sshhh! This is a working library.

After Theory

Terry Eagleton

Against the Grain

Richard Manning

A revisionist history that argues that we traded away much of our humanity in exchange for the little bit of security that agriculture promised. This book completely changed the way I think about food. more

The Art of Simple Food

Alice Waters

A beautifully designed book that has served me well in the kitchen. Especially helpful when you belong to a CSA and need to decide what to do with the week’s pound of turnips. Waters also includes helpful notes about stocking your pantry and what equipment to buy (or not buy, as the case may be). more

A History of Reading

Alberto Manguel

A Humument

Tom Philiips

The fourth in Tom Philips ongoing project to recompose an old, unknown Victorian novel. The title comes from the original text (A Human Document) after the middle part has been covered up. Philips works through the book, painting, collaging, scribbling over and cutting out parts of the novel to create a new text on top of it. Weird and fascinating and beautiful. more

The Big Short

Michael Lewis

Infuriatingly good. There isn’t another writer alive who could take the obscurities of subprime mortgages and credit default swaps and deliver a page-turner like this one. Lewis’ storytelling abilities come at a price, however: I now fully understand the extent to which Wall Street is completely and unforgivably fucked. more

Book Typography

Michael Mitchell, Susan Wightman

A thorough and beautiful guide to typography and typesetting, worthy of any designer’s desk. more

Boxed In

Mark Crispin Miller

An academic thesis that applies the traditional methods of close reading to television commercials. more

Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky

In this follow-up to Here Comes Everybody, Shirky argues that we’re evolving from passive consumers of Seinfeld to creative makers of everything from lolcats to open source software to real-time news reporting. One can’t help but hope that the death of television is as nigh as he predicts. 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

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 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. more

Content Strategy for the Web

Kristina Halvorson

The book on the new(ish) field of content strategy, or, how we’re going to save the web. Required reading for anyone interested in how words can reach their potential now that they are freed from the page. more

The Courage to Create

Rollo May

The Craftsman

Richard Sennett

Sennett defines craftmanship as the desire to do a job well for its own sake. In so doing, he frees it of the bounds of carpentry or metalwork and extends the work of craft to that of the programmer, the doctor, and the parent. And he restores materialism—long maligned as being complicit in capitalism’s ills—as that which looks to “cloth, circuit boards, or baked fish as objects worthy of regard in themselves” (page 7). more

The Creative Habit

Twyla Tharp

Tharp’s treatise on creativity applies as well to writing or design as it does to dance. more

Days of Reading

Marcel Proust

Proust’s meditations on reading, and the gifts that writers leave their readers. Best read slowly. more

Deep Economy

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben indicts the current economic system for it’s single-minded pursuit of “more” without regard for whether or not it is (or can be) “better.” The contemporary companion to Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. more

Designing Design

Kenya Hara

Designing for People

Henry Dreyfuss

The first book on industrial design. A lovely, timeless book. Dreyfuss scattered the pages with his sketches, making for a playful, very human read. more