I Can’t Believe I’m Blogging!

Greetings to all the 12ozers out there. I admit that when I first heard about this thing called blogging, my
reaction was, “Who would ever want to spend time writing or reading all that stuff?!?” Well times change.
I’m writing and we’ll see if anyone’s reading. I’m anticipating that 2009 will be an interesting year for me with
a lot of travels, events and other stuff surrounding the new 25th anniversary edition of Subway Art so I’ll use
this space as a sort of diary—starting with yesterday. BLADE came over to check out the new edition. Henry
and I have only just received advance copies from Thames & Hudson in England. The rest are still on their
way by slow boat from China. There are actually 4 editions—UK, US, Germany and Italy—sorry no France but
don’t know why. It is a VERY BIG book. One of our first reactions was, “Well this one will be much harder to
steal.” But then a copy mysteriously disappeared from Henry’s studio! Anyway BLADE was super happy to
see that he still had his centerfold but about 4 times bigger than the old one.

There are two different covers. The publishers in each country decide on the covers. The idea is that they
know what their book buying public wants. We’ll see about that.The UK and Italy chose a cover with
oversized graffiti by RASTA (I think he’ll be happy!) and Germany and US chose Dondi painting in the
yards for their cover. It will be interesting to find out who likes which. I’m happy with both versions and
love the whole book. The printing is gorgeous. When we published the first edition in 1984, we never
expected to still be talking about subway graffiti in 2009.

Signing off for now,
Martha C.