The Elements of Typographic Style

Robert Bringhurst's masterpiece! Searches for introductory typography texts will find suggestions for Elements. I'm not qualified to review these texts broadly or in comparison to one another but would like to share those points that I particularly enjoyed.

First, the format, the page composition and the typesetting is, of course, wonderful. The book can be read straight through paragraph by paragraph, front to end.. or can be opened randomly and scanned from corner to corner. The sidebars, insets, graphics, tables all stand on the page, balanced with one another, asking to be read.

Second, the writing is clear, succinct, unpretentious and informative. Bringhurst explains the physical and historical elements of type. Definitions are presented in text and also through plentiful examples and diagrams.

Finally, the book, it's full of letters! If you enjoy looking at the night sky to see stars or like looking at words to see letters - Elements is a portable marvel waiting for you.

Elements has the same charm of opinion as the title it riffs on, Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style," and exudes a passion for its topic - an intimacy of the author's long inspection.

A Documentary History of the United States

A Documentary History stitches together historical documents, speeches and essays with brief (and largely liberal) comments from the author. Every few documents, a page or two is dedicated to setting the frame of the times, explaining why the following pieces were selected and providing the briefest historical context.

I'm sure this book is more fun to read if you lean left - the author's comments generally reflect a liberal point of view on the social history assembled. However, the reminder that the full and original texts of our history are readily available and immediately accessible to (English speaking) readers, is powerful.

I wish my High School American history teacher had thrown out the Houghton Mifflin and simply handed us copies of this book, instead. Both the method of learning and considering history and the details derived from the study would have been better served.

Wall and Piece by Banksy

Unfamiliar with Banksy (perhaps exposing my American middle class wankerism), I stumbled across this book browsing Amazon.

I wish I'd stolen it from the bookstore to hide in the library.

This Banksy fellow is a hardcore graffiti artist, employing stencils and humor, often black, to political and social point making.

He's got a website.

Reading this reminds me of Ralph Steadman's The Curse of Lono... I always thought Ralph deserved top billing. Banksy side-steps that and does his own writing.

A Field Guide to American Houses

Lengthily subtitled:

The guide that enables you to identify, and place in their historic and architectural contexts, the houses you see in your neighborhood or in your travels across America - houses built for American families (rich, poor and in-between), in city and countryside, from the 17th century to the present.

I can't describe the content more accurately - except to say it is brilliantly illustrated with photographs, examples, drawings and sketches.

And I absolutely loved this book. Some books register a new idea or a new vocabulary - impart a little knowledge that colors the everyday world - and create a foundation for new observations and appreciations. This book is very much one of those.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Dad lent this to me last time I visited. A deeply moody book - it is also a very crafted book. Written in a diary like style devoid of dates and times (which adds to the sense of despair and lost-ness) largely from the protagonist's perspective with occasional third person omniscient point of view. Names are used only sparingly (if at all). Reads very quickly. It left me in a funk well after having finished - at the same time the style of the narrative and the structure of the novella are so carefully assembled to complement the setting and story - it feels almost a step too many was taken. It feels, oddly, like a full length short story.

I'm curious to see how it stands in a few years; I read it almost a month ago and am still taking time to blog about it ...

Advanced Mac OS X Programming

Second part of the previously reviewed Cocoa book... This is also the second edition of "Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming," which is a more accurate title. This is a cool book - much different from the (practical) tutorial based first book, this book is a walk through of unix programming and subsystems specific to OS X. Covers File I/O, file systems, socket basic, the OS X keychain, BSD kqueues, etc. Written in a consumable and readable style, I was sad to finish. The chapters stand well alone (in fact, I read them very out of order reading first about the topics that were new to me).

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X - followup

So far the neatest part of working though this book has been thinking about NIBs. The NIB stores the objects that compose the UI. It can literally store archived instances of objects which are deserialized / unarchived when the NIB is loaded. I'd like to find some time to dig into the details more - or perhaps just see if I can take a nib file apart manually. A bit like freeze-drying. And in both reality and analogy, I don't really understand in any detail how it works.