American Neon Signs by Day & Night

Spiral binding. Sq. 8to [20x20cm]. First printing. Pictorial thin card wrappers. Fourteen fold out plates: photographs of neon signs in the US, taken at night and in daytime, printed side by side on foldouts; the majority taken in Las Vegas in 1979. A near fine copy with just the slightest shelf wear to edges and cover. *** A rare first printing of this publication, limited to 1000 copies. This first printing was part of a series of books “illustrating the creative printing by Rosbeek”. A second edition (limited to 750 copies) was published two years later in 1982.*** In the mid seventies Dutch photographer Toon Michiels (1950-2015) made various journeys to the USA, where he undertook a number of road trips in a rented car. He developed a fascination for the spectacular neon signs that motels and restaurants had placed along the highways to lure passing drivers to make a stop-over. Michiels photographed them by day and by night in a systematic way: frontal view, placing them in the middle of the frame with just a bit of space around them. It resulted in a stunning publication with fourteen fold out plates showing the same neon sign in the daytime and at night. Our copy is the scarce first printing from 1980, limited to 1000 copies. An exhibition of this series was staged in 2016 at the prestigious Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam and Les Rencontres in d’Arles, bringing this lost classic back to people’s attention.