A long time coming: Cartographies of Time

Murray GM July 4, 2015

I've had this fantastic book for a while, but I haven't been able to do it justice when it comes to photographing it. So I'm putting up anyway as it's too good to leave off this blog.

Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton is a great book, visually rich and full of historical goodies. Even if you aren't a visualisation or graphic design obsessive there's plenty about this book to love. The textured cover and binding is wonderful, and the wrap around cover image demonstrates one of the trickiest issues dealing with this subject; scale. Many of these wonderful artefacts are long or vast scale, things that are physical and don't want to be contained with in the pages of a book. I'd have loved to see a few of them break out (maybe the odd gate fold), but that was probably too much for the budget.

It's a great piece of book design by Jan Haux, especially the contents page.
Yet another beautiful book from the Princeton Architectural Press.
https://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?isbn=9781568987637

A Pair of Manuel Limas

Murray GM April 25, 2014

Continuing my two of kind theme, I've just received my copies of Visual Complexity and The Book of Trees both by Manuel Lima.

If you're a fan of Edward Tufte or just into information graphics and data visualisation, you'll love both of these. There's a little overlap but it's worth it. The most recent one (The Book of Trees ) is really wonderful. They are both from the excellent Princeton Architectural Press, whose publications I've raved about many times on this blog. They published the incredible Cartographies of Time, which is a book that I can pick up again and again.

Here's a sampling from Visual Complexity

Here's a sampling from The Book of Trees

Update:

I've spent a little time with these books now, and they are wonderful. However the typography in Visual Complexity troubles me. It's the body copy. It's justified on 2 columns and is set at a nice large size, but the line length, in my opinion, is too short. It causes lots of hyphenation and makes the gaps between words much larger than the 'i' rule. The result means the words appear disconnected, interestingly much like datapoints, but it's less legible.

Don't let this put you off, the book is still a sumptuous collection of fantastic data visualizations and ideas.

Another beautiful book from the Princeton Architectural Press

Murray GM June 25, 2011

Picked up a copy of The Englishman Who Posted Himself and Other Curious Objects by John Tingey (http://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?isbn=9781568988726). Yet another beautifully designed book from Princeton Architectural Press. Hats off to the designer Deb Wood for the great typography and managing to capture that essential 'englishness' in the design.

This is a wonderful book about an eccentric man's obsession with the postal system and increasingly creative ways to collect. The Englishman is Willie Reginald Bray and he was a mail artist extraordinaire. He constantly probed and challenged the postal system and invented elaborate ways to gather postmarks from far off places, such as dropping postcards in bottles over the sides of ships and out of hot air balloons. It's a great story full of art, humour and inspiration.