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Do It: The Compendium: Bruce Altshuler, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kate Fowle: 9781938922015: Amazon.com. Building Stories by Chris Ware. Awards Staff Pick I've been waiting for this book to come out for at least five years, and this magnificent edition exceeded all my expectations (and they were big ones)!

Building Stories by Chris Ware

I can't even begin to imagine a book more intricately constructed than Building Stories. I show it to everyone who visits my house, and we all marvel at its amazing splendor! Recommended by Adam P., Powells.com What a strange yet wonderful box of loveliness! Synopses & Reviews. Philip Pullman’s Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, reviewed. Illustration by Noah Van Sciver It’s tempting to look at the glut of fairy tale material that’s washed up on our pop-cultural shores of late and conclude that the genre is having “a moment.”

Philip Pullman’s Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, reviewed

Adaptations, like waves, are coming in sets: two TV shows, two films based on “Little Red Riding Hood,” two on “Snow White” (a third was canceled in production), two on “Beauty and the Beast,” not to mention upcoming projects like Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, Tim Burton’s Pinocchio, Jack the Giant Killer, and the “Sleeping Beauty” riff Malificent, in which, in a magical bit of casting, Angelina Jolie will star as an evil queen. But really these stories have never gone away, nor, despite parental grousing—“Cinderella” has too much housecleaning; “Jack and the Beanstalk” is unrealistic; and do they have to call them “dwarves”? —were they ever in danger of doing so. Photo by KT Bruce. From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of our Fairytales: Sara Maitland: 9781619020146: Amazon.com. 100 Ideas that Changed Art: Michael Bird: 9781856697958: Amazon.com. The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game: Julia Rothman,Jenny Volvovski,Matt Lamothe,Dave Eggers: 9780811870900: Amazon.com.

The Where,the Why,and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science: Matt Lamothe,Julia Rothman,Jenny Volvovski,David Macaulay: 9781452108223: Amazon.com. Moby Dick Big Read. Fine Press Limited Edition Books with Original Art: Arion Press. Nox (9780811218702): Anne Carson. The People of Paper (9781932416213): Salvador Plascencia. OFFF, Year Zero: Artwork and Designs from the OFFF Festival (9781935613299): Offf. History of Forestry - The American Woods: exhibited by actual specimens and with copious explanatory text by Romeyn B. Hough.

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers (9780691147147): John MacCormick, Chris Bishop. Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (9780393082104): Neil deGrasse Tyson, Avis Lang. Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (9780375422775): George Dyson. The Quantum Universe: Why Anything That Can Happen Does Happen. By Maria Popova What Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has to do with the science of paper and the root of the human condition.

The Quantum Universe: Why Anything That Can Happen Does Happen

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser famously remarked. “We’re made of star-stuff,” Carl Sagan countered. But some of the most fascinating and important stories are those that explain atoms and “star stuff.” Such is the case of The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen* by rockstar physicist Brian Cox and University of Manchester professor Jeff Forshaw — a remarkable and absorbing journey into the fundamental fabric of nature, exploring how quantum theory provides a framework for explaining everything from silicon chips to stars to human behavior. Quantum theory is perhaps the prime example of the infinitely esoteric becoming the profoundly useful. Consider the world around you. Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. The Physics Book: An Illustrated Chronology of How We Understand the Universe. By Maria Popova Making knowledge digestible in the age of information overload, or what a cat has to do with quasicrystals.

The Physics Book: An Illustrated Chronology of How We Understand the Universe

Einstein famously observed that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it’s comprehensible. In The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics, acclaimed science author Clifford Pickover offers a sweeping, lavishly illustrated chronology of comprehension by way of physics, from the Big Bang (13.7 billion BC) to Quantum Resurrection (> 100 trillion), through such watershed moments as Newton’s formulation of the laws of motion and gravity (1687), the invention of fiber optics (1841), Einstein’s general theory of relativity (1915), the first speculation about parallel universes (1956), the discovery of buckyballs (1985), Stephen Hawking’s Star Trek cameo (1993), and the building of the Large Hadron Collider (2009).

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. Share on Tumblr. PANTONE: A Color History of the 20th Century. By Maria Popova From Gatsby to Apple, or what the 1939 New York World’s Fair has to do with the evolution of color theory.

PANTONE: A Color History of the 20th Century

Mine is PANTONE 803-C, what’s yours? More than mere aesthetic fetishes, our favorite colors — and color in general — speak to us in powerful cyphers of symbolism, memories, associations, and emotional undertones. What is true of us as individuals is also true of culture at large. 344 Questions: The Creative Person's Do-It-Yourself Guide to Insight, Survival, and Artistic Fulfillment (Voices That Matter) (9780321733009): Stefan G. Bucher. Finish This Book (9780399536892): Keri Smith. Wreck This Journal (9780399533464): Keri Smith.

344 Illustrated Flowcharts to Find Life's Big Answers. Letter to Jane Magazine for iPad + Source Code by Tim Moore » Updates. Contrary to what you might have believed, production on Letter to Jane has never stopped and today I wanted to share a preview with you all.

Letter to Jane Magazine for iPad + Source Code by Tim Moore » Updates

The app has been rebuilt from scratch thanks to all the wonderful new things I've learned since becoming the Creative Director for 29th Street Publishing. I posted a preview of the app on Letter to Jane not too long ago, and I'd encourage you to check it out if you haven't. I'd also like to share a quick demo video of what the core of the app will function. How this handles images is something I've spent a great deal on and it is the heart and soul of this app.

Thanks to my time with Port and 29th Street I learned enough to build this gallery from the ground up and hope it's simple enough to use so that you can make an array of your photos and that's it, the app will resize for you, (as anything there's a bit more to it, but that's essentially it). Also... I'd like to share the lineup you'll see in issue 04: Important Note for Backers With Ads.

Children’s Books - Part 6. 03 FEBRUARY, 2014By: Maria Popova “The Little Prince will shine upon children with a sidewise gleam.

Children’s Books - Part 6

It will strike them in some place that is not the mind and glow there until the time comes for them to comprehend it.” Although Antoine de Saint-Exupéry only wrote one children’s book in his lifetime, it is among the most beloved of all time, one of those rare gems with most timeless philosophy for grown-ups. But what few realize is that Saint-Exupéry, a commercial pilot who never mastered English and penned his masterwork in French, wrote The Little Prince (public library) not in Paris but in New York City and Long Island, where he arrived in 1940 after the Nazi invasion of France. Parts of his plane were found years later. The Little Prince wasn’t published in the author’s native France until two years after his death. The Night Life of Trees (9788186211922): Durga Bai, Bhajju Shyam, Ram Singh Urveti. Children’s Books - Part 5. 14 FEBRUARY, 2014By: Maria Popova “Moral: The vector belongs to the spoils.”

Children’s Books - Part 5

In 1963, two years after he penned his timeless classic The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster wrote and illustrated The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (public library) — the quirky and infinitely wonderful love story that unfolds in a one-dimensional universe called Lineland where women are dots and men are lines; a hopeful straight line falls hopelessly in love with a dot out of his league, who only has eyes for a sleazy squiggle, and sets about wooing her. Inspired by the Victorian novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, it’s an endearing and witty fable of persistence and passion, and a creative masterwork at the intersection of mathematics, philosophy, and graphic design.

To woo the dot, the line decides to master the myriad shapes capable of expressing his full potential. Catalyzing Creativity: 7 Playful Activity Books for Grown-Ups. By Maria Popova Greenlighting mess-making, 101 ways to astonish yourself, and how to flowchart your way to happiness.

Catalyzing Creativity: 7 Playful Activity Books for Grown-Ups

The intersection of childhood and adulthood is a frequent area of curiosity around here, from beloved children’s books with timeless philosophy for adults to quirky coloring books for the eternal kid. Today, we turn to seven wonderful activity books for grown-ups that inject a little more whimsy and playfulness into your daily grind. “The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over, and then expecting different results,” Einstein famously proclaimed. In Cheerful In 3 ½ Months, spotted last week at the NY Art Book Fair, author Gerard Jansen invites you to do precisely the opposite, finding your sanity by doing things a bit differently than you’re used to. Here’s a sneak peek at the Dutch version, subsequently translated in English: Images via bloesem living. Every Page of Moby Dick, Illustrated. By Maria Popova Illustrated insights on love, hate, God, capitalism, and the rest of life via Herman Melville and found paper.

Every Page of Moby Dick, Illustrated

Since 2009, former high school English teacher and self-taught artist Matt Kish has been drawing every page of the 552-page Signet Classics paperback edition of Herman Melville’s iconic Moby-Dick, methodically producing one gorgeous, obsessive drawing per day for 552 days using pages from discarded books and a variety of drawing tools, from ballpoint pen to crayon to ink and watercolor. Now, thanks to Tin House Books, Kish’s ingenious project joins our running list of blogs so good they became books: Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page gathers his magnificent lo-fi drawings in a 600-page visual masterpiece of bold, breathtaking full-page illustrations that captivate eye, heart, and mind, inviting you to rediscover the Melville classic in entirely new ways. Ballpoint pen on paper, September 17, 2009 'Call me Ishmael' 'But look! Stunning Subjectivity: Paula Scher's Obsessive Hand-Painted Maps. By Maria Popova An irreverent, artful antidote to GPS appification, or what the NYC subway has to do with tsunamis.

Iconic designer Paula Scher is one of my big creative heroes, her thoughts on combinatorial creativity a perfect articulation of my own beliefs about how we create. Since the early 1990s, Scher has been creating remarkable, obsessive, giant hand-painted typographic maps of the world as she sees it, covering everything from specific countries and continents to cultural phenomena. This month, Princeton Architectural Press is releasing Paula Scher: MAPS — a lavish, formidable large-format volume collecting 39 of her swirling, colorful cartographic points of view, a beeline addition to my favorite books on maps. I began painting maps to invent my own complicated narrative about the way I see and feel about the world.