Designers & Books Blog

 

856 blog entries
Rare & Beautiful
By Peter Kraus July 7, 2021

Peter Kraus of Ursus Books looks at Futurist masterpieces, photo-books, and other graphically innovative publications produced in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter July 31, 2012

Architect Michael Manfredi: Weiss/Manfredi (New York)
Profile     Book List
Architect Michael Manfredi sent along to Designers & Books an “electic” list of books that he says “continue to be my valued friends, mentors, provocateurs, and sources of inspiration.” More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter June 7, 2011

Architecture curator and architectural historian Barry Bergdoll: The Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University (New York)
book list
A lover of books and architecture would be hard-pressed to find three finer libraries than the Helen Kate Furness Free Library in Wallingford, Pennsylvania; the Avery Library at Columbia University in New York; and the Cambridge University Library in England.

These, as it turns out, are the libraries that have been in Barry Bergdoll’s life—while growing up, while in college and graduate school, and while a Kellett Fellow abroad. In these libraries he says, “I had the luck of spending many of my days.” In fact, Bergdoll at one point imagined that “being a librarian might be the best of all possible worlds.” More...

Archives & Libraries
By Elizabeth Meggs May 30, 2017

Designer and design history educator Elizabeth Meggs selects 16 books from the library of her father—the pioneering graphic design historian Philip B. Meggs (d. 2002) who authored the landmark Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, recently updated in a sixth edition—and her mother, art director and writer/illustrator Libby Phillips Meggs. More...

Archives & Libraries
By Witold Rybczynski November 14, 2013

Kahn’s original drawings models, and correspondence offer a “view from the drafting room” of the architect’s work, writes Witold Rybczynski. More...

Daily Features
By Anne Quito, Superscript August 27, 2013

Presented at Columbia's current exhibition “Wide Awake Typographer,” Ernst Reichl's handwritten notes—candid, witty, scholarly, and at times acerbic—give visitors a first-person tour of the typographic designer's lively mind. More...

Daily Features
By Bryn Smith, Superscript September 11, 2013

Fashion is a nuthouse, a refuge, or some combination of the two, according to writer and self-proclaimed bon vivant Simon Doonan in his new memoir, The Asylum. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter May 10, 2011

Graphic designer Angus Hyland: Pentagram (London)
book list
Angus Hyland is a partner in Pentagram’s London office and also consultant creative director to Laurence King Publishing. He agreed to answer some questions from us about books—those on his list (which he describes as “divided in half by the needs of work and pleasure”), those he’s written, and those he’s about to read. More...

Daily Features
By Steve Kroeter February 17, 2021

Originally published in 1962 and out of print for almost 50 years, The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn was the first book on influential 20th-century American architect Louis I. Kahn (1901–74) to feature his own images and words. We’re reissuing it in a beautiful new facsimile edition, along with an all-new companion Reader’s Guide, thanks to our successfully funded Kickstarter. You can now order a copy on www.louisikahn.com/shop. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter July 5, 2011

Fashion designer Christian Lacroix (Paris)
book list

Like his acclaimed couture designs, the life and career of Christian Lacroix can be described as sumptuously adventurous, explosively colorful, grandly visionary, and endlessly inventive. “I never loved the world around me as it was,” he says, reminiscing about his childhood in a recent interview with The Guardian (London). “I re-designed it all in my own style.” More...