Art + Design Reference

By Anna Corba
Take a trip to Paris, without leaving your own backyard! Learn to create line drawings of all things quintessentially French with this charming volume filled with easy-to-follow exercises. Learn More

By Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels, introduction by Steven Heller, afterword by Andrew Blauvelt
The Electric Information Age Book explores the nine-year window of mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when formerly backstage players—designers, graphic artists, editors—stepped into the spotlight to produce a series of exceptional books. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of the "Electronic Information Age," these small, inexpensive paperbacks aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Carl Sagan to the masses. Graphic designers such as Quentin Fiore (The Medium is the Massage, 1967) employed a variety of radical techniques—verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics—that were as important to the content as the text. The Electric Information Age Book is the first book-length history of this brief yet highly influential publishing phenomenon. Learn More

By Parviz Tanavoli
Over the course of the past two decades a previously unrecognized genre of startlingly modern looking large flatwoven hangings and covers (gelims) has emerged from an isolated highland region in Mazandaran Province in northern Iran. Learn More

By Yoshitomo Nara
This lavishly produced two-volume catalog raisonné, created with the full participation of Yoshitomo Nara, is the most extensive, authoritative, and beautiful expression of the artist’s work ever published. Featuring two 400-page volumes bound in fabric featuring Nara’s designs, the catalog covers all of the artist’s prolific output over the span of his career to date, including more than 4,500 paintings, drawings, editions, sculptures, photographs, and collaborations with other artists. Learn More

Illustrations by Lisa Hanawalt
This personal studio includes everything budding artists need to paint a modern-day masterpiece. Learn More

By Amid Amidi Foreword by John Lasseter
Over the past 25 years, Pixar’s team of artists, writers, and directors have shaped the world of contemporary animation with their feature films and shorts. From classics such as Toy Story and A Bug’s Life to recent masterpieces such as Up, Toy Story 3, and Cars 2, this comprehensive collection offers a behind-the-scenes tour of every Pixar film to date. Learn More

By Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Lois Weinthal, ed.
AfterTaste: Expanded Practices in Interior Design is an edited volume comprising texts, interviews and portfolios that collectively document new theories and emerging critical practices in the field of interior design. The material is informed by, but not limited to, the annual AfterTaste symposia hosted by Parsons The New School of Design. Learn More

By Stephen Taylor
It was an exercise to learn how to see, to understand just one thing in its greatest detail. Stephen Taylor came across the 250-year-old tree while on a walk in Essex, England, six years ago, shortly after the deaths of his mother and close friend—a tragic time that brought him back to painting and then to an obsession with realism and color perception. He painted the same oak scores of times over a period of three years, in extremes of weather and light, at all times of day and night. Oak is nature's creed of endurance (the tree was standing when Jane Austen was just a baby) and of one man's promise to find beauty in a painful world. Learn More

By Charles Bloszies
Increasingly, architects are hired to design new work for existing structures. Whether for reasons of preservation, sustainability, or cost-effectiveness, the movement to reuse buildings presents a variety of design challenges and opportunities. Old Buildings, New Designs is an Architecture Brief devoted to working within a given architectural fabric—from the technical issues that arise from aging construction to the controversy generated by the various project stakeholders to the unique aesthetic possibilities created through the juxtaposition of old and new. Learn More

By Helen Armstrong and Zvezdana Stojmirovic, foreword by Ellen Lupton
Creativity is no longer the sole territory of the designer and other creative professionals. Amateurs are drawn to websites such as Flickr, Threadless, WordPress, YouTube, Etsy, and Lulu, approaching design with the expectation that they will fill in the content. Learn More

By Paula Scher
In the early 1990s, celebrated graphic designer Paula Scher (Make It Bigger, 2002) began painting maps of the world as she sees it. The larger her canvases grew, the more expressionistic her geographical visions became. Displaying a powerful command of image and type, Scher brilliantly transformed the surface area of our world. Learn More

By John Ingledew
A source book of visual ideas and strategies for visual communication How to Solve any Creative Brief: An A Z of Ideas explains the key ideas, sources of inspiration and visual techniques that have been used throughout design history. Learn More

By Bowie Style
Patterns are everywhere, an antidote to gloomy economic times, we see them creeping over shop fronts, packaging design, clothes and home accessories. Learn More

By Jennifer Bass and Pat Kirkham with a forward by Martin Scorsese
This is the first book to be published on one of the greatest American designers of the 20th Century, who was as famous for his work in film as for his corporate identity and graphic work. Learn More

By Tony Morgan
A great introduction for retail students, this book offers a user-friendly reference guide to all aspects of visual merchandising and covers both window dressing and in-store areas. Learn More

Essays by Jen Bekman and Christoph Niemann
If New York City is a state of mind, then Jorge Colombo captures the metropolis' thoughts like no other. Learn More

By Chip Carter
This latest title in the wildly popular Obsessed With series is the Star Trek fan’s ultimate challenge. More than just a trivia book, this interactive game includes an electronic scoring module that allows readers to quiz themselves or compete against a friend. Learn More

By James Jean
Over the past decade, James Jean has won critical acclaim for his art (including a record eight Eisner Awards in a row for his cover illustrations for the DC Comics series Fables), hosted celebrated gallery exhibitions around the globe, received numerous design awards, and developed a fan base of devoted collectors. Learn More

Illustrations by Caitlin Keegan
Shakespeare’s sonnets are revered the world over for perfectly capturing the torments and joys of love—requited or otherwise—in just fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. This treasure of a book collects 29 of the bard’s most romantic sonnets, each one lovingly illustrated by the talented Caitlin Keegan. Learn More

By Ed Roth
In this entirely original collection, stencil maverick Ed Roth presents 25 brand-new stencil designs—from retro-cool typewriters, microphones, and roller skates to elegant leaves, birds, and abstract shapes. Learn More

Text by Katrien Van der Schueren
Large-scale wall charts were fundamental tools of classroom instruction throughout Europe in the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Collected here for the first time in one deluxe volume are over 100 of these vintage educational posters—now important relics in the history of science, art, and design. Learn More

By Laetitia Devernay
Pairing two seemingly disparate elements—an orchestra conductor and a grove of trees—award-winning artist Laetitia Devernay herself orchestrates a visual magnum opus. Learn More

Edited by Alexander Brash,, Jamie Hand,,and Kate Orff
Gateway National Recreation Area is one of the most diverse and underused parks in the national park system. Spreading across the coastline of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and New Jersey, it includes wildlife estuaries, bird-nesting areas, salt marshes, historic military forts, beaches, and NYC's first municipal airport, to name just a few of its exceptional features. Learn More

By Caitlin Lempres Brostrom and Richard C. Peters
Over the course of a career that spanned forty-five years, William Wilson Wurster (1895–1973) designed hundreds of residences up and down the West Coast. Like Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, with whom Wurster maintained a close professional exchange, Wurster blends modernism with the vernacular. Wurster described these homes as "frames for living": spaces that could be fully transformed by the occupant to meet their needs and desires, well-designed canvases for homemaking. Authors Caitlin Lempres Brostrom, AIA, and Richard C. Peters, FAIA, draw upon extensive historical research as well as personal relationships with Wurster to tell the story of his career, including both residential and institutional building. The Houses of William Wurster features new and archival footage of thirty-three of the architect's best-known houses and includes a foreword by Donlyn Lyndon. Learn More

By Richard Brereton with Caroline Roberts
In the digital age, the original meaning of cut and paste has been replaced with a few clicks of a mouse, This has led to a lot of derivative and unimaginative computer produced work. In response to this, artists have returned to using more traditional methods of making images. Learn More

By Matt Pagett
Learn the language of drawing with this helpful guide that teaches artists of every skill level the grammar and vocabulary necessary to develop their own style. Learn More

Foreword by Karen Sinsheimer Essay by Margaretta Mitchell
Described by Ansel Adams as the “greatest photographer of the nude,” Ruth Bernhard created a collection of images that ranks among the most profound photographs of the female form. Her intense, studied camerawork transcended the boundaries between the spirit and the flesh. Learn More

By Louisa Taylor
Ceramicists have been plying their art and craft for thousands of years, and never more prolifically than today. The Ceramics Bible is the most comprehensive and up-to-date volume on the subject. Learn More

By Eli Wilner
Originally published in 2000, The Gilded Edge was the first book to offer an in-depth look at America’s legacy of exquisite antique picture frames. Studied and appreciated in Europe for many years, frame connoisseurship was neglected in America until Eli Wilner created this lushly illustrated celebration of the craft. Learn More

By Daniel Wallace
Passed down from Master to apprentice, The Jedi Path is an ancient training manual that has educated and enlightened generations of Jedi. Within its pages, the Jedi-intraining will discover the history and lore of the Jedi Order, the ways of the Force and how to wield it, the subtle nuances of lightsaber combat, and the dangers of the Dark Side. The only remaining copy in existence, this hallowed tome features handwritten annotated notes by Yoda, Luke Skywalker, Count Dooku, and Darth Sidious, among many others. Learn More

By Will Hobson
A modern twist on the classic inkblot personality test, this kit includes 12 beautiful inkblots to analyze and interpret. Any interpretation can be a jumping-off point for self-discovery, or maybe just a good laugh! Learn More