Allison Arieff

Writer; Editor / United States /

Allison Arieff’s Notable Books of 2013

4 books
Denis Wood

I love this book just for the fact that Wood says he strips away the extraneous “map crap” (scale, orientation, street grids) to create this simultaneously dreamy and subversive document of his Boylan Heights neighborhood. Wood is interested not in intersections but what's within interstitials. His mesmerizing graphics capture barking dogs, absentee landlords, disfigured trees, and the paper route of Lester Mims. The absence of the expected doesn’t make these cartographic explorations any less informative, however. The narratives accompanying Wood’s maps tell a much deeper story of this North Carolina neighborhood than any “normal” map ever could.

John Clifford

Graphic Icons is a book that probably everyone assumed already existed but didn’t. We owe a debt of gratitude to graphic designer John Clifford for making sure it does. What a labor of love: Clifford’s reverence for the greats of the profession is apparent on every gorgeous page of the book. Sure to become required reading for any graphic design student (but also ideal for the coffee table), Graphic Icons is 240 pages of pure inspiration.

The book includes most of the designers you’d expect: Lissitsky to Lustig, Lois to Landor. But despite that sense of recognition on nearly every page it’s just amazing how fresh all the work feels. In fact, there is so much terrific visual (and written) information here that my only complaint is that the book isn’t much, much longer.

John Bertram
Yuri Leving

I suppose the impossibility of picking the perfect cover for a book that has had so many iconic covers explains the choice of the utterly nondescript text-only, lime-green one they went for. But it was a bad decision because few would pick this up on a whim.

But now that I’ve got that out of the way, Lolita—The Story of a Cover Girl makes up for its surface deficiencies with its interior content (which is perhaps the diametric opposite of Lolita’s appeal). Supremely unsettling writer Mary Gaitskill for the preface? Brilliant. A chapter devoted to Nabokov in paperback and another to specifically Russian visions of Lolita? Love it. The vast spectrum of Lolita representations is impressive and yet, it was surprising to see, particularly in the covers commissioned specifically for this book, how certain tropes are returned to again and again: abstracted genitalia, rustled bedsheets, overwrought type treatments, the color pink. I have to say I prefer the older Lolita covers to the contemporary, commissioned ones. If I had to pick, I’d go with Balthus or Klimt for their unsettling confrontational portraits of young girls in far too much command of their sexual powers.

Becky Cooper
Foreword by Adam Gopnik

To conquer her fear of the immensity of Manhattan, Becky Cooper handed out blank maps of the city to strangers (as well as notable residents like Man on Wire’s aerialist Philippe Petit and the New Yorker’s Patricia Marx) with one simple instruction: Fill it in with whatever best captures your experience of the city. The book, Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers, is the delightful result. (I’ll admit that I kinda love the one that envisions the city as a sea of Starbucks.)

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