A Week at the Airport

Alain de Botton

A slim document observing the place most of us strive to avoid; a good lazy travel book.

U&lc

John D. Berry

U&lc was a magazine of experimental typography, founded by Herb Lubalin in 1973, and published through 1999. John D. Berry’s tome includes reproductions of many of the original issues, plus notes on the history of the magazine from Berry and others.

The Solid Form of Language

Robert Bringhurst

Bringhurst’s short essay meanders through the history of scripts and their varied forms, touching on the origins of their physical shapes as well as the political and social forces that impacted them along the way.

Making Ideas Happen

Scott Belsky

Reductively, this is GTD for the Photoshop set. But Belsky defines creativity expansively, as something that people of all vocations are not only capable of, but naturally inclined to.

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes

Almost certainly the greatest novel ever written, and an early precursor to postmodernism.

Graphs, Maps, Trees

Franco Moretti

An academic treatise that argues that rather than reading books, we should be mining them for data.

A Reader on Reading

Alberto Manguel

A series of essays from the author of A History of Reading that explores the reader’s perspective.

Manual of Typography

Giambattista Bodoni & Stephen Füssel

A reproduction of Bodoni’s lifelong project to document as many typefaces as possible, complete with the dedication by his widow, and an essay from Stephan Füssel placing the book in historical context.

A Pattern Language

Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa & Murray Silverstein

A collection of architectural patterns, fascinating for their grasp and depiction of the social experience of a town.

Common as Air

Lewis Hyde

Hyde addresses the history of copyright, and demonstrates that the founding fathers were not at all fans of it.

CSS3 for Web Designers

Dan Cederholm

The second book from A Book Apart, and required reading for anyone who wants to make the web a more beautiful place.

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.

The Gift

Lewis Hyde

The original subtitle of this book defined it as “Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property,” which hints at the real message better than the revision: that real art, no matter the price, is always a gift from the artist to the audience.

The Elements of Editing

Arthur Plotnik

“The editor, not the author, best understands the readership,” Plotnik says. “Authors know their subject. Editors specialize in knowing the audience.”

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.

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.

Made by Hand

Mark Fraunfelder

A chronicle of one man’s attempt to become a DIYer. Frauenfelder learns that making things yourself means mostly making mistakes, but those mistakes can be a source of joy.

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.

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.

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