A working library is an exploration of—and advocate for—
the reading experience. by Mandy Brown

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.

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).

Art Space Tokyo

Ashley Rawlings, Craig Mod

Lovingly illustrated and printed, this is your guide to all the hidden art galleries in Tokyo, complete with notes on where to eat and what neighborhoods to get lost in on your way. Interviews with gallery owners provide context. A project of Pre/Post, this new edition was funded via Kickstarter and represents a new kind of publishing model that I sincerely hope to see more of. I have never visited Tokyo, but when I do, I know what book to pack.

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.

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.

Bird by Bird

Anne Lamott

Personal musings on the life of the writer. Lamott is primarily a novelist, but I find her writing advice to be just as relevant to nonfiction. As with the best books on writing, she expertly dispels any notion of romance.

Books as History

David Pearson

If you can get past the absolutely reprehensible cover design, Books as History is a smart study of books’ physical form, and a defense of its value independent of the words on the page. Whether or not the printed book “survives” is a less interesting question to me than what we can learn from books as they have been and are now becoming, and Pearson’s text is a succinct tale of the former. As for the latter, we’ll all know in time.

Book Typography

Michael Mitchell, Susan Wightman

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

Boxed In

Mark Crispin Miller

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

Clout

Colleen Jones

Colleen Jones clearly and (perhaps not surprisingly) persuasively explains how to create content that not only informs, but influences. She discusses what makes for influential content, as well as how to go about the potentially daunting process of producing it and evaluating its success. Even as someone fairly well-versed in the art of rhetoric, I learned a few things. And the general approach—considering and measuring your content’s impact—is one we should all have at the ready.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Common as Air

Lewis Hyde

Hyde addresses the history of copyright, and demonstrates that the founding fathers were not at all fans of it. Rather, they understood that a cultural commons needed to be regulated and protected, much as an agricultural commons needs to be defended against enclosure. As such, any encroachment on the commons must be limited and temporary, and designed for the public good, not private gain.

Community and Privacy

Christopher Alexander, Serge Chermayeff

A precursor to Alexander’s A Pattern Language, in which he and Chermayeff define what’s wrong with the design of the suburbs, and outline the principles behind a more human (and urban) environment. As interesting for its approach to the problem as it is for any of the proposed solutions.

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.

The Courage to Create

Rollo May

An approach to creativity from an existential psychologist. May sees creativity as the ultimate goal of all people (not merely those traditionally deemed “creative”) and links creativity to well-being and a desire to make the world a better place.

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).