A graphic-novel guide to the demented present from the authors of the bestselling The Age of Earthquakes

If you’re wondering why the inside of your head feels so strange these days, this book has the answers. 

 is a new kind of graphic novel that shows how you’ve been morphing into something else. It’s about the remaking of your interior world as the exterior world becomes more unfamiliar and uncertain. Basar, Coupland and Obrist’s cult prequel, 

The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present

, was hailed as “a meditation on the madness of our media” (Dazed) and “an abstract representation of how we feel about our digital world” (Hello!). Like that book, 

 collapses comedy and calamity at the speed of swipe. Dazzling images are sourced from over 70 of the world’s foremost artists, photographers, technologists and musicians, while Daly & Lyon’s kinetic design elevates the language of memes into a manifesto. Over 14 timely chapters, 

 tours through fame and intimacy, post-work and new crowds, identity crisis and eternity. Crazed, hilarious, unsettling, true. No other book today so presciently predicts how the present and the future have become the same thing. 

 is an accelerated tale for an even more accelerated culture. Welcome to the Age of You.

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The Extreme Self

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A toolkit for visual literacy in the 21st century.

David Reinfurt developed this 3-part curriculum teaching graphic design at Princeton. His course is divided into 3 topics, or fields of study: T-Y-P-O-G-R-A-P-H-Y, G-E-S-T-A-L-T and I-N-T-E-R-F-A-C-E. (We don’t know why they're all-caps and hyphenated.) He then took his lectures of those three semesters, and turned them into a 3-day conference, held in California last year. The condensed lectures presented at the conference were 

 turned into the three chapters of this book. 

Enjoy this fresh perspective on all you may have missed, or mis-remembered, from History of Graphic Design, including a detailed description of a subject Reinfurt has studied deeply: Muriel Cooper at MIT.

Foreword by Adam Michaels and Introduction by Ellen Lupton.

A *New* Program for Graphic Design

On design’s complicity in systems of oppression: critique and exit strategies from the author of The Politics of Design.

Capitalism could not exist without the coins, notes, documents, graphics, interfaces, branding and advertisements; artefacts that have been (partly) created by graphic designers. Even anti-consumerist strategies such as social design and speculative design are being appropriated within capitalist societies to serve economic growth. It seems that design is locked in a system of exploitation and profit, a cycle that fosters inequality and the depletion of natural resources.

 uses clear language and striking visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. The book contains many case studies of designed objects related to capitalist societies and cultures, and also examines how the education and professional practice of (graphic) designers supports the market economy and how design practice is caught within that very system.

is structured in chapters with titles of professions that designers can occupy (such as Educator; Engineer, Hacker, Futurist, Activist, etc.). These titles respond to the importance of not just how designers make work, but also how they perform daily economic and social roles.

Each chapter is divided into coherent articles in which diverse examples of objects and design practices are relayed. The book also features examples of radical design collectives, that work towards alternatives between design, community and reciprocity.

Ruben Pater (1977, NL) was educated as a graphic designer, worked in several design studios, also independently, and as an educator (e.g. MA Royal Academy of Art, The Hague). With Untold Stories Pater makes critical work on the edge of graphic design, journalism and activism.

is an inspirational book full of sources for design students, educators and visual communicators all over the world, just like Ruben's first book 

(BIS, 2016). www.untold-stories.net; @unlisted_roots; @capitalslock

Caps Lock

We think this book is seriously hot 🔥.

Edited by artist Anne de Vries in collaboration with an AI text generator, this book offers a “scroll” through the tumultuous present, from posthumanism to the anthropocene, with writings from esteemed contemporary theorists.

Deep Scroll

The decade that forged the Sottsass look: on the legendary designer’s ’60s collaboration with the Poltronova company.

The decade of collaboration between the Italian designer and architect Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007) and Tuscan furniture company Poltronova from 1960 to 1970 marked a phase of almost total freedom for the designer. The breadth of this era, both rich in creations and decisive in establishing the designer's style, is now accessible in this analysis of Sottsass' work, augmented with advertising photos from the period, annotated sketches and his personal photographs.
In 1956, at the request of the painter and sculptor Sergio Camilli, Sottsass became the artistic director of Poltronova, Camilli’s new furniture company. Sottsass then created Poltronova’s logo and produced its first catalogs. The vibrant, playful Poltronova catalogs express his experimentation with geometric shapes, mixes of materials and vibrant colors.
The brand became a true standard bearer of Italian creation, collaborating with renowned artists such as Max Ernst. This beautiful catalog, designed in a characteristic Sottsass style, serves as both a guide to all the pieces that he designed with Poltronova and also a celebration of the master’s playful spirit in wood, steel, marble and every material he could implement to construct his iconic chairs, cabinets, mirrors and more.

Sottsass: Poltronova 1958-1974

“An assessment of the diversity and creativity of type and how design makes sense of communicating text.” –Typeroom

, by internationally renowned Dutch graphic designer and typographer Gerard Unger (born 1942), is the first complete and accessible theory of the breathtakingly varied field of typography. “Of all designed objects letters are probably the most pervasive,” as Unger explains at the beginning of his study. “Very familiar yet amazingly diverse in their appearance … there seems to be no limit to human ingenuity when it comes to varying letterforms.”

Unger approaches the diversity and creativity of the field with a wide-ranging, reflective, critical theory of how we design and make sense of text. The history of typography is surveyed, from cuneiform script to Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet and today's digital developments, and explored in relation to how our eyes and brain process various letter shapes in order to understand text.

This volume consists of 24 concise chapters, each clearly describing a different aspect of type design (from practical considerations like spacing and rhythm, legibility, size and italics to more ineffable considerations like personality and preference). This theoretical material is illuminated by more than 200 illustrations and practical examples, and an extensive glossary succinctly explains terminology and key ideas.

Internationally oriented, and taking into consideration the past, present and future of typography, 

 will be an indispensable resource for graphic design students, professionals, and those with a general interest in text and printed matter.

Theory of Type Design

 is the first book ever to focus on the cover art of the modern US hip hop CD mixtape. From the bootleg recordings of Kool Herc in the 1970s to Lil’ Wayne, Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj and Drake’s latest opus, CD mixtapes have been and continue to be an essential part of hip hop culture. A visual world that reached unseen levels at the turn of the millennium, uncensored, unregulated and extreme, it is the most anarchic of all genres of graphic design.

To make their music stand apart from the dozens of mixtapes regularly released on sites like datpiff.com, hip hop artists rely on cover art to catch listeners’ eyes. The race for attention-grabbing covers led mixtapes to adopt a lurid movie-poster aesthetic: flashy and explosive.

Freed from label guidelines, legal opinion and moral hindrances, the five designers featured in 

―KidEight, Miami Kaos, Mike Rev and Tansta & Skrilla―created covers for the likes of Lil’ Wayne, Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj, Drake, Gucci Mane, Rick Ross, The Game, Tupac, Eminem, Raekwon, 2Chainz, Young Jeezy and A$AP. Along with 500 of these covers, interviews with the designers recount how they entered the hip hop mixtape industry, taking us through the creative process, describing how visual trends have come and gone, and how designing mixtape covers changed the trajectories of their lives. Originally published as a limited edition of 400 hand-numbered copies (which quickly sold out), 

 is at last available as a trade edition.

Damn Son, Where Did You Find This?

The phenomenon of "bootyfication,” from colonialism to contemporary visual culture.

 analyses the virality of images in our mediated society. The book is essentially a case study of the image of female butts and their influence in media, society and art. The butt, this book argues, is the democratic sex object par excellence, and the phenomenon of bootyfication exists in many contexts, from the exploitation of the body in colonialism to ’90s hiphop culture. 

 traverses various periods and locations to analyse the political implications of the image of the female butt. It goes on to discuss the role of the butt in film, internet art, music videos, dance and plastic surgery. Ultimately, 

 aims to reflect on how our society is conditioned by viral images that exist not only in a digital context, but also have consequences in the physical world.

With an introduction by Charlotte van Buylaere, curator and writer specializing in postfeminism and internet art, the book features Eminem, Nicki Minaj, Guy Debord, Beyoncé, Amy Schumer, Kara Walker, Josefine Baker, Kim K. Saartje Baartman, Amalia Ulman and many others.

Post Butt

Includes a CD titled “Last Classics Straight From The Underground” by Cory Arcangel vs DJ regularfantasy aka DJ Silk and “Bear With Me” A play for two webmasters starring Kevin Beversdorf by Olia Lialina.

New York–based artist Cory Arcangel (born 1978) is a leading exponent of technology-based art, drawn to video games and software for their ability to rapidly formulate new communities and traditions and, equally, their speed of obsolescence. His work bridges the highbrow and the lowbrow, popular culture and art. With 

, Arcangel presents media and cultural references that are widely accessible and known to the masses, in novel and unorthodox ways. Arcangel is a firm believer in making his work available and freely shares many of his video and code-based works on the Internet. His practice has gained him an immense online presence and following that is both independent of and outside the mainstream fine art world. This first comprehensive monograph was designed in close cooperation with the artist.

Asymmetrical Response

All The Small Things

What is good design if not designing for good? Ideas for a better world.

The world today can be an infinitely better place. With the increasing amount of issues affecting us as a whole in recent years, such as the global health crises, environmental destruction, and socioeconomic disparities, the onus is on each and every one of us to do everything we can for the generations to come.

Design has been ― and will always be ― our crucial tool in this regard. Whether it be through campaigns that rally for action, posters that raise awareness, or products that actually change bad habits, designers combine creativity, craft, and compelling visuals to materialize concepts that can effectively transform the way we live. 

 collates the best projects and insights to inspire not only those who wish to do good, but also hope for all in a better tomorrow.

Good By Design

An imaginary institution merging research with graphic-design experiments to create a new theory of typography.

The Palace of Typographic Masonry, an institute dedicated to the wealth and diversity of graphic languages from Arabic to Zapotec, is the brainchild of Dutch graphic designer Richard Niessen (born 1972). An imaginary institution, the Palace brings together Niessen's graphic-design experiments and his research to create an interdisciplinary cultural history and new theory of typography.

This book offers the reader a tour of an imaginary institution through 195 "exhibits" in Niessen's Palace of Typographic Masonry, organized as a progression through nine terms: sign, symbol, ornament, construction, play, poetics, dialogue, craft and order. As befits a tour of an imaginary institution devoted to graphic design, this spiral-bound publication is special, printed on perforated cardboard sheets.

The Palace of Typographic Masonry

Metahaven’s experimental, densely illustrated exhibition publication offers a unique perspective on their practice.

This book offers a fresh perspective on the popular and acclaimed Amsterdam-based design/art collective Metahaven. Densely illustrated, and very recognizably designed by Metahaven, it is the only survey of its work currently available. Led by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden, Metahaven works between filmmaking, art, research and design; it has produced documentary-based works, music videos, books (such as 

) and lectures that investigate matters of propaganda, truth and identity, especially with regard to the structuring of our symbolic realm. The book offers a variety of critical takes on the collective's work and examines its recent shift to moving-image work, thinking through the various ways in which its sprawling oeuvre is embedded in the sociopolitical challenges of the present.

PSYOP: An Anthology

Designs for more than one: Ideas, utopian propositions and practical solutions for reinterpreting and reconnecting empathically with the world around us.

This book brings together ideas and projects that seek to define a new role for design based on empathy. As a mediator of emotions and feelings, design is presented here as a practice that takes care as its main purpose. Designers adopt sensitive, diplomatic, sometimes therapeutic functions, with the aim of connecting us with one another but also with the world around us, with other species, with soil, water and even the universe. In this book, the reader will find new ideas, utopian propositions but also practical solutions for reinterpreting and reconnecting with the world around them. Taking food as a key medium of encounter, both between people and also with the more than human world, the designers featured in this book consciously operate in a multi-scalar realm – from the invisible microbial life that lives in our gut to the vast landscapes transformed by agricultural practices. Designs for more than one are those that take into consideration not just their immediate user or client but the many constituents inevitably impacted by any new object or action.

Edited by Mariana Pestana with Sumitra Upham and Billie Muraben, with written contributions by Ekin Ozbicer, Mariana Pestana, Susan Lanzoni, Naz Şahin, Billie Muraben, Sumitra Upham, FRAUD, Luigi Coppola and Vivien Sansour and Pelin Tan, Aslıhan Demirtaş, Black Athena Collective, theOtherDada, TiriLab, Counterspace, Anna Puigjaner (MAIO) with Alina Abouelenin, Aslı Uludağ, Dele Adeyemo, Young Curators Group, Eylül Şenses, Ulya Soley, Nur Horsanalı, Studio Ossidiana, Orkan Telhan + elii, Ibiye Camp, Ben Thorp Brown, Paula Gaetano Adi, Meriem Bennani, Calum Bowden, Jawa El Khash, Emmy Bacharach, Alice dos Reis, Macedo Cannat, Future Anecdotes.

Empathy Revisited

This reprint illustrates the power of design and features astonishingly contemporary graphics, advertisements and corporate identities for renowned brands.

Sutnar’s brilliant structural systems for clarifying otherwise dense industrial data placed him in the pantheon of Modernist pioneers and made him one of the visionaries of what is today called “information design.” Visual Design in Action is a snapshot of Sutnar’s American period (1939-1976), and includes graphics for Carr’s Department Store, advertisements for the Vera Neumann Company, identity for Addo-X, and other stunningly contemporary works. He is best known for his total design concept for the Sweets Catalog Service and lesser known for introducing the parenthesis as a way to typographically distinguish the area code from the rest of a phone number. Visual Design in Action is a testament to the historical relevance of Modernism and the philosophical resonance of Sutnar’s focus on the functional beauty of total clarity. This reprint of Visual Design in Action (originally published in limited quantities in 1961) is as spot-on about the power of design and “design thinking” as it ever was.

Visual Design in Action

An invigorating history of female coders, engineers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries who helped create and shape the internet.

“This is a radically important, timely work,” says Miranda July, filmmaker and author of 

. The history of technology you probably know is one of men and machines, garages and riches, alpha nerds and brogrammers--but from Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program in the Victorian Age, to the cyberpunk Web designers of the 1990s, female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of technology and innovation.

In fact, women turn up at the very beginning of every important wave in technology. They may have been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize, but they have always been part of the story.

 reporter and YACHT lead singer Claire L. Evans finally gives these unsung female heroes their due with her insightful social history of the Broad Band, the women who made the internet what it is today.

Seek inspiration from Grace Hopper, the tenacious mathematician who democratized computing by leading the charge for machine-independent programming languages after World War II. Meet Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, the one-woman Google who kept the earliest version of the Internet online, and Stacy Horn, who ran one of the first-ever social networks on a shoestring out of her New York City apartment in the 1980s.

Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention to become database poets, information-wranglers, hypertext dreamers, and glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs. This inspiring call to action shines a light on the bright minds whom history forgot, and shows us how they will continue to shape our world in ways we can no longer ignore.

Broad Band

A fun and fast portrait of life in Brooklyn in the 1960’s. Especially recommended for New Yorkers but a page turner for anyone.

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range.

The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of 

, James McBride’s funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award–winning 

, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.

As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York—overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.

Bringing to these pages both his masterly storytelling skills and his abiding faith in humanity, James McBride has written a novel every bit as involving as 

 demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us.

Deacon King Kong

One of the most important and influential books written in the past half-century, Robert M. Pirsig's 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

 is a powerful, moving, and penetrating examination of how we live . . . and a breathtaking meditation on how to live better. Here is the book that transformed a generation: an unforgettable narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father and his young son. A story of love and fear -- of growth, discovery, and acceptance -- that becomes a profound personal and philosophical odyssey into life's fundamental questions, this uniquely exhilarating modern classic is both touching and transcendent, resonant with the myriad confusions of existence . . . and the small, essential triumphs that propel us forward.

A gorgeous novel that begins a long and wonderful career of works that take place on Ojibwe land over many, many generations.

Set on and around a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, 

—the first novel by bestselling, National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich—is the epic story about the intertwined fates of two families: the Kashpaws and the Lamartines.

With astonishing virtuosity, each chapter draws on a range of voices to limn its tales. Black humor mingles with magic, injustice bleeds into betrayal, and through it all, bonds of love and family marry the elements into a tightly woven whole that pulses with the drama of life.

Filled with humor, magic, injustice and betrayal, Erdrich blends family love and loyalty in a stunning work of dramatic fiction

Love Medicine

The sophomore year classic! Good for new designers and old heads who want to remember the rules.

Renowned typographer and poet Robert Bringhurst brings clarity to the art of typography with this masterful style guide. Combining practical, theoretical, and historical, this book is a must for graphic artists, editors, or anyone working with the printed page using digital or traditional methods.

Having established itself as a standard in its field 

 is house manual at most American university presses, a standard university text, and a reference work in studios of designers around the world. It has been translated into italian and greek, and dutch.

The Elements of Typographic Style

The past's visionary future of domestic design, from Alison and Peter Smithson to Superstudio.

The “home of the future” has long been a topic of fascination in popular culture and an intriguing prospect for designers, and the 20th century offered up countless visions of the future of domestic life, from the aspirational to the radical. Whether it was the dream of the fully mechanized home or the notion that technology might free us from the home altogether, the domestic realm was a site of endless invention and speculation.

But what happened to those visions? Are the smart homes of today and patterns of use in the sharing economy the future that architects and designers once predicted, or has the “home” proved resistant to radical change?

Home Futures: Living in Yesterday’s Tomorrow

 explores different approaches to reinventing domestic life, tracing the social and technological developments that have driven change in the home. The first comprehensive survey of the 20th century’s aspirational, radical and futuristic visions of the home, this richly illustrated publication showcases a range of ideas and plans for the future―from the prescient to the fantastical―that designers produced as they imagined new ways of living at home and on the move, independently and collectively, with more and with less.

 brings together a range of leading contemporary curators, designers, architects, critics and academics to consider projects by designers such as Ettore Sottsass, Alison and Peter Smithson, Superstudio, Enzo Mari, Archigram, Dunne & Raby, OMA, Joe Colombo, Absalon, Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Atelier Van Lieshout, Yona Friedman, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Hamilton, Hans Hollein, Haus-Rucker-Co, Industrial Facility, Jan Kaplický, Frederick Kiesler, Linder, Enzo Mari, OpenStructures, Ugo la Pietra and many more. Looking back on more than a century of speculative design, 

 proposes that we are already living in yesterday’s tomorrow―just not in the way anyone predicted.

Home Futures

A multilayered exploration of the intimate relationship between human and design and rethink the philosophy of design in a multidimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media.

The question “are we human?” is both urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multilayered exploration of the intimate relationship between human and design and rethink the philosophy of design in a multidimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media.

The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outside space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design.

Colomina’s and Wigley’s field notes offer an archaeology of the way design has gone viral and is now bigger than the world. They range across the last few hundred thousand years and the last few seconds to scrutinize the uniquely plastic relation between brain and artifact. A vivid portrait emerges. Design is what makes the human. It becomes the way humans ask questions and thereby continuously redesign themselves.

Beatriz Colomina is an architectural historian and theorist who has written extensively on questions of architecture, art, technology, sexuality and media. She is Founding Director of the interdisciplinary Media and Modernity Program at Princeton University and Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Architecture. Her work has been published in more than 25 languages and her books include 

Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies

Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines

Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media

Mark Wigley is professor of architecture at Columbia University. A historian and theorist, he explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture and technology. His books include: 

Derrida’s Haunt: The Architecture of Deconstruction

White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture

Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire

Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio

Are We Human: Notes on an Archaeology of Design

 with Beatriz Colomina, in association with their curation of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial. He has also curated exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Drawing Center in New York; the Witte de With and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. His latest book is 

Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation

 (Lars Müller, 2018). He was born in New Zealand, trained there as an architect, then as a scholar, and is based in New York.

are we human?

An updated version of the seminal 1994 classic volume on the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

1. All things are impermanent.
2. All things are imperfect.
3. All things are incomplete.

 quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things unconventional...

Leonard Koren was trained as an architect but never built anything — except an eccentric Japanese tea house — because he found large, permanent objects too philosophically vexing to design. Instead he created 

, one of the premier avant-garde magazines of the 1970's. Since then Koren has produced books about design (

Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement

Which “Aesthetics” Do You Mean: Ten Definitions

Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

A survey of Fuller’s work organized by parallel conceptual threads rather than in a linear chronology.

The work of R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) is among the most extraordinary and inventive in 20th-century design and architecture, not least for its incorporation of a range of intellectual and technical disciplines. Fuller described himself as an “engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, comprehensive designer and choreographer.''

 is a major reassessment of Fuller’s legacy in the context of design, examining his singular vision of new conceptual models for design and architecture, alongside his ideas on their potentially world-altering consequences. Drawing extensively on his archive and with over 300 images, the book follows Fuller’s explorations of geometry, language and intellectual property in their relation to design principles and pedagogy, organizing its survey of Fuller’s work through parallel conceptual threads rather than in a linear chronology of his career.

Pattern Thinking

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was an architect, engineer, geometrician, cartographer, philosopher, futurist, inventor of the famous geodesic dome, and one of the most brilliant thinkers of his time. For more than five decades, he set forth his comprehensive perspective on the world’s problems in numerous essays, which offer an illuminating insight into the intellectual universe of this renaissance man. These texts remain surprisingly topical even today, decades after their initial publication. While Fuller wrote the works in the 1960’s and 1970’s, they could not be more timely: like desperately needed time-capsules of wisdom for the critical moment he foresaw, and in which we find ourselves. Long out of print, they are now being published again, together with commentary by Jaime Snyder, the grandson of Buckminster Fuller. Designed for a new generation of readers, Snyder prepared these editions with supplementary material providing background on the texts, factual updates, and interpretation of his visionary ideas.

Initially published in 1969, and one of Fuller’s most popular works, 

 is a brilliant synthesis of his world view. In this very accessible volume, Fuller investigates the great challenges facing humanity, and the principles for avoiding extinction and “exercising our option to make it.” How will humanity survive? How does automation influence individualization? How can we utilize our resources more effectively to realize our potential to end poverty in this generation? He questions the concept of specialization, calls for a design revolution of innovation, and offers advice on how to guide “spaceship earth” toward a sustainable future.And it Came to Pass – Not to Stay brings together Buckminster Fuller’s lyrical and philosophical best, including seven “essays“ in a form he called his “ventilated prose”, and as always addressing the current global crisis and his predictions for the future. These essays, including “How Little I Know”, “What I am Trying to Do”, “Soft Revolution”, and “Ethics”, put the task of ushering in a new era of humanity in the context of “always starting with the universe.“ In rare form, Fuller elegantly weaves the personal, the playful, the simple, and the profound.

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

An excellent reference guide to recent and historical place-oriented art and activism.

In The Lure of the Local, Lucy R. Lippard, one of America's most influential art writers, weaves together cultural studies, history, geography, and contemporary art to provide a fascinating exploration of our multiple senses of place. Expanding her reach far beyond the confines of the art world, she discusses community, land use, perceptions of nature, how we produce the landscape, and how the landscape affects our lives. In this extensively illustrated, beautifully produced volume, she consistently makes unexpected connections between contemporary art and its political, social, and cultural contexts.

The Lure of the Local

 is a masterwork in art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this influential book presents Albers’s singular explanation of complex color theory principles.

Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, 

 first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten color studies chosen by Albers, and has remained in print ever since. With over a quarter of a million copies sold in its various editions since 1963, 

 remains an essential resource on color, as pioneering today as when Albers first created it.

’s initial publication, this anniversary edition presents a significantly expanded selection of close to sixty color studies alongside Albers’s original text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusion of transparency and reversed grounds. A celebration of the longevity and unique authority of Albers’s contribution, this landmark edition will find new audiences in studios and classrooms around the world.

Interaction of Color

Part artist's book, part exhibition catalog, this book chronicles Tauba Auerbach’s multimedia syntheses of abstraction, science, graphic design and typography

Tauba Auerbach studies the boundaries of perception through an art and design practice grounded in math, science and craft. Published in conjunction with the first major survey of the artist’s work, this volume, designed by Auerbach in collaboration with David Reinfurt, spans 16 years of their career, highlighting their interest in concepts such as duality and its alternatives, interconnectedness, rhythm and four-dimensional geometry.

Encapsulating Auerbach’s longstanding consideration of symmetry, texture and logic, the title 

 offers a framework for this volume’s typeface, design and structure. Images of more than 130 paintings, drawings, sculptures and artist’s books created between 2004 and 2020 are mirrored by a comprehensive selection of related reference images, illuminating their multifaceted practice as never before. Essays by Joseph Becker, Jenny Gheith and Linda Dalrymple Henderson provide further context for the work.

The book contains original marble patterns created specially for the book by the artist on both the endpapers and the edges of the book block. The cover is lettered in Auerbach’s calligraphy, applied in black foil on a silver paper. The typeface was designed by David Reinfurt with Auerbach expressly for this publication, and is based on their handwriting.

New York–based artist Tauba Auerbach (born 1981) grew up in San Francisco and graduated from Stanford University in 2003. They apprenticed and worked as a sign painter at New Bohemia Signs in San Francisco. In 2013 they founded Diagonal Press. They are represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and Standard Oslo.

S v Z

A tremendous feat of bookmaking, Taryn Simon’s The Color of a Flea’s Eye deploys prints, postcards and other ephemera to explore the organization of visual information through the New York Public Library's beloved archive.

A tremendous feat of bookmaking, Taryn Simon’s 

 deploys prints, postcards and other ephemera to explore the organization of visual information through the New York Public Library's beloved archive.

 presents a history of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection―a legendary trove of more than one million prints, photographs, postcards, posters and images from disused books and periodicals. Since its inception in 1915, the Picture Collection has been a vital resource for writers, historians, artists, filmmakers, fashion designers and advertising agencies.
In her work 

 (2012-20), Simon (born 1975) highlighted the impulse to organize visual information, and pointed to the invisible hands behind seemingly neutral systems of image gathering. Each of Simon’s photographs is made up of an array of images selected from a given subject folder, such as Chiaroscuro, Handshaking, Haircombing, Express Highways, Financial Panics, Israel, and Beards and Mustaches. In artfully overlapped compositions, only slices of the individual images are visible, each fragment suggesting its whole. Simon sees this extensive archive of images as the precursor to internet search engines. Such an unlikely futurity in the past is at the core of the Picture Collection. The digital is foreshadowed in the analogue, at the same time that history―its classifications, its contents―seems the stuff of projection.

Simon spent years sifting through letters, memos and records that reveal an untold story between the library and artists, media, government and a broader public. These documents also divulge the removal and transfer of photographs from the democratically circulating picture-collection folders to the photography collection in the late 1980s when their marketplace value became apparent. Simon’s selection of photographs from these transfers highlights gender, immigration, race and economy in America alongside the technical development of photography.

Produced in direct collaboration with the artist, the book contains 57 individually hand tipped-in plates, numerous gatefolds and a variety of unique papers, as well as essays by Joshua Chuang, head of The New York Public Library’s Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, and Tim Griffin, executive director and chief curator at The Kitchen.

The Color of a Flea's Eye

Utilizing found images from textbooks along with his own geometric patterns, Matthew Craven’s collages and illustrations seek to create a new handmade universe, juxtaposing imagery from different cultures and time periods to celebrate commonalities. Photographs of archaeological remains and the natural world are overlaid on colorful tiled backgrounds drawn on the back of vintage movie posters, to create a hypnotic and mesmerizing vernacular of symbols and designs. Featuring an introduction by LACMA curator Leslie Jones, 

, is the first publication of Craven’s art and a reconfiguration of traditional historical narratives inspired by obsessive formations.

Primer

For more than 20 years, German photographer and filmmaker Armin Linke has been photographing the effects of globalization, the wholesale transformation of infrastructure and the networking of the post-industrial society via digital information and communication technologies.

Do you have to see it to design it? Does it need to see to be seen? Do you believe it if you see it? If you see something, say something?

For more than 20 years, German photographer and filmmaker Armin Linke (born 1966) has been photographing the effects of globalization, the wholesale transformation of infrastructure and the networking of the post-industrial society via digital information and communication technologies.

His photographs show that the modern world is a massive profusion of data, where the material infrastructures―consisting of computer centers, data highways and server rooms―are largely invisible.

The Appearance of That Which Cannot Be Seen

, Linke invited scientists, philosophers and theoreticians to examine his picture archive. Ariella Azoulay, Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel, Mark Wigley, and Jan Zalasiewicz made a selection of images and in the process opened up Linke’s photos to a variety of different readings.

Designed by Jan Kiesswetter, Mevis van Deursen

Potawatomi professor Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the role of Indigenous knowledge as an alternative or complementary approach to Western mainstream scientific methodologies.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In 

, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Is it even important to know how the sausage 

 made? Maybe the better question is, how 

 made? According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, humans on earth are facing a serious shortage of protein-rich food. Now more than ever, progressive meat consolidation could mean the survival of our kind. And could give us something to look forward to.

The sausage is one of mankind’s first-ever designed food items. A paragon of efficient butchery, it was designed to make the most of animal protein in times of scarcity, and dates back as far as 3300 BC. Today, the sausage remains a cornerstone of our food culture. England alone has over 470 different types of breakfast sausages. Now, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), we are facing a serious shortage of protein-rich food. Meat, in particular, will be scarce. One reason for this is over-consumption: in today’s world, we simply consume too many animal products.

So can we look to the sausage to provide a solution once again, in order to reduce the consumption of meat? Can the use of new ingredients replace the meat and increase the diversity of our diets? To answer these questions, a chef of molecular gastronomy, a master butcher and a designer have teamed up to look into sausage production techniques and potential new ingredients―like insects, nuts and legumes―to create the “future sausage.” This book takes the reader on a journey through all the building blocks of a sausage and presents lesser-known ingredients, carefully selected for their “future potential.”

Sausage of the Future

Originally published in 1977, Four Basic Kinds of Lines & Colour is a classic artist's book by preeminent conceptual artist Sol LeWitt.

 is a classic artist’s book by preeminent conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). Featuring 34 pages of drawings, the work is an early example of LeWitt’s rigorous, algorithmic process in which a set of rules, applied to generate an image, are subsequently run through all of their permutations.

In the late 1960s LeWitt began applying this technique, first developed for his wall drawings, to artists’ books. In this publication, LeWitt demonstrates the 34 ways that basic lines (horizontal, vertical, left-facing diagonal and right-facing diagonal) can be rendered in four colors (red, yellow, blue and black), with each page displaying a single combination (for example, horizontal lines in blue).

The book is one of LeWitt’s signature bookworks, which in its original edition remains quite scarce, so this new facsimile edition is significant; almost none, if any, of his books (he produced over 50) have been reprinted.

Published by Primary Information / Printed Matter Inc.

Four Basic Kinds of Lines & Colour

In print for over fifty years, D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths has introduced generations to Greek mythology — and continues to enthrall readers.

 has introduced generations to Greek mythology—and continues to enthrall young readers.

Here are the greats of ancient Greece—gods and goddesses, heroes and monsters—as freshly described in words and pictures as if they were alive today.

Books