A working library is an exploration of—and advocate for—All books
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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.
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Graphs, Maps, Trees
Franco Moretti
An academic treatise that argues that rather than reading books, we should be mining them for data. Somewhat frustratingly written (the vocabulary of literary theory serving primarily to restrict rather than clarify), and I remain largely unpersuaded; but some of the data he uncovers is fascinating and begs for further investigation. A mathematical complement to Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.
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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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1984
George Orwell
The classic novel of authoritarianism. Also, the Bush administration’s how-to manual.
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The Value of Nothing
Raj Patel
Raj Patel carefully demonstrates how traditional economics fails to properly account for many costs (whether environmental or social) and argues that the tragedy of the commons is one borne of privatization and corporatism, not an innate fact of the commoners themselves.
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Living and Eating
Annie Bell, John Pawson
A minimalist’s manifesto, with simple recipes and beautiful, spare photography. Keeping it on my coffee table for perusing before heading to the farmer’s market.
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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.
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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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The Elements of Editing
Arthur Plotnik
References to “video display units” notwithstanding, many of Plotnik’s essays on editing remain as compelling today as they were thirty years ago. “The editor, not the author, best understands the readership,” he says. “Authors know their subject. Editors specialize in knowing the audience.” (page 25)
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The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Michael Pollan
Worth the hype, not because of the widely-hailed subject matter but because of the extraordinary writing.
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Food Rules
Michael Pollan
This little book from everyone’s favorite omnivore deftly defines a series of simple rules to eat by, expanding on his mantra from In Defense of Food: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
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Days of Reading
Marcel Proust
Proust’s meditations on reading, and the gifts that writers leave their readers. Best read slowly.
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Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon’s famously difficult masterpiece. I destroyed three copies in a (failed) effort to grasp it completely. But despite the challenges, the story is enormously charming; I have very warm feelings about the time I spent with it, and I still think of Byron each time I have to change a bulb.
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Slow Learner
Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon’s early stories are facile at best, but the introduction to the collection—in which Pynchon addresses his readers and talks about his writing—is invaluable.
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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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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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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).
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The Riverside Shakespeare
Shakespeare
The book I most dreaded carrying around when I was a student (because of its heft), but which I now profess the most nostalgia for. It’s not so much a collection of plays and sonnets as it is a record of days past.
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How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul
Adrian Shaughnessy
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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.
