A working library is an exploration of—and advocate for—All books
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The Subversive Copy Editor
Carol Fisher Saller
Carol Fisher Saller’s irreverent guide to copy editing has helpful advice for working with writers, as well as guidance for writers about working with their editor. Her expert (and often hilarious) responses to The Chicago Manual of Style Online’s Q&A are an excellent reminder that editing is as much art as science.
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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).
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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.
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Graphic Design
Adrian Shaughnessy
Shaugnessy’s irreverent guide—the ABC’s of design—addresses the underside of the designer’s life, with entries on banks (page 30), presentation skills (page 230), and sacking clients (page 268). Each post is short and discreet, making for a book that need not be read in the order it was made. Much to my surprise, the monospaced text font is entirely comfortable to read.
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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.
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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.
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Orality and Literacy
Walter J. Ong
Ong’s is perhaps the only book I’ve discovered that carefully and thoroughly addresses the differences between oral and literate cultures. In pointing out that Plato used writing to deliver his objections to the written word, he says “Once the word is technologized, there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available” (page 79).
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Proust and the Squid
Maryanne Wolf
Wolf addresses the ways in which the brain adapts—or fails to adapt—to reading. An excellent history, as well as a compelling glimpse at the ways in which reading on the screen may yet create a new kind of literacy.
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Designing with Web Standards
Ethan Marcotte, Jeffrey Zeldman
The king of web standards returns for a third edition, this time with the addition of the talented Ethan Marcotte. Required reading.
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Small Is Beautiful
E.F. Schumacher
Schumacher brilliantly interrogates modern economics, revealing its philosophical underpinnings to be relentless supporters of goods over people. He proposes an alternative—a Buddhist economics—that takes as its imperative the quality of human life, not the quantity of profit. An excellent companion to Rushkoff’s Life Inc. in the argument that economics is not a natural science.
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Book Typography
Michael Mitchell, Susan Wightman
A thorough and beautiful guide to typography and typesetting, worthy of any designer’s desk.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Here Comes Everybody
Clay Shirky
I’m late to the party on this, but Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody discusses the evolution of group collaboration in the age of social media, and, conversely, the increasing irrelevance of institutions. Required reading for anyone who thinks about the ways in which technology is changing human behavior.
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How to Tell When You’re Tired
Reg Theriault
A fabulous little book, written by a lifelong worker. Theriault came from a family of fruit tramps—migrant workers who travelled the country picking fruit wherever it came to harvest—and later became a longshoreman. His insight into the working life is profound and lovely—as relevant to those on the docks as to those at their desks.
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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.
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Life Inc.
Douglass Rushkoff
A passionate, well-written text that argues that our centralized currency system is the key to the corporatism that has infected not only our government but our daily lives.
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The Vintage Book of Amnesia
Jonathan Lethem
An eccentric collection of short pieces that touch on the subject of memory loss, from writers as varied as Martin Amis, Jorge Luis Borges, and Oliver Sacks.
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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.
