Books
The Five-Star Delight of Driving Across America with Ron Padgett
At the heart of Padgett’s writing is an innocence: he sees everything — no matter how banal or how curious or strange — with the same attentive, innocent eye.
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A Graphic Novel in the Form of a Monster-Obsessed Child’s Notebook
In My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Emil Ferris avoids the strictures of any one genre, following the meandering mind of a 10-year-old obsessed with movie monsters.
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A New Account of Robert Lowell’s Mania Risks Glorifying It
Clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison's Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire intimately details the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's mental illness and how it shaped his poetic output.
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The Designs of Allan Wexler, a “Radical Deconstructor of Habitation”
A new book celebrates the artist’s unique vision, featuring more than 200 projects he has conceived since the 1980s.
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An Illustrated 19th-Century Japanese Travelogue of Egypt
The image of Egypt as conceived by innovative Japanese publisher Takejirō Hasegawa was well outside the dominant paradigm and thus startling to Western eyes.
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Homage to Josef Albers: Writers Pay Tribute to a Pioneer of Abstraction
In Josef Albers: Midnight and Noon, Nicholas Fox Weber, Elaine de Kooning, Colm Tóibín, and more discuss the artist’s seminal Homage to the Square series.
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Watch the British Library Digitize One of the World's Largest Books
The 1660 Klencke Atlas is taller than most people, and now its rare maps are easily accessible online.
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The Early-20th-Century Photographer Who Magnified the Alien Beauty of Plants
Using a homemade camera, Karl Blossfeldt captured the sculptural details of plants, from the geometry of a seed pod to the alien curl of a fern.
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Photos Evoke the Terror and Hope of the Underground Railroad
For her new book, Jeanine Michna-Bales photographed 100 sites along the Underground Railroad under cover of darkness.
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Remixing Six Centuries of Iconic Graphic Designs
In a new book, Phaidon considers the unexpected and deliberate connections between 500 of our most recognizable images.
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Matching the Smells of Musty Manuscripts with Chemical Compounds
Researchers at University College London studied the scents of old books to better understand how to identify and protect "heritage smells."
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A Designer’s 1977 Road Map to Better Visual Literacy Gets Rereleased
A new edition of George Nelson's How to See shows that his guide to the human-made landscape is as relevant as ever.