This is a masterful photo book, by a photojournalist who worked for newspapers in the 1930s and 1940s. He shot with a hand-held 4×5 and flashbulbs. I don’t know if he thought of himself as an artist, but he was a true outsider artist. He roamed New York at night, processed his film in a darkroom built into the trunk of his car and delivered his prints to his editor at Picture News by day.…
This was my hiking handbook in the 70s and 80s. In the 70s I didn’t actually have this book, and all my hiking was done with friends family. I was just a teenager and wasn’t planning my own trips. But I found this book somewhere–on the bookshelf at summer camp? At my best friend’s house?
In any case, Fletcher was not nearly so gear oriented as current writers.…
A novel from my teenage years. Cat Man is a novel of running off to join the circus. The protagonist finds work caring for the cats: lions and tigers. He becomes more obsessed with the great cats with each chapter. But it is not the protagonist’s disastrous fixation that makes the book, it is the sumptuous detail in the operation of a mid 20th century circus.…
This is the oddest and loveliest of the Becher’s volumes of architectural typologies.
You can have your blast furnaces, I love the coal mine tipples. I love the way you can see the structure, the bracing, usually made of nailed together boards, all creaky and improvised. The shabby landscapes, shot plain as day in the soft light of winter when there are no leaves on the trees, nothing to obscure the grandeur of wooden towers for coal shafts.…
A sweet vintage book consisting of profiles of steam locomotives.. if you are into such things.
I used it as a reference for designing railroad themed board games.…
I’ve always admired Jacob Holdt’s achievement in this book. With the most curious of cameras he made a photographic journey through America, and always took the time to visit, eat with (and for some reason usually sleep with) the poorest people he met. A really beautiful book.…
This book was introduced to my childhood home by my uncle Jerry (who lived in the Sausalito hippy houseboat community) and it was read by my parents and myself and my siblings at various times. We all used to quote its slogan “Allah’s winds are free, therefore his faithful use them”. It is a really beautiful book on so many levels: the exquisite photography by the author, the ethnographic details of beduin society, and most of all the accounts of the working of an wooden arab sailing cargo vessel, a dhow.…
I read this natural history book as a kid and it inspired me to keep a variety of pets. The illustrations by the author, and the chapters on aquariums are especially wonderful.…
It is not often that I read a book that makes me think: Wow, this explains everything!” Jared Diamond’s book did exactly that, in a literal sense. The entire tapestry of global civilizations is explained in this book.…
This is the sort of novel that transports the reader to an extraordinary time and place. Vivid, passionate, and erudite, it is lovely writing. If the vocabulary of the first chapter doesn’t make you sit up and get out the dictionary (i.e. computer) then you are more literate than I.
The essential subject is that the horror of the second world war intrudes on the paradise of Greece.…
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