sshhh! This is a working library.

Minima Moralia

Theodor Adorno

Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood

Linked

Albert-László Barabási

A fascinating take on networks that looks for and finds similarities among people, computers, cells, and atomic particles. more

There’s nothing funny about design

David Barringer

A clever (and, yes, funny) collection of essays. Sidebars pepper the text with sources and commentary; the latter often reveal less about the subject matter than the nervous and endearing habits of the writer. more

Library

Matthew Battles

Battles’ lively history runs from the ancients to the internet, with tales of libraries built and burned along the way. In this, one thing becomes clear: that any library, once conceived, will someday be destroyed. more

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

Pierre Bayard

Provocative, cheeky, and very French. The title belies the real subject, which is an argument against reading and for writing. The book that convinced me to launch this site. more

Ways of Seeing

John Berger

Based on the BBC documentary, Berger begins with a retelling of Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and concludes with a brilliant analysis of modern day advertising and its roots in Renaissance-era oil painting. The text is set in Univers bold, an unusual choice that has the effect of slowing down the reading experience; the result is akin to listening to a voiceover. Two of the book’s seven chapters eschew words in favor of images, and while the quality of the printing leaves a lot to be desired, the essays prevail nonetheless. more

Collected Fictions

Jorge Luis Borges

Short, surreal little tales that experiment with the form of the story and often take the library as their subject. more

With Borges

Alberto Manguel

A slim volume, with Manguel’s youthful memories of evenings spent reading to Borges in his home in Buenos Aires. more

The Elements of Typographic Style

Robert Bringhurst

The typographer’s bible; a book that is never too far from reach. more

Why There Are Pages And Why They Must Turn

Robert Bringhurst

A short essay about the future of the book from the inimitable Robert Bringhurst, lovingly typeset in Quadraat and printed on a Heidelberg cylinder press. more

The Design of Design

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

An engineer’s perspective on the design process. His conclusions are familiar, but the means by which he gets there are fascinating; something of a mathematical approach to design intuition emerges. more

Handcrafted CSS

Dan Cederholm, Ethan Marcotte

An excellent, practical overview that demonstrates how to use CSS3 properties today, as well as other methods of “handcrafted” design. The approach blurs the line between design and development in myriad and lovely ways. more

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. more

Waiting for the Barbarians

J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee’s most important novel, sadly more relevant everyday. Perhaps the writer I most admire. more

Summertime

J.M. Coetzee

Of Coetzee’s last few works of fiction (this, Diary of a Bad Year, Elizabeth Costello), I can draw only a few, tentative conclusions: that he feels compelled to explore the structure of the novel itself (for reasons I cannot yet articulate), and that he is wise enough to get out ahead of the biographers who will no doubt pounce on his grave while still warm. more

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis

Davis’ shorts are very short—sometimes only a paragraph—but they leave impressions larger than the tiny space they consume. The juxtaposition of bold, centered type and handwritten borders on the cover is a near perfect representation of the stories therein. more

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Alain de Botton

A lengthy and wonderful photo essay with stories of various kinds of work, from biscuit manufacturer to rocket scientist; a welcome companion to Theriault’s How to Tell When You’re Tired. Alas, de Botton finds many more sorrows than pleasures in the modern workplace. more

Jan Tschichold, Master Typographer

Cees W. de Jong

Thames & Hudson’s tome to Jan Tschichold is as oversized as he was. Includes beautiful photographs of his work, alongside essays about his life and legacy. more

Mediated

Thomas de Zengotita

de Zengotita investigates the ways in which our experience of the world is mediated both through traditional media (television, newspapers) but also the ways in which we self-mediate—whether through photographs or status updates, we’ve come to think of our lives as a narrative, with ourselves always at the center. Written before Twitter came along, but relevant nonetheless. more