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"The colorful, annotated paintings collected in Paula Scher MAPS offer a world informed by the graphic designer's poignant and incisive commentary."--Travel + Leisure
In the early 1990s, celebrated graphic designer Paula Scher (Make It Bigger, 2002) began painting maps of the world as she sees it. The larger her canvases grew, the more expressionistic her geographical visions became. Displaying a powerful command of image and type, Scher brilliantly transformed the surface area of our world. Paintings as tall as twelve feet depict continents, countries, and cities swirling in torrents of information and undulating with colorful layers of hand-painted boundary lines, place-names, and provocative cultural commentary. Collected here for the first time, Paula Scher MAPS presents thirty-nine of Scher's obsessively detailed, highly personal creations. 
"Some books show you how to laugh, some show you how to think, but, every once a while, one will show you how to live. The exquisite Oak: One Tree, Three Years, and Fifty Paintings follows of the story of artist Stephan Taylor who decided to paint the same oak tree in the English countryside every day for three years...."
--Oprah.com Book of the Week It was an exercise to learn how to see, to understand just one thing in its greatest detail. Stephen Taylor came across the 250-year-old tree while on a walk in Essex, England, six years ago, shortly after the deaths of his mother and close frienda tragic time that brought him back to painting and then to an obsession with realism and color perception. He painted the same oak scores of times over a period of three years, in extremes of weather and light, at all times of day and night. Oak is nature's creed of endurance and of one man's promise to find beauty in a painful world. 
For forty years, Chez Panisse and its founder, legendary chef Alice Waters, has had a profound influence on food, farming, cooking, and dining around the world.
From the beginning, Waters saw the beauty and aesthetic of fine printing as a way to communicate---at the outset of the diners' experience---the care and attention given to the preparation of their dinner. Berkeley-based artist Patricia Curtan began hand printing menus for the restaurant during its early years, while employed as a cook in the Chez Panisse kitchen. Curtan's menus, works of art in their own right, capture the unique spirit of the famous restaurant with letterpress and linoleum-block prints on beautiful paper. In Menus for Chez Panisee, Curtan presents four decades of menus including dinners for special guests such as Julia Child, Hillary Clinton, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and James Beard. 
"A landmark chronicle of a wonderful career."
--Interior Design Over the course of a career that spanned forty-five years, William Wilson Wurster (18951973) designed hundreds of residences up and down the West Coast. Like Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, with whom Wurster maintained a close professional exchange, Wurster blends modernism with the vernacular. Authors Caitlin Lempres Brostrom, AIA, and Richard C. Peters, FAIA, draw upon extensive historical research as well as personal relationships with Wurster to tell the story of his career, including both residential and institutional building. 
Author Manuel Lima has been called the "Edward Tufte of the 21st century" and nominated as one of the "50 most creative and influential minds of 2009" by Creativity magazine.
Visual Complexity, his first book of illustrated interconnectedness, is an optic biography of networks, from primal tree symbols and their root systems to social networking sites and beyond. Lima's visually expressive book is the guiding hand necessary for explaining the awesomely complex associations that define our lives. 
"Hidden in Thomas Thwaite's deceptively simple story is an epic tale that touches an electronics, metallurgy, sustainability social history, consumerism, epistemology, and global post industrial capitalism, among other things. It's also funny as hell. Dare I say it? The Toaster Project is the twenty-first century's first masterpiece of design writing."--Michael Bierut, Pentagram
"Hello, my name is Thomas Thwaites, and I have made a toaster." So begins The Toaster Project, the author's nine-month-long journey from his local appliance store to remote mines in the UK to his mother's backyard, where he creates a crude foundry. Along the way, he learns that an ordinary toaster is made up of 404 separate parts, that the best way to smelt metal at home is by using a method found in a fifteenth-century treatise, and that plastic is almost impossible to make from scratch. |
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