We're a few years late to the game on this story, but better than never, right? But perhaps we're not the only ones who didn't know that the celebrated film director/producer Francis Ford Coppola has been publishing a print magazine entirely dedicated to short fiction, plays, and film essays since the Clinton administration. In fact, his publication, Zoetrope: All-Story, won the 2018 National Magazine Award for Fiction and regularly attracts superstar talent like David Mamet, Margaret Atwood, and Haruki Murakami. Each issue is designed by a guest artist, ranging from Agnès Varda to David Bowie. Additionally, the quarterly actively seeks submissions at various intervals throughout the year, providing specific guidelines for each issue.

Co-founded with author Adrienne Brodeur, Zoetrope has remained a print-only endeavor since its inception--itself something of a minor miracle in the age of the internet.

The Spring 2019 edition is guest designed by San Francisco-based graphic artist Barbara Stauffacher Solomon and featuring work by musician Tom Waits and Ben Stroud. The publication of the latest issue coincides with a revamped website, where visitors can preview forthcoming stories and order back issues.

A 1996 story explored Coppola's desire to pursue such an endeavor, especially after his attempt running San Francisco's City magazine flopped. "Francis has had this dream for a long time," co-founder Brodeur said in that piece. "He enjoys writers a great deal. He knows that story magazines are not profitable ventures... Literature is where he's gotten some of his greatest work."

A comprehensive display of Ed Ruscha’s artist’s books, text-based paintings, and photography opened in London last week at Tate Modern’s Blavatnik building. A Nebraska-born artist who defies categorization, Ruscha is adept in any medium, deriving inspiration from seemingly mundane architecture, topography, and mass media. Book collectors will be most familiar with his photobooks, e.g. Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), Various Small Fires and Milk (1964), Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967), and Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968), but this exhibition spans his six-decade career and includes some forty works on paper gifted to Tate by the artist following his 2015 promise to donate all future prints to the national collection.

“His text-based works, photographic series of urban landscapes and enigmatic artist’s books were hugely influential in the development of conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, and his sardonic takes on the banality of modern life continue to inspire generations of artists,” reads a statement released by Tate Modern.

Running through spring 2020, ARTIST ROOMS: Ed Ruscha draws from a touring collection of over 1,600 works of modern and contemporary art owned jointly by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland.

Last year, the Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, presented a major Ruscha exhibition titled Ed Ruscha: Archaeology and Romance.