A working library is an exploration of—and advocate for—All books
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Detail in typography
Jost Hochuli
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Ideology
Terry Eagleton
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Fateless
Imre Kertesz
An autobiographical novel, in which Kertész addresses his childhood in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Kertész’s writing is spare and damning, akin to the filmmaking of Michael Haneke.
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Minima Moralia
Theodor Adorno
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The Elements of Typographic Style
Robert Bringhurst
The typographer’s bible; a book that is never too far from reach.
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How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul
Adrian Shaughnessy
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Slow Learner
Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon’s early stories are facile at best, but the introduction to the collection—in which Pynchon addresses his readers and talks about his writing—is invaluable.
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Modern typography
Robin Kinross
A rare object—a book on typography that is as beautifully written as it is designed.
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Unjustified texts
Robin Kinross
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Diary of a Bad Year
J.M. Coetzee
Coetzee’s latest novel is written as two, entwined diaries—his own and that of a younger woman who he comes to pass the time with. Subtle and capable typography allows the trick to come off.
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Literary Theory
Terry Eagleton
The classic introduction to literary theory and a capable and somewhat subversive argument for Marxism.
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Boxed In
Mark Crispin Miller
An academic thesis that applies the traditional methods of close reading to television commercials.
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1984
George Orwell
The classic novel of authoritarianism. Also, the Bush administration’s how-to manual.
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Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon’s famously difficult masterpiece. I destroyed three copies in a (failed) effort to grasp it completely. But despite the challenges, the story is enormously charming; I have very warm feelings about the time I spent with it, and I still think of Byron each time I have to change a bulb.
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The Shock Doctrine
Naomi Klein
Klein expertly and devastatingly reveals the history behind a model of capitalism that first fed on disaster, then fomented it.
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Waiting for the Barbarians
J.M. Coetzee
Coetzee’s most important novel, sadly more relevant everyday. Perhaps the writer I most admire.
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Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
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Limbo
Bernard Wolfe
A bizarre dystopia in which the elite voluntarily amputate their limbs and have them replaced with high performing machines. Deeply misogynistic and perverse; the B-film version of 1984.
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The Ecocriticism Reader
Cheryll Glotfelty, Harold Fromm
An introductory collection in literary ecology, the movement that aims to do for environmentalism what gender and race studies did for civil rights.
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The Comedy of Survival
Joseph Meeker
Meeker argues that the destructive aspects of western civilization are founded on the tragic mode, while the comic mode offers a path for redemption. The foundational work of ecocriticism.
