fawny.org

Books I’m reading

I am not convinced this ongoing bibliography, which is inconvenient to maintain, is benefitting me or you very much. I get no Amazon referrals whatsoever (an actually useful currency), nor do I have much evidence that this page is ever read.

This listing is also available on LibraryThing (though that version is not definitive or completely updated at all times). Some books were read at the library. A very few listed items were never cracked open (shown deleted); some were simply flipped through, usually because that is the actual intended usage.

August 2008

  1. The Wild Trees by Richard Preston
  2. Foul! the Secret World of Fifa by Andrew Jennings
  3. Love, Castro Street: Reflections of San Francisco
  4. What’s the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank
  5. DMZ 1 & 2 by Brian Wood, Riccardo Burchielli
  6. The Holmes Inspection by Mike Holmes
  7. Just Say Nu: Yiddish for Every Occasion by Michael Wex
  8. Stop Forgetting to Remember: The Autobiography of Walter Kurtz by Peter Kuper
  9. Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey by Geoff Pevere, Greig Dymond
  10. On a Personal Note by Rita MacNeil

July

  1. Writing for the Internet by Jane Dorner
  2. No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July (whose surname I always misread with the pronunciation “Julie”)
  3. Lunch With Jan Wong (at TRL)
  4. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath
  5. The Design of Future Things by Don Norman
  6. Blackletter: Type and National Identity (at TRL)
  7. Breakpoint by Richard A. Clarke (audio CD)
  8. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
  9. Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists by Casey Reas Ben Fry
  10. Get to Work by Linda Hirshman
  11. Concrete Toronto by Spacers™
  12. How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer by Debbie Millman (whose excruciating nasal voice we are spared)
  13. Welcome to Pyongyang by Charlie Crane
  14. The Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning, and Sexual Power of Red Hair (inevitably) by Marion Roach (interloan)
  15. Get Ahead in Spelling by Robert Allen, John Seely
  16. Canada’s Queen by Patti Tasko
  17. Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with [Peggy] by Earl Ingersoll
  18. The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English by Mark Abley (review)
  19. Chasing Adonis: Gay Men and the Pursuit of Perfection by Tim Bergling
  20. The Truth (with Jokes) by Al Franken (audio CD)
  21. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (audio CD)

June

  1. Typography and Graphic Design: From Antiquity to the Present by Roxanne Jubert, Serge Lemoine (at TRL)
  2. Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (interloan)
  3. Athlete by Howard Schatz, Beverly Ornstein (interloan)
  4. Athlete/Warrior by Jonathan Anderson (interloan)
  5. Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert
  6. Simpsons Comics Strike Back
  7. Great Design Using Non-Traditional Materials by Sheree Clark, Wendy Lyons
  8. Simpsons Comics Royale: A Super-Sized Simpson Soirée
  9. Futurama Adventures
  10. Communication Design: Principles, Methods and Practice by Jorge Frascara
  11. Designed by Peter Saville
  12. The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers by Vendela Vida
  13. The Affected Provincial’s Companion by Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy (interloan)
  14. American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges
  15. The Best Software Writing I by Joel Spolsky
  16. Got War? by Garry Trudeau
  17. Designing programmes: Four essays and an introduction by Karl Gerstner (interloan)
  18. Wayshowing by Per Mollerup (again)
  19. Eliot Noyes by Gordon Bruce (interloan)
  20. City Making in Paradise by Mike Harcourt et al.
  21. Memphis: Research, Experiences, Result, Failures and Successes of New Design by Barbara Radice
  22. Camouflage by Tim Newark (interloan)
  23. Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism by Umberto Eco
  24. The Future of Music by David Kusek
  25. Who Owns Canada Now? by Diane Francis
  26. Microtrends by Mark Penn, Kinney Zalesne
  27. The Second Plane: September 11, Terror and Boredom by Martin Amis
  28. Rule the Web by Mark Frauenfelder

May

  1. The Barnbrook Bible by Jonathan Barnbrook (at TRL)
  2. Richard Renaldi: Figure and Ground (at TRL)
  3. When Languages Die by K. David Harrison (interloan)
  4. Active Literature: Jan Tschichold and New Typography by Christopher Burke (interloan)
  5. Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide by Laura J. Murray, Samuel E. Trosow (interloan)
  6. Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design by Henry Petroski (interloan)
  7. The Maple Leaf Forever: A Celebration of Canadian Symbols (only three of them – Mounties, beavers, maple leaves) by Donna Farron Hutchins, Nigel Hutchins
  8. If/Then: Design Implications of New Media (interloan)
  9. Do the Windows Open? by Julie Hecht
  10. Phototypesetting: A design manual by James Craig (interloan)
  11. Intercambios: Spanish for Global Communication (First Canadian Edition) by Guiomar Borrás, James N. Hendrickson, Stephen Henighan, Antonio Velásquez (interloan)
  12. Looking Good: A Guide for Men by Charles Hix (photos by Bruce Weber; interloan)
  13. The Architecture of Parking by Simon Henley (interloan)
  14. The Outsports Revolution: Truth & Myth in the World of Gay Sports by Cyd Zeigler, Jim Buzinski
  15. Building with Awareness: The Construction of a Hybrid Home by Ted Owens
  16. Independent Queer Cinema: Reviews and Interviews by Gary M. Kramer
  17. Slang Through the Ages by Jonathon Green
  18. The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design by Paul Betts (interloan)
  19. Creative Time: The Book by Anne Pasternak (interloan)
  20. Foreskin’s Lament by Shalom Auslander
  21. Regret the Error by Craig Silverman
  22. The Ice Palace That Melted Away by Bill Stumpf (which I might have edited in an early form)
  23. Saul’s Book by Paul Rogers
  24. The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall
  25. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture by Geert Lovink
  26. Managing Humans by Rands
  27. Don’t Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock (audio CD)
  28. United States by Laurie Anderson
  29. The Visual Dictionary of Graphic Design by Gavin Ambrose, Paul Harris
  30. The Fran Lebowitz Reader
  31. Blue Covenant by Maude Barlow
  32. Canadians: A Portrait of a Country and Its People by Roy MacGregor
  33. Real World Mac Maintenance and Backups by Joe Kissell
  34. Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (again)

April

  1. Street Furniture by Jacobo Krauel (a dud)
  2. Conservatize Me by John Moe
  3. While You’re Reading by Gerard Unger
  4. Dubliners by James Joyce (audio CD)
  5. A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, Paul Giamatti (audio CD)
  6. In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
  7. Risotto by Jenny Stacey, Kathryn Hawkins
  8. The Everything Soapmaking Book by Alicia Grosso
  9. Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres
  10. City of Night (finally) by John Rechy
  11. Brownsville by Neil Kleid
  12. Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus and Later by Johannes Itten
  13. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (with fabulous metal type)
  14. Thonet, Stahlrohr, Möbel
  15. The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot by Naomi Wolf
  16. Elizabeth and After by Matt Cohen
  17. I Am Blind and My Dog Is Dead by Sam Gross

March

  1. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, Tom Hollander (audio CD)
  2. In Search of the Standard in Canadian English by Strathy Language Unit (actually added sometime last year)
  3. Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan by Alex Kerr
  4. Accidental City by Wedgie Fulford
  5. The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto! by Adrienne Shadd, Afua Cooper, Karolyn Smardz Frost
  6. East/West: A Guide to Where People Live in Downtown Toronto by Mark Fram, various Spacers™, et al. (with a strictly limited definition of “east”)
  7. Retro Graphics by Jonathan Raimes, Lakshmi Bhaskaran
  8. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam (audio CD)
  9. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean by Douglas Wolk
  10. Starring Brian Linehan by George Anthony
  11. Canadian Oxford Dictionary of Current English
  12. The Book of Dave by Will Self
  13. The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd
  14. Forms in Modernism: A Visual Set by Virginia Smith
  15. The Warhol Economy by Elizabeth Currid
  16. Psychogeography by Will Self
  17. Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon
  18. The Acme Novelty Library Nº 18 by Chris Ware
  19. I Remember by Joe Brainard
  20. The Story of English by Robert McCrum et al.
  21. Finer Points in the Spacing & Arrangement of Type by Geoffrey Dowding
  22. The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture by Daniel Harris
  23. Revolting Librarians Redux: Radical Librarians Speak Out by Katia Roberto and Jessamyn West
  24. Arts and Letters by Edmund White
  25. Radical Graphics/Graphic Radicals by Laura Harper (interloan)
  26. Design and Art by Alex Coles
  27. Androphilia by avowed satanist Jack Malebranche (“male branch” of the family tree?; interloan)

February

  1. Consolation by Michael Redhill
  2. Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by Kerry Patterson et al.
  3. Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual by Timothy Samara
  4. I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now by Damien Hirst (J. Barnbrook, designer; at TRL)
  5. The New Kings of Nonfiction by Ira Glass
  6. Canadian English: Origins and Structures by J.K. Chambers
  7. When Words Deny the World by Stephen Henighan
  8. Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America by Andrei S. Markovits
  9. The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore
  10. Berthold Fototypes E1 (at TRL)
  11. Bareback: A Tomato Project (at TRL)
  12. Made You Look by Stefan Sagmeister, Peter Hall (at TRL)
  13. Pentagram: The Compendium (at TRL)
  14. Experimental Formats 2 (“Mr. Shake-Hands Man II”) by Roger Fawcett-Tang (at TRL)
  15. Architectural Graphic Standards (at TRL)
  16. Area by Valerie Vago-Laurer, Patrick Busse (at TRL)
  17. Turning White: A Memoir of Change by Lee Thomas
  18. Architecture of the Absurd by John Silber
  19. Collins Canadian Essential English Dictionary & Thesaurus
  20. Editing Canadian English
  21. What Is Publication Design? by Lakshmi Bhaskaran
  22. Guide to Canadian English Usage by Margery Fee, Janice McAlpine (also 1997 edition)
  23. Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
  24. Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television by Greg Downey
  25. A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture by Reyner Banham
  26. Concrete at Home by Fu-Tung Cheng
  27. Concrete Design by Sarah Gaventa
  28. Becoming a Digital Designer by Steven Heller (inevitably), David Womack
  29. America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It by Mark Steyn
  30. In Bad Taste? The Adventures and Science Behind Food Delicacies by Massimo Marcone
  31. The View from Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers by Matthew Hays
  32. Whipping Girl: A [Transgenderist] Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano
  33. What Not to Build: Dos and Don’ts of Exterior Home Design by Sandra Edelman, Judith Kay Gaman, Robby Reid

January

  1. The Complete Peanuts 1963–1964 by Charles Schulz
  2. The War Within: One More Step at a Time by G. B. Trudeau
  3. Brodovitch by Andy Grundberg
  4. Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility by Steven Heller (inevitably), Véronique Vienne
  5. The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media
  6. Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete by Jean-Louis Cohen, G. Martin Moeller (interloan)
  7. Y: The Last Man Volume 9: “Motherland” by Brian K. Vaughan
  8. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (audio CD)
  9. The Top 100 Canadian Albums by Bob Mersereau
  10. Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach by Henry Rogers
  11. Vegan Vittles: A Collection of Recipes Inspired by the Critters of Farm Sanctuary by Joanna Stepaniak
  12. Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story by Harvey Pekar
  13. Starbucked by Taylor Clark
  14. Signage Systems and Information Graphics by Andreas Übele
  15. Canadian A to Z of Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation by Katherine Barber, Robert Pontisso
  16. Faking It by Hugh Barker
  17. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
  18. The Complete Peanuts 1965–1966 by Charles M. Schulz
  19. Directions 2007 by ADCC (without an ISBN or author)
  20. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language by David Crystal
  21. The Angry Island by A.A. Gill
  22. Only in Canada[,] You Say: A Treasury of Canadian Language by Katherine Barber
  23. Language and the Internet by David Crystal
  24. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (audio CD)
  25. The Acme Novelty Library Volume 17 by Chris Ware
  26. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (yes) by Jane Jacobs

2007 (n ≈ 193)

December

  1. Other Men’s Sons by Michael Rowe
  2. Architecture in the United Kingdom by Philip Jodidio
  3. Holding the Bully’s Coat: Canada and the U.S. Empire by Linda McQuaig
  4. The A–Z of Modern Design by Bernd Polster
  5. Concrete:: Design, Construction, Examples by Martin Peck
  6. Born to Kvetch by Michael Wex (audio CD)
  7. A.A. Gill Is Away by A.A. Gill
  8. Bitter Chocolate by Carol Off
  9. The Dip by Seth Godin
  10. Stupid to the Last Drop by William Marsden
  11. I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert (audio CD)
  12. G1: New Dimensions in Graphic Design by Neville Brody, Lewis Blackwell
  13. Our Dumb World: Atlas of the Planet Earth by the Onion (Scott Dikkers)
  14. Signs: Lettering in the Environment by Phil Baines, Catherine Dixon
  15. Graphic Design: Visual Comparisons by Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, Bob Gill (interloan)
  16. How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors, edited by Dan Crowe, Philip Oltermann

November

  1. The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen
  2. It’s Not News, It’s Fark by Drew Curtis
  3. Toronto Sprawls by Lawrence Solomon
  4. Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story by Randall Rothenberg
  5. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger
  6. The Unfinished Canadian: The People We Are by Andrew Cohen
  7. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
  8. British or American English? A Handbook of Word and Grammar Patterns by John Algeo (interloan)
  9. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (audio CD)
  10. The [Four]-Hour Workweek by full-of-shit ginger Timothy Ferriss
  11. Transmaterial: A Catalog of Materials that Redefine our Physical Environment by Blaine Brownell (interloan)
  12. Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers: A Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the 20th Century by Rosemarie Ostler (interloan)
  13. Shortcomings by Adrian Tomin[é]
  14. High-Definition DVD Handbook: Producing for HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc by Mark R. Johnson, Charles G. Crawford, and Christen M. Armbrust
  15. 79 Short Essays on Design by Michael Bierut
  16. Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco
  17. Um… by Michael Erard

October

  1. Christmas Days by Derek McCormack
  2. The Nasty Bits by Tony (never “Anthony”) Bourdain
  3. This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood by Jack Valenti
  4. Design Studies: Theory and Research in Graphic Design by Audrey Bennett, Steven Heller (inevitably)
  5. Greentopia [perverse official orthography: GREENTOPIA]: Towards a Sustainable Toronto by various Spacers™
  6. Fonts & Encodings by Yannis Haralambous
  7. 25 Apartments and Lofts Under 2,500 Square Feet (an astronomical amount of space, hence no problem whatsoever to furnish, hence “under” is misleading and disingenuous at best) by James Grayson Trulove
  8. The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture by Alanna Stang, Christopher Hawthorne
  9. Advertising Design and Typography by Alex White
  10. Dictionnaire du snobisme gastronomique par David Kamp, Marion Rosenfeld
  11. Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart
  12. Writing Systems: An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis by Florian Coulmas
  13. Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson
  14. Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums
  15. Pictograms, Icons and Signs by Rayan Abdullah, Roger Hubner
  16. Details in Contemporary Architecture by Christine Killory, René Davids
  17. The Art of Placemaking: Interpreting Community Through Public Art and Urban Design by Ronald Lee Fleming (interloan)
  18. Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge
  19. Mean City by John Martins-Manteiga (blog post)
  20. The Book of Boy Trouble: Gay Boy Comics with a New Attitude by Robert Kirby, David Kelly
  21. Athletic Ability and the Anatomy of Motion by Rolf Wirhed

September

  1. Urban Enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities by Johanne Sloan
  2. Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission by Thomas H. Kean, Lee H. Hamilton
  3. Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design Since the Sixties by Rick Poynor (again, but not interloan)
  4. Made to Measure: New Materials for the 21st Century
  5. The Secret Life of Logos: Behind the Scenes with Top Designers by Leslie Cabarga
  6. Graphic Design as a Second Language by Bob Gill (interloan)
  7. American Splendor: Another Day by Harvey Pekar
  8. The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows by James Morrison
  9. Vegetarian Sports Nutrition by D. Enette Larson-Meyer
  10. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction by Jeff Prucher
  11. Everything Bad Is Good for You by Steven Johnson
  12. Obligate Carnivore: Cats, Dogs, and What it Really Means to be Vegan (interloan)
  13. Looking Closer 4 [cover: Four; title page: 4; copyright page: 4]: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, Bierut et al., eds.
  14. Living by Design: The Partners of Pentagram, edited by Peter Gorb (interloan)
  15. Looking Closer Five: Critical Writings on Graphic Design
  16. True to Type: An Autobiography of Ruari McLean (interloan)
  17. Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing by Margaret Livingstone (actually some time earlier)
  18. Information Graphics: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference by Robert L. Harris
  19. Interior Design Visual Presentation by P. Alves
  20. Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin (audio CD)
  21. Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, Terry Hope Romero, Sara Quin
  22. Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes by Saul Austerlitz (interloan)

August

  1. Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love (superior original title: How Dirty Girls Get Clean)
  2. The Copy[-]editor’s Handbook by Amy Einsohn
  3. The Forms of Colo[u]r: The Interaction of Visual Elements by Karl Gerstner
  4. Wikinomics by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams
  5. Kissing Bill O’Reilly, Roasting Miss Piggy: 100 Things to Love and Hate About TV by Ken Tucker (interloan; blog post)
  6. Why Aren’t More Women in Science? Top Researchers Debate the Evidence Wendy M. Williams, Stephen J. Ceci
  7. The Adonis Complex The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession
  8. Format (The Shape and Size of a Book Etc.) by Gavin Ambrose , Paul Harris
  9. Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success by Allan Metcalf
  10. How I Live Now: by Meg Rosoff (audio CD)
  11. Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry by John S. Schuchman (interloan)
  12. Pop! Stand Out in Any Crowd by Sam Horn
  13. Signage and Wayfinding Design by Chris Calori
  14. London Orbital by Iain Sinclair
  15. Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton
  16. Spy vs. Spy: The Complete Casebook by Antonio Prohias (and Peter Kuper)
  17. Spook Country by William Gibson
  18. Thinking Visually by Mark Wigan
  19. The Practical Guide to Information Design by Ronnie Lipton
  20. FAC 461
  21. The Complete Graphic Designer: A Guide to Understanding Graphics and Visual Communication by Ryan Hembree
  22. Enamelling by Ruth Ball
  23. The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford

July

  1. The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Robert I. Sutton
  2. From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up by Ted Gideonse, Robert Williams
  3. The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left by David Crystal
  4. Canadian Television Today by Bart Beaty, Rebecca Sullivan (blog post)
  5. The TTC Story: The First 75 Years
  6. Wayfinding: People, Signs, and Architecture by Paul Arthur, Romedi Passini
  7. War Fix (definitely not Boy) by Steve Olexa, David Axe
  8. The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton
  9. The Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life by Steven E. Landsburg (awful)
  10. A Designer’s Research Manual: Succeed in Design by Knowing Your Clients and What They Really Need by Jennifer Visocky
  11. The seriously underwhelming Y: The Last Man Volume 8: “Kimono Dragons” by Brian K. Vaughan
  12. The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer
  13. How to Live in Small Spaces: Design, Furnishing, Decoration and Detail for the Smaller Home by Terence Conran
  14. Toronto by Geoffrey James

June

  1. Geometry of Design: Studies in Proportion and Composition by Kimberly Elam
  2. World Englishes: An Introduction by Gunnel Melchers, Philip Shaw
  3. Stylepedia: A Guide to Graphic Design Mannerisms, Quirks, and Conceits by (inevitably) Steven Heller and his wife Louise Fili
  4. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin
  5. A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles
  6. Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times by Kevin Smokler
  7. Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill
  8. Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavio[u]r by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson
  9. Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, a complete piece of shit by Kevin Roberts
  10. PDW: Publication Design Workshop by Timothy Samara
  11. Far-Seer by Robert J. Sawyer
  12. The Ayn Rand Cult by Jeff Walker (interloan)
  13. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin
  14. The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer (audio CD)
  15. The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson, Ernie Colón
  16. Design City Toronto by Sean Stanwick and Jennifer Flores
  17. What We Do Is Secret by (“Thorn” [“Þorn”?]) Kief Hillsbery
  18. Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability by Luke Wroblewski (interloan)
  19. Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image by Felice Frankel (interloan)
  20. Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting by a cast of thousands
  21. Bulletproof Ajax by Jeremy Keith
  22. Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design by Shawn Lawton Henry (merely skimmed)

May

  1. Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels by Scott McCloud
  2. HTML Dog: The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS by Patrick Griffiths
  3. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins (gift of Geekslut)
  4. We Are Not French: Language, Culture, and Identity in Brittany by Maryon McDonald (interloan)
  5. Wayfinding: Designing and Implementing Graphic Navigational Systems by Craig Berger (yes, that Craig Berger)
  6. Hart’s Rules for Compositors (interloan; 37th edition, 1967)
  7. Sign Gallery (interloan)
  8. Successful Sign Design (interloan)
  9. Typography Papers 5
  10. Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment by Lance Strate, Ronald L. Jacobson, Stephanie B. Gibson (interloan)
  11. Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
  12. The Kill Bill Diary: The Making of a Tarantino Classic by David Carradine

April

  1. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (audio CD)
  2. Designing Across Cultures by Ronnie Lipton
  3. The Complete Peanuts 1961–1962 by Charles M. Schulz
  4. A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond by Christine Vachon, Austin Bunn, John Pierson
  5. Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century by Alex Steffen
  6. EverywareThe Dawning Age of [Narcissistic] Computing by Adam Greenfield
  7. Up, Down, Across: Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks by Alisa Goetz (interloan)
  8. Graphic design: Reproduction and representation since 1800 by Paul Jobling and David Crowley (interloan)
  9. The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp
  10. Small Is the New Big by Seth Godin
  11. Studies Out in Left Field: Defamatory Essays Presented to James D. McCawley on the Occasion of His 33rd or 34th Birthday by Peter H. Salus, Arnold M. Zwicky, James D. McCawley, Robert I. Binnick (interloan)
  12. Body Type: Intimate Messages Etched in Flesh by Ina Saltz (gift of Nagaijin)
  13. The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane! American Films of the 1970s by Ron Hogan & Peter Bogdanovich (gift of Nagaijin)
  14. An Essy on Typography by Eric Gill (1941 edition) (interloan)

March

  1. Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
  2. Dog Days by Ana Marie Cox
  3. Safe: Design Takes on Risk and Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design, two totall Dullsvilles by Paola Antonelli
  4. Women Designers in the USA 1900–2000 by Pat Kirkham
  5. Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors 1880s to 1920s by Sally Gibson
  6. A Broadcast Engineering Tutorial for Non-Engineers by Graham Jones

February

  1. Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS by Celia Farber
  2. Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo by John Crewdson
  3. Typography by Friedrich Friedl
  4. Stripped: The Illustrated Male by Claus Kiessling, Joris Buiks, eds.

January

  1. Nine Pioneers in American Graphic Design by R. Roger Remington, Barbara J. Hodik
  2. Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949–2002 by Minglang Zhou, Joshua A. Fishman (interloan)
  3. The Science of Reading: A Handbook by Charles Hulme, Margaret Snowling
  4. Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown by Michael Cunningham
  5. Vegan Italiano: Meat-free, Egg-free, Dairy-free Dishes from Sun-Drenched Italy by Donna Klein
  6. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Eddie Tufte
  7. 20th-Century Type Remix by Lewis Blackwell
  8. Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire by Cliff Atkinson
  9. Home and Abroad by Martin Parr
  10. American Prospects by Joel Sternfeld
  11. Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist Design in Our Time by Natalia Ilyin (interloan; ★★★★)
  12. A raft of books by and on Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and Wolfgang Tillmans, which I flipped through the way a secretary does a copy of Vogue
  13. Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino (interloan), who thinks he’s a better writer than he is
  14. Speaking Canadian English by Mark M. Orkin (second-hand find by Suzanne™)
  15. The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism by Katie Roiphe
  16. The Visual Nature of Colo[u]r by Patricia Sloane
  17. Language and Typography by Cal Swann
  18. The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Postmodernism by Charles Jencks (I bought the latest edition)
  19. How Typography Works (And Why It Is Important) by Fernand Baudin
  20. The Complete Guide to Digital Color Correction by Michael Walker
  21. Graphic Design as Communication by Malcolm Barnard
  22. The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

2006 (n ≈ 111)

December

  1. Brian K. Vaughan extravaganza: Y: The Last Man (which Vaughan pronounces as one word: “YtheLastMan”) with Pia Guerra, Jr. & Jose Marzan; Ex Machina with Tony Harris; Pride of Baghdad with Niko Henrichon
  2. What is Graphic Design For? by Alice Twemlow
  3. Dutch Graphic Design: 1918–1945 by Alston W. Purvis (second-rate at best)
  4. Dutch Graphic Design: A Century by Kees Broos, Paul Hefting (ditto)
  5. This Is My Country[;] What’s Yours? by the notably snobbish Noah Richler
  6. The Best of Brochure Design 8 by Ann Willoughby
  7. Paperwork: The Potential of Paper in Graphic Design by Nancy Williams
  8. Twentieth-Century Type (though the cover reads 20th Century Type), one of the innumerable editions by Lewis Blackwell
  9. Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design by April Greiman (astonishingly dated 1980s dot-matrix graphics)
  10. Butt Book: Best of the First Five Years Of Butt Magazine by Wolfgang Tillmans, Jop Van Bennekom, Gert Jonkers, Bruce LaBruce (FANTASTIC MAGAZINE FOR HOMOSEXUALS)
  11. The Book of Photography: The History, the Technique, the Art, the Future by Anne H. Hoy
  12. Toronto Modern: Architecture 1945–1965
  13. Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke
  14. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture by Charles Jencks

November

  1. Beautiful Evidence by Eddie Tufte, which includes The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, meaning you wasted your money on the latter if you bought the former
  2. A Writer’s Life by Gay Talese
  3. An Accidental Canadian: Reflections on My Home and (Not) Native Land by Margaret Wente
  4. The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher
  5. A Guide to Ecstacity by Nigel Coates, Marcus Field, Brian Hatton, Theodore Zeldin (designed by Why Not, and boy, does it have an amazing cover)
  6. Paul Rand: Modernist Designer by Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo
  7. Double Game by Sophie Calle, Paul Auster
  8. Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
  9. Sign Design: Graphics, Materials, Techniques by Mitzi Sims
  10. Designing Type by Karen Cheng
  11. The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English by Grant Barrett (chocolate foot, respeaker, i18n, bouma, roadblock)
  12. Foul<bang> The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote-Rigging, and Ticket Scandals, which is quite a mouthful
  13. False Flat: Why Dutch Design is so Good by Aaron Betsky, Adam Eeuwens
  14. Informal (Architecture) (parens not necessarily in original) by Cecil Balmond, Jannuzzi Smith, Christian Brensing, Charles Jencks, Rem Koolhaas
  15. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks (perverse official orthography: BOBOS* in Paradise)

October

  1. Colloquial Hebrew (to at least learn the bleeding alphabet) by Tamar Wang, Zippi Lyttleton
  2. I. by Stephen Dixon
  3. Talk to the Hand by Lynne Truss
  4. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 by Simon Reynolds
  5. Designers on Design by Terence Conran, Max Fraser
  6. College Street – Little Italy: Toronto’s Renaissance Strip by Denis De Klerck, Corrado Paina
  7. Spy: The Funny Years by George Kalogerakis with Graydon Carter, Kurt Andersen (q.v., q.q.v.)
  8. Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design by Walter Tracy
  9. Sign Graphics by Marta Serrats (translation of Imagen Gráfica)
  10. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (excessively literary and recherché but strong nonetheless)
  11. Digital Typography: An Introduction to Type and Composition for Computer System Design by Richard Rubinstein (outdated, and I worry I should have been remembering, or photocopying, more from it)
  12. Type, Image, Message: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop by Nancy Skolos & Tom Wedell (packed to bursting with superb examples, many of them, oddly enough, by the authors)
  13. The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 by Johanna Drucker (a thesis in book form, a crashing bore, and an example of how not to typeset in a spindly, half-arsed digital bastardization of Caledonia)
  14. National Lampoon’s 1964 High School Yearbook: 39th Reunion
  15. Unjustified Texts: Perspectives on Typography by Robin Kinross
  16. Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century by (inevitably) Steven “I Hate Design Blogs” Heller
  17. Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages by Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine
  18. The Complete Peanuts 1959–1960 by Charles M. Schulz

September

  1. The Designer and the Grid by Lucienne Roberts & Julia Thrift
  2. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander
  3. Designing Books: Practice and Theory by Jost Hochuli & Robin Kinross
  4. Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance by a cast of thousands
  5. Designing Typefaces by David Earls
  6. 2004 and 2005 back issues of Eye (oddly disappointing half the time)

August

  1. Words & Buildings: The Art and Practice of Public Lettering by Jock Kinneir (interlibrary loan)
  2. Lettering on Buildings by Nicolete Gray (interloan)
  3. Lettering in Architecture by Alan Bartram (interloan)
  4. Pioneers of Modern Typography by Herbert Spencer (interloan)
  5. Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design Since the Sixties by Rick Poynor (interloan)
  6. The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934 by Deborah Wye (interloan)
  7. Visual Function: An Introduction to Information Design by Paul Mijksenaar (interloan)
  8. Modern Typography by Robin Kinross (reading very selectively)
  9. The Forms of Color: The Interaction of Visual Elements by Karl Gerstner
  10. Twentieth-Century Type Designers by Sebastian Carter
  11. Six Chapters in Design: Saul Bass, Ivan Chermayeff, Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, Ikko Tanaka, Henryk Tomaszewski by Philip Meggs
  12. My Lives by Edmund White
  13. The ABCs of ▴■●: The Bauhaus and Design Theory, Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, eds.
  14. Decoration and Its Uses by Edward Johnston (not typeset but calligraphed)
  15. Dots Dot Dot 7, 8, 9, 10 & 11, Peter Biľak, ed. (thanks to William Lawrence)

July

  1. How Buildings Work: The Natural Order of Architecture by Edward Allen and David Swoboda
  2. Grapevine: The New Art of Word-of-Mouth Marketing by David Balter and John Butman
  3. Cockeyed: A Memoir by Ryan Knighton
  4. Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times by Omar Calabrese
  5. Type & Image: The Language of Graphic Design by Philip Meggs
  6. Raising the Bar: Integrity and Passion in Life and Business: The Story of Clif Bar, a book so pretentious it needs a chain of subtitles, by Gary Erickson and Lois Lorentzen

June

  1. Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham (excellent audio-CD version by Alan Cumming)
  2. Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design by Steven Skov Holt, Mara Holt Skov (with texturized lenticular cover that offgasses)
  3. Independent People by Halldór Laxness (gift from Sigrún)
  4. Isms [perverse official orthography: ...isms]: Understanding Architectural Styles by Jeremy Melvin
  5. Coupe issue on Toronto signage
  6. In the Blink of an Eye: How Vision Sparked the Big Bang of Evolution by Andrew Parker
  7. The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd (more than most entries on these lists, a MEANING TO GET AROUND TO IT title)
  8. Types Best Remembered/Types Best Forgotten by Robert Norton

May

  1. Spacing
  2. Disruptive Pattern Material: An Encyclopædia Of Camoflage (whose title I could not, and cannot, remember) by Hardy Blechman
  3. How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy
  4. The Life of Graham by Bob McCabe

April

  1. Laundry: The Home Comforts Book of Caring for Clothes and Linens by Cheryl Mendelson
  2. Gay Male Pornography: An Issue Of Sex Discrimination by Christopher N. Kendall, which I expect to be complete horseshit
  3. The Solid Form of Language: An Essay on Writing and Meaning by that total bore Robert Bringhurst
  4. Access by Design: A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers: by Sarah Horton, on the same topic as, and published by the same publisher as, my own book (another of New Riders’s many little fuck-yous)
  5. Adrian Frutiger: Son œuvre typographique et ses écrits by Jost Huchili et al.
  6. Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs by Katherine Barber, with simply awful type, several typos, and horrid British spelling and ‘quotation marks’

March

  1. 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style by Matt Madden
  2. Vas: An Opera in Flatland by Steve Tomasula
  3. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form by Venturi, Brown, & Izenour
  4. Modern Architecture: A Guidebook for His Students to This Field of Art by Otto Wagner (with a pretty serious redesign by Laurie Haycock)
  5. Graphic War: The Secret Aviation Drawings And Illustrations of World War II by Donald Nijboer (with amazing exploded, X-ray, and cutout diagrams)
  6. The World’s Writing Systems by Peter T. Daniels & William Bright
  7. Ethnologue: Languages of the World: Maps and Indexes by the Christians at SIL, namely Barbara F. Grimes
  8. Disability Drama in Television and Film by Laurie E. Klobas

February

  1. The Big Show: Hight Times and Dirty Dealings Backstage at the Academy Awards® by Steve Pond
  2. Counterpunch by Fred Smeijers (thanks to Antonio)
  3. Center Square: The Paul Lynde Story by Steve Wilson & Joe Florenski

January

  1. The Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann
  2. My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki (CD)
  3. A Century of Graphic Design by Jeremy Aynsley
  4. Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco by Peter Shapiro
  5. Bully: It’s the Pits by Paul 107 (critique)
  6. Diary of a Drag Queen by Daniel Harris
  7. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman
  8. America: The Book by The Daily Show

2005 (n ≈ 39 [5 months])

December

  1. Utopia: Towards a New Toronto, edited by Jason McBride and Alana Wilcox
  2. Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicent[re] of the Dot.Com [sic] Juggernaut by James Marcus
  3. The Polite Revolution: Perfecting the Canadian Dream by John Ibbitson
  4. Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh
  5. Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler
  6. In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson (CD)
  7. Colors
  8. Private Eye
  9. Punk Planet

November

  1. Spacing (q.v.)
  2. Various Onion compilations
  3. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle, so insubstantial that I blazed through it at a Starbucks (also prone to hard-to-catch copy errors I nonetheless caught)

October

  1. The Design of Dissent by Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilić
  2. The Logogryph: A Bibliography of Imaginary Books by Thomas Wharton
  3. PINS by Jim Provenzano
  4. Like People in History by Felice Picano
  5. Heeb, eventually
  6. Fanfare for the Area Man: The Onion Ad Nauseam Complete News Archives, Vol. 15

September

  1. Pyrrhus, that is, An Arrow’s Flight (q.v.) by Mark Merlis (★★★★★ [or merely “a well-written, interesting exercise”])
  2. Break, Blow, Burn by Camille Paglia
  3. Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935–2005 by Phil Bailes
  4. All Access: The Making of Thirty Extraordinary Graphic Designers by Stefan G. Bucher
  5. Size Matters: Effective Graphic Design for Large Amounts of Information by Lakshmi Bhaskaran
  6. Large Graphics: Design Innovation for Oversized Spaces by Cheryl Dangel Cullen
  7. Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop by Timothy Samara
  8. Private Eye (perennially)
  9. Esquire

August

  1. Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats by Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry
  2. The Fabulous Sylvester by Joshua Gamson: “You are a star. You only happen once”
  3. Queer Wars by Paul Robinson
  4. Resident Alien: The New York Diaries by Quentin Crisp
  5. The Stately Homo: A Celebration of the Life of Quentin Crisp, edited by Paul Bailey, which Amazon simply does not have
  6. Libel: A Handbook for Canadian Publishers, Editors and Writers by Julian Porter
  7. Ikea catalogue
  8. Ryerson Review of Journalism
  9. Private Eye
  10. Light Before Day by Christopher Rice (at least, it is in the pile; all I’ve done is check the type [Caledonia])
  11. Type Design: Radical Innovations and Experimentation by Teal Triggs (no relation)
  12. The Encyclöpedia öf Heavy Metal by Daniel Bukszpan

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Updated 2008.08.17 15:24