s obsession continued, uninterrupted, for the next 35 years.

In 1999, on a visit to Boas's home in Lancaster, the editors of Dilettante Press discovered rows of meticulously assembled scrapbooks lining the sagging bookshelves of Boas's bedroom. The albums revealed a vast personal archive of over 50,000 images of famous people. This discovery resulted in an internationally acclaimed photo exhibition and the book, Starstruck: Photographs from a Fan.

Culled from Boas's images from the 60s and 70s, Starstruck unearths never-before-seen candid moments of the most famous superstars of the era, alongside many forgotten and cult personalities. Combined with Boas's own insightful and astonishing stories of his interaction with the stars, Starstruck documents, with a refreshing vitality, a bygone era of glamour, fashion, and pre-paparazzi innocence. The result is fascinating portrait of contemporary American culture, taken from the remarkable perspective of an unknown fan.

Starstruck features essays by Paper Magazine Senior Editor Carlos McCormick and Village Voice correspondent Michael Musto

*Selected by Artforum Magazine as "Best of 2000*

"Remarkable...compulsively absorbing"
- Ken Johnson, New York Times

"Starstruck unexpectedly celebrates the beauty of the amateur-one whose vocation is not driven by a hunger for money, but by love. The book is a breath of fresh air"
- Warren Beatty

"Really fabulous...I could not put it down.I didn't expect it would be such a great read, as well as, of course, being a profound social and cultural document."
- Ken Coupland, Graphis

dilettantepress.com/books/starstruck.html

Extreme Canvas
Hand-Painted Movie Posters from Ghana
by Ernie Wolfe, III

9" x 12", 305 Pages
Paperback: $45.00
Hardcover: $75.00
 

Essays by:
Clive Barker
LeVar Burton
Joe Coleman
Deirdre Evans-Pritchard
Walter Hill
Angelica Huston
John Milius
Roy Sieber
Paul Hayes Tucker
Gus Van Sant
Ernie Wolfe, III
John Yau

In the 1980s a group of entrepreneurs in Ghana created small-scale, mobile film distribution empires, hitting the road with videocassettes, television monitors, portable gas-powered generators and rolled-up, hand-painted, artist-signed canvas posters. This new medium created the first opportunity for some of the best young painters in Ghana to express themselves on a public scale. In the frequent absence of an original image upon which to base the work they had been commissioned to produce, the artists in this book inevitably created cinematic paintings that were largely interpretive and imagination-driven.

From Publishers Weekly
"Just as British television dramas are culturally repackaged for American audiences, so the hand-painted movie posters serve to claim the movies for the people of West Africa," writes one of many contributors to Extreme Canvas: Hand-Painted Movie Poster from Ghana. Edited by Los Angeles gallerist Ernie Wolfe III, the book includes 350 colorful, highly stylized illustrations for everything from "Children of the Corn 3" to "6 Lovers of Melody" (with a disproportionate number of action and other horror flicks in between) by artists such as Alex Nkrumah-Boateng, D.A. "Bright" Obens and Kofi Kuwirnu, all of whom contribute photos and biographical notes. John Yau, LeVar Burton, Clive Barker, Anjelica Huston and Gus Van Sant, among others, provide critical essays and commentary.

From Library Journal
African art scholar and West L.A. gallery owner Wolfe has performed a singularly stunning achievement by both introducing and cataloging over 350 luridly colorful examples of the unique way of advertising Hollywood and Hong Kong films in Ghana. Produced on recycled canvas flour sacks that have been stitched together, the posters were created mostly between 1985 and 1996 by a small group of artists to promote the movies shown in theaters and video clubs. To help elucidate this garish West African refraction of American pop culture, Wolfe has assembled numerous essays from a critically diverse array of artists, scholars, and filmmakers. Ghanaians, it quickly becomes apparent, are not chick-flick fans. The posters are divided among six film genres, including sf and fantasy, action and adventure, war and urban commandos, horror, comedy and drama, and martial arts. Writer and director Walter Hill nails it dead-on in his introduction to the action and adventure section when he writes, "To be brutally honest, many of these posters are more interesting than the films." Along with many lush, full-page representations of the posters, Wolfe includes photographs of and statements from the artists. In both idea and execution, Dilettante Press is carving a wonderfully quirky niche for itself in mainstream popular culture publishing with this visual treasure. Despite its seemingly narrow academic bent, this book is unconditionally and enthusiastically recommended for all pop culture collections. Barry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX