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

The Creative Habit

Twyla Tharp

Tharp’s treatise on creativity applies as well to writing or design as it does to dance.

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.

Days of Reading

Marcel Proust

Proust’s meditations on reading, and the gifts that writers leave their readers. Best read slowly.

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.

Designing Design

Kenya Hara

Designing for Emotion

Aarron Walter

Aarron Walter joins the A Book Apart rainbow of knowledge with this short book on designing for humans. A mix of psychology and case studies show how designing for emotion works, with guidance on the small or large steps you can take to start doing it. Aarron’s enthusiasm is charming, and a compelling example of the book’s principles in action.

Designing for People

Henry Dreyfuss

The first book on industrial design. A lovely, timeless book. Dreyfuss scattered the pages with his sketches, making for a playful, very human read.

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.

Design and Truth

Robert Grudin

A wide-ranging and philosophical approach to user-centered design. Grudin argues compellingly that design that does not consider the user is dishonest. See also: my review in the Barnes&Noble Review.

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.

Detail in typography

Jost Hochuli

Diary of a Bad Year

J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee’s latest novel is written as two, entwined diaries—his own and that of a younger woman who he comes to pass the time with. Subtle and capable typography allows the trick to come off.

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes

Almost certainly the greatest novel ever written, and an early precursor to postmodernism. Some ten years separated publication of the first and second volumes, during which time an unauthorized sequel was published by an unknown writer. In that spurious text, Quixote is recast as the classic and heroic knight, morphing from satire to cliché. Subsequently, in Cervantes’ second volume, the real Quixote learns of the impostor and seeks him out. Grossman’s translation captures the vernacular humor that made Quixote famous in his own time.

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)

Robert Bringhurst

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

Fateless

Imre Kertesz

An autobiographical novel, in which Kertész addresses his childhood in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Kertész’s writing is spare and damning, akin to the filmmaking of Michael Haneke.

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.

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.

The Gift

Lewis Hyde

The original subtitle of this book defined it as “Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property,” which, in addition to being more lyrical, also 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. Cf. Godin on emotional labor.

Glut

Alex Wright

Alex Wright shows the many ways we have endeavored to manage an abundance of information, beginning with libraries and encyclopedias, running through taxonomies and folksonomies, and into networks which both eschew formal organization and evolve governing structures as they mature. The final chapter addresses the tensions between the old, literate cultures, and the new (or newly revived) oral culture of the the web, echoing the writings of Walter Ong.