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

Minima Moralia

Theodor Adorno

A Pattern Language

Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, Sara Ishikawa

A collection of architectural patterns, fascinating for their grasp and depiction of the social experience of a town. But perhaps more compelling is the process of design that it proposes: one which considers the environment and well-being of the user not as a means to an end but as the end itself.

Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood

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.

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.

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.

Making Ideas Happen

Scott Belsky

Reductively, this is GTD for the Photoshop set. But Belsky, like others working in this space, defines creativity expansively, as something that people of all vocations are not only capable of, but naturally inclined to. And his work at Behance to catalog the habits of successful people makes for a wealth of advice that is both practical and grounded. Less lyrical than Twyla Tharp’s Creative Habit, it nonetheless deserves its space on the shelf.

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.

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 (the yellowing paper of the original newsprint was photographed for the book), plus notes on the history of the magazine from Berry and others. The older issues are especially beautiful and expressive.

Manual of Typography

Giambattista Bodoni, Stephan 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. The labor required to painstakingly produce such a work is lost in a modern reprint, but the extraordinary love of type persists. The exhaustive exploration serves as a reminder of the attentiveness to detail that marks all great type.

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.

Robert Bringhurst

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

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.

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. Set in Chaparral, the very same typeface used here, and perhaps my favorite.

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.

Firecracker

Mike Monteiro, Ryan Carver

Mike Monteiro’s words combine with Ryan Carver’s photographs to tell a story as lovely as it is mundane. The routines and anxieties of a breakup are reflected in the banality of the environment: milk jugs, empty parking lots, a home seen from the outside, enclosed by a fence. Both the photos and words are compelling enough to stand on their own, but they make for odd and interesting bedfellows. More like this, please.

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.

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. Dan not only clearly explains how to use CSS3 today, he also describes why and when you should use it—and he does so with such charm you’ll want to read it again and again. As with all the books from A Book Apart, this one is brief: you won’t learn everything there is to know about CSS3, just what you need to know.

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.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Ted Chiang

As a novel, The Lifecycle of Software Objects suffers from expository writing, flat characters, and uninspired prose. But as a thought experiment, it’s surprisingly (if incompletely) compelling. Chiang explores how we might teach an artificial intelligence, and what happens when (or if) it grows up. The ideas outshine the story.