Agenda

Guardian press photo booklet series

UK readers should keep an eye out for a 9-days series of booklets being distributed with The Guardian and sister Sunday newspaper The Observer, beginning tomorrow, Saturday 7 November 2009. Tomorrow's volume of !00 Years of Great Press Photographs takes the reader from 1910 to 1929, whereafter the series moves a decade at a time up to the present day. More information at The Guardian's website.

Blurb BookSmart v2.5 released

Online book printing and publishing service Blurb has today released an improved version of its book creation software. BookSmart, which is a free dowload from the company's website. Blurb has also introduced a flat rate shipping fee for orders of between 1 and 5 books, which means the vast majority of orders should now be cheaper. Full details at Blurb.com.

Impressions calls for photobooks

We received this information too late for the next issue of Ag which is at the printers, so here it is online. Impressions Gallery in York is calling for independently published photobooks to be offered for sale during its Photography Book Fair Weekend, 24-25 October 2009. You have until 6 October to apply, so hurry up. For full details click here.

Spring 2009 of Ag in the shops

The Spring 2009 issue of Ag, Ag55, is in the shops and on its way to subscribers, and includes the final call for entries to our Brilliant Book Awards. We’re looking for your best photobook ideas, and the winners will be printed as beautiful hardbacks by Blurb.com -- plus prizes from Adobe of Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom 2. Over £2500 in prizes to be won! Cover photographer Andy Gotts talks about photographing the stars and we have exclusive new colour work from John Blakemore. David Lee reviews a new body of work from Chris Killip -- Here Comes Everybody -- and Bill Jay advises on how to fake appearing profound about photography. Gerry Badger hails a series of books on photobooks from Errata Editions and Tim Daly describes how to reproduce b&w print effects using inkjet output. Eddie Ephraums discusses the relationship between text and pictures, plus we have six great portfolios in Scene Around. And we have the usual mix of new and views and some of our favourite new photobooks. Click the link top left for more.