ANNA HOWARD — Coasters, The New Rare Editions, London, 2026

A6, 10.5 × 14.8 cm. 56 pages. Perfect bound. 120gsm uncoated text; 150gsm uncoated cover. First edition of 100 copies. Each copy uniquely wine-stained by the artist. Two special-edition postcards produced for the publication by The New Rare Editions. Published by The New Rare Editions, London, 2026. The New Rare Pocket Library, No. 02.

Condition: New. Each copy intentionally and individually marked by the artist with a wine-glass ring; variations in density, shape and placement are integral to the edition and are not condition defects.

The second publication in The New Rare Pocket Library, Coasters takes an object already built around use, repetition and residue and moves it into the book.

The cover is where the edition stops behaving like an ordinary edition. Howard individually marked every copy using the base of a wine glass, leaving a different circular stain on each one. The ring may be faint, doubled, pooled, incomplete or almost geometrically perfect.

100 copies. 100 different stains.

The gesture is small but exact. A disposable trace normally wiped from a table becomes the distinguishing mark of the book itself. Serial publishing remains intact, but uniformity doesn’t: every copy belongs to the same edition while carrying a state that can’t be precisely repeated.

There’s a neat reversal in the title. A coaster exists to protect a surface from exactly the mark Howard deliberately transfers onto the book. The thing designed to prevent the stain becomes the subject of an edition whose identity depends on staining.

The residue becomes the edition mark.

Two special-edition postcards were made specifically for Coasters and published by The New Rare Editions, extending the project beyond the bound book into another format built for handling, circulation and removal. Book, stain and postcard become related but independently mobile parts of the same publication.

That sits directly inside the proposition of the Pocket Library: “The book is not a record of the work. It is one of the places the work goes.” Here the work doesn’t simply enter the book as reproduction. It lands physically on its cover — and then travels again through the postcards.

Published as Pocket Library No. 02, following Giorgio Sadotti’s Play, the book belongs to a series of small publications made with artists from material already in circulation — works, images, texts, documents and ideas given another place to exist.

The New Rare at Glue Book Fair 2026