I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail

Ramsingh Urveti

17th-century British “trick” poetry meets Indian folk art in this magnificent die-cut masterpiece, two years in the making.

Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire

Eric Berkowitz

Writer and lawyer Eric Berkowitz explores the millennia-long quest to regulate and mandate one of the strongest drivers of human behavior, and the tragic deformities that result from the dictatorship of external authority over the most intimate of inner realities. Tracing how we went from the male bonding ceremonies commonly performed in medieval Mediterranean churches to the lesbian executions in 18th-century Germany, along the entire spectrum of cultural attitudes towards mistresses, goat-lovers, prostitutes, medieval transvestites, adulterers, and other sexual norm nonconformists, Berkowitz brings an eye-opening lens to one the most mercilessly judged yet universal aspects of being human.

Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind

Jeremy W. Hayward

“Western civilization’s science and technology bring society tremendous benefit. Yet, due to highly developed technology, we also have more anxiety and more fear. I always feel that mental development and material development must be well-balanced, so that together they may make a more human world. If we lose human values and human beings become part of a machine, there is no freedom from pain and pleasure. Without freedom from pain and pleasure, it is very difficult to demarcate between right and wrong. The subjects of pain and pleasure naturally involve feeling, mind, and consciousness.”

The Dalai Lama and leading Western scientists explore the essence of mind.

100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design

Steven Heller

From visual puns to the grid, or what Edward Tufte has to do with the invention of the fine print.

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone

Eric Klinenberg

“Despite its prevalence, living alone is one of the least discussed and, consequently, most poorly understood issues of our time.”

Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Henry Miller

“And your way, is it really your way?

[…]

What, moreover, can you call your own? The house you live in, the food you swallow, the clothes you wear — you neither built the house nor raised the food nor made the clothes.

[…]

The same goes for your ideas. You moved into them ready-made.”

Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired

Till Roenneberg

“Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,” Napoleon famously prescribed. (He would have scoffed at Einstein, then, who was known to require ten hours of sleep for optimal performance.)

But science indicates otherwise.

German chronobiologist Till Roenneberg debunks the social stigma around late risers and shows the biological roots of “night owls” and “early birds.”

A Technique for Producing Ideas: The simple, five-step formula anyone can use to be more creative in business and in life!

James Web Youn

“…the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.”

James Webb Young’s timeless five-step guide to producing ideas, originally written in 1939.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Graphic Artist

Penny Fowler

An unprecedented look at the iconic architect’s diverse contribution to graphic design — his covers for Liberty (some of which were so radical the magazine rejected them), his mural designs for Midway Gardens, his photographic experiments, his hand-drawn typographical studies, the jacket designs for his own publications, including The House Beautiful and An Autobiography, and a wealth more.

The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Jonathan Gottschall

“Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.”

Educator and science writer Jonathan Gottschall traces the roots, both evolutionary and sociocultural, of the transfixing grip storytelling has on our hearts and minds, individually and collectively. What emerges is a kind of “unified theory of storytelling,” revealing not only our gift for manufacturing truthiness in the narratives we tell ourselves and others, but also the remarkable capacity of stories — the right kinds of them — to change our shared experience for the better.

The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1944-1969

Bertrand Russell

1. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

From Russell’s A Liberal Decalogue — his list of the Ten Commandments that outline the essential responsibilities of a teacher.

Ounce Dice Trice

Alastair Reid

Poet Alistair Reid and beloved artist Ben Shahn’s marvelous exploration of the nooks and crannies of language, real and imagined, through obscure, esoteric, and invented words for familiar things that are as mind-bending as they are tongue-twisting. It’s part Lewis Carroll, part Shel Silverstein, part something entirely its own and entirely refreshing.

The title comes from the playful alternative words bored shepherds used when they grew tired of counting their sheep the usual way.

Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult

Luciano Chessa

Italian Futurist painter and composer Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), best-known for authoring the 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises (public library) and regarded as the first noise artist, is the father of the first systematic poetics of noise. He Russolo played a crucial role in the evolution of 20th-century musical aesthetics and influenced such music icons as Edgar Varese, Pierre Schaeffer, and John Cage. He was also one of the first theorists of electronic music and is even considered by some the inventor of the synthesizer. Yet despite enormous interest in his work, Russolo’s life remained largely unexamined — until now.

Here, composer and San Francisco Conservatory music history professor Luciano Chessa reconstructs Russolo’s life through ambitious archival research, uncovering and digesting esoteric and obscure texts to reverse-engineer how the artist’s eccentric interests influenced his creative output — namely an interest in the supernatural and, more specifically, in the occult.

Between Page and Screen

Amaranth Borsuk & Brad Bouse

A remarkable “digital pop-up book” that tells the love story of the letters P and S through minimalist, wordless black-and-white geometric patterns that spring to life and summon the text when looked at through a webcam. You suddenly see yourself projected on the screen, holding in your hands the paper pages from which the living language of digital text unfolds into the story. And what a story it is — full of wordplay and innuendo, the narrative flows with equal parts humor and poetic sophistication as words morph into one another with your every movement, a visceral metaphor for the longing of the two alphabetical lovers.

The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

In 1916, Freud took the stage in Vienna in front of an audience that had gathered to hear the eighteenth of his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, and proceeded to canonize himself by staking his place in the history of humanity alongside Copernicus and Darwin, the former having solved geocentrism, the latter anthropocentrism, and Freud himself, allegedly, egocentrism. He likened the criticism psychoanalysis, “his” “science,” was receiving to that Copernicus and Darwin faced when their theories first confronted the status quo. Over the century that followed, Freud’s legacy penetrated society and went on to underpin the making of consumer culture. But understanding the story, the complete story, of how Freud became Freud hinges on understanding the story’s very storiness.