Warning: these books are [mostly] devoid of plot with not much character development, just page after page of visual scrumptuousness.

So here they are, ordered from the top of the pile to the bottom:

The 1000 Journals Project: Over ten years ago, someguy [that's the name he goes by] distributed 1000 blank journals around San Francisco, leaving them in airports, coffee shops, libraries and other public spaces with instructions to fill a page however you wanted and then pass it on or leave it for the next person to find. Over time, many of these journals made their way back to someguy; in other cases, participants sent him a digital page image. This book is a fascinating compilation of some of these incredibly intimate and creative pages, made even more interesting by the juxtaposition of pages from many different journals. Find out more at www.1000journals.com.

The Museum at Purgatory: Like he did in the Griffin and Sabine trilogy, Nick Bantock takes us into a fantasy world that feels real, telling us imaginative stories illustrated by whimsical images, and presented in a beautifully designed and printed book. Bet you can’t get past page 50 without an overwhelming urge to go to your studio and make stuff. [What are you waiting for? Go!]

Everyday Matters by Danny Gregory: This book is simultaneously instructional, inspirational and an intimate look at Gregory’s life as he uses art, specifically drawing, to find his way through a difficult time.

The Polaroid Book: [Taschen]: I love the look of Polaroids, the feel of them, the real object-ness of them. The downright messiness of them. And I love the kind of pictures that are taken with them— casual, intimate, often haunting.

Non Facturé [Rejected Photos]: I came across this gem during a blissful afternoon wandering through Powell’s Bookstore some years ago. From the introduction: “Non facturé [not charged] is the term used by French photo labs for images not suitable for printing because they are, for instance, over- or under-exposed, blurred, out of focus, or taken by accident…at times they have an unexpected, spontaneous quality which would be impossible to achieve on purpose. This book and CD-ROM set contain more than 100 such pictures, selected on their often mysterious beauty and graphic quality.”

1000 Artist Journal Pages: Personal Pages and Inspirations: This call to artists got responses from hundreds of artists from around the world who were willing to share pages from their visual diaries. “I felt like part of a global community,” said Dawn DeVries Sokol, the project’s curator. “Hundreds of artists were willing to share themselves through their pages…one thing I know after working on this project: we are all artists, artistes, künstlers, artistas, artisti or however you may pronounce it in your part of the world.” You’re bound to find something in here that makes you say: I can do that! [So go already!]

Artists’ Journals & Sketchbooks: If you are inspired to begin a visual journal but uncertain how to get started, this book will help. In addition to luscious page images, this book also contains some background about what these artists were thinking when they created the pages, tips for getting started, and some step by step techniques. [Now there’s no excuse. Go on, go. Make some art.]

True Colors: A Palette of Collaborative Art Journals [Somerset Studio]: Each of the 16 contributing artists started a journal in a designated color—white, red, hot pink & orange, violet & greet, metallics—and the journals circulated among the other artists, each adding her unique take on the color theme. [Now start making art with your friends.]

The Journey is the Destination: Dan Eldon created seventeen journals in his short life, the final ones in the midst of the violence of Somalia in the 1990s. This book was put together by his mother and sister to tell the story of this young man who “blazed through his short life like a meteor, leaving a trail…that awes with its intensity and beauty.”—USA Today. [Eldon made art in a war zone! We really have no excuse.]

Tricia Guild on Color: Tricia Guild’s books are luscious, from the design of the table of contents, to the font choices, to the rhythm of the images. I turn to her books again and again to deconstruction them in various ways for my own book design work. But for now, just take a stroll through the color spectrum. And give thanks for our ability to perceive color.

Okay, spend some time getting inspired. Then put the book down and go make something.

[I’m supposed to tell you that I am part of amazon.com’s associate program, which means I get a pittance if you buy one of these books through these links. Just so ya’ know.]

Usually our baskets are full way before the hour is up, so we’ll grab a coffee or a piece of quiche and pile our books on the table.

I tend to be quite promiscuous in my book-grabbing and -piling and -reading but during our last outing, I came across this exquisite gem and had eyes for no other.

500 Handmade Books: Inspiring Interpretations of a Timeless Form is part of the 500 Series from Lark Books.

Within the art community, there is an ongoing discussion about what constitutes a book: what is that elemental “bookness” that without it, makes an object something other than a book.

Here is what Steve Miller, one of the jurors, said about their selection criteria:

“…in order to quality, a piece had to demonstrate what we call ‘bookness,’ meaning that it had to operate like a book, opening up and presenting a sequence or potential sequence of images, words, or ideas.”

The books featured selected are from the best bookmakers currently working, including the teacher who introduced me to artist books: Sas Colby. Some of these books push the boundaries of tradition, some are solidly grounded within it. All are brilliantly conceived and exquisitely crafted.

… I plan to share what I have learned about how to think about a book project, organize its content [particularly images], design and produce it—and make a profit doing so.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the “making a profit” part. Many of us who love doing creative work are not so keen on the numbers side of things. Yet, it is exactly the lack of profitability that forces many of us to give up work that nourishes us and [not be too grandious, but I’m just sayin’] contributes something of value to the world in ways both large and small.

So I personally have committed to learning what I need to learn and doing what I need to do to have a business that is profitable and sustainable and moves me from a position of scrambling for work into one of executing a thoughtful plan that moves me toward more strategic goals.

And, to give credence to that old saying that we teach what we need to learn, I have put together two series of workshops specifically focused on the business side of things.

Money Matters is a series of four one-hour teleclasses that covers: Calculating Your Hourly Rate, Evaluating Pricing Models, Estimating, and Gold Is In the Details. Although I work primarily with private publishers, this series is relevant to anyone who needs to set their own pricing, create estimates and proposals, and manage projects, client expectations, and subcontractors. You can sign up for individual classes or for the entire series at a significant savings.

Print Production Workflow: In Depth is another series of four one-hour teleclasses that explores in more depth the tasks, variables, and trouble-spots you are likely to encounter throughout the seven phases of book design and production. The series is divided into 1] Book Design & Cover Design Workflow, 2] Photos, Memorabilia, and Other Graphic Elements Workflow, 3] Page Layout Workflow, and 4] Printing & Binding Workflow. Like the Money Matters series, you can sign up for individual teleclasses or for the entire series at a significant savings.

Two additional teleclass series are in the works: Design Thinking which will cover Book Design Thinking, Design Fundamentals, Typography Fundamentals, and Partnering with Professionals. Digital Image Workflow goes even further into topics addressed in Print Production Workflow such as DAM [Digital Asset Management] Fundamentals, Scanning Fundamentals, Problem Pictures, and Image Editing Fundamentals.

I’ll be supplementing these teleclasses with blog posts and resources related to these topics, which, I hope, will create a holistic curriculum for setting up, executing, and profitably completing book design projects. Here’s to all of us doing good—and profitable—work in the world.

Some related posts that might be of interest:

My original post on book thinking

and a link to  upcoming teleclasses

As more of our photographic images reside in the virtual world, we have not yet developed new systems for keeping track of them. I worry that a generation or more of photographic images will be lost. Here are two books that offer a new system for the digital era.

In the digital shoebox: how to organize, find, and share your photos, Sarah Bay Williams applies her experience coordinating hundreds of thousands of digital images for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science to the problem of organizing collections of personal digital photos. This is the first book I’ve seen that provides a methodical, step-by-step approach that anyone can follow to organize their digital photos from the camera to a final print. This book is written for personal or family photos, but is a good introduction into the methodology of digital archiving.

Googling the term “digital asset management” tends to turn up software recommendations or deadly-dull academic treatises. In The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers – 2nd Edition, Peter Krogh steps away from the bells and whistles of specific software and outlines a methodology [here’s that word again – guess I’m big on it] that, once implemented, can migrate to any software system. Krogh’s book is written for professional photographers and may seem like overkill for organizing personal images, but, like Williams’ book, reading it creates a head-shift and offers a way of thinking about these virtual objects.

Both authors stress two elements key to the smooth functioning of their system: file naming conventions that work for any image brought into the system, and a methodical workflow that is executed consistently whenever images are added to your computer.

Often the resistance to getting a handle on digital images is figuring out how to name the files, where to store them, what to do first, how to handle variations of an image, etc. Granted, it does take some up-front time thinking through the system and some practice getting it to become automatic, but this is one of the things I refer to as “think once, execute many times.”

You might be interested in some of my other book recommendations on my resources for learning page.

I’m a firm believer in getting a good grounding in the fundamental elements of any craft or trade. Through the long history of  setting type—from cast metal through phototypesetting to digital fonts—principles have evolved that affect legibility and readability as well as the reader’s emotional and aesthetic response. The following three books provide a good foundation for understanding this 500+ year old craft.

A note on publication dates: When I look at books about technology or training books for specific programs, I always look for something published within the past year or two. However, when it comes to design and typography,  principles don’t change with the software versions. So I tend to look to the classics, written by people well established in their field.

Back in the days of Hemingway and Dorothy Parker, writers didn’t need to know anything about setting type: that was handled for them. Today there’s a generation of a certain age that grew up using typewriters but are now writing with computers and, in many cases, expected to be their own typesetters. In 1990 Robin Williams [the writer, not the actor, but almost as funny] wrote her wonderful little book: The PC is not a Typewriter. [Williams has also written a version for the Mac called, appropriately enough, The Mac is not a Typewriter so Mac people do not have to go through the trouble of translating function keys.]

By now, it seems, everyone has heard about one space after punctuation, not two, although some still resist or are uneasy about it. Williams explains why the rule you learned in high school typing circa 1967 is no longer relevant. She then moves on to distinguish the appropriate use of en and em dashes, how to find and use special characters and glyphs that might be buried in your font’s character set, and how to set paragraphs that would make Maxwell Perkins weep for joy at the beauty of it all.

Designing with Type by James Craig has been a required text in almost all college courses on typography since 1971. Most recently updated in 2006, eliminating rubber cement and thinner from the list of “essential tools for the designer” [I assume, since the copy on my bookshelf was revised in 1980], it is the equivalent of a semester or two at an excellent design school.

First published in 1993 and revised in 2002, Stop Stealing Sheep is a more entertaining and somewhat less intimidating book that covers much of the same ground as Craig’s book but less pedantically. It is also a wonderful exemplar of various type applications: pay particular attention to the indexes, credits, chapter titles and sidebars.

You might be interested in some of my other book recommendations on my resources for learning page.

That’s a question I hear frequently from writers who want to design their own books. And it’s not a bad question; it’s just usually raised at the wrong point in the process.

Before we can choose a font, we need to determine the kinds of information that will be in the book. In even the simplest books, there are usually chapter titles, perhaps chapter subtitles, body text, and captions. There are also page numbers, sometimes running heads and footers. Often there’s a table of contents, perhaps an index, a timeline and a family tree. These are all different kinds of information; they serve different purposes and often have a hierarcy of importance.

Identifying, naming, and classifying these different types of information is the  preliminary thinking step that will eventually lead to making design choices about the appropriate typeface, size and color to assign to each of these pieces of information.

This combination of conceptual and design work has had the term information design applied to it since the early 1970s. As an introduction, let me recommend:

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information: 2^nd edition by Edward R. Tufte

Edward R. Tufte’s name is one of the first that comes to anyone’s mind when talking about information design. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is his first and classic book and although his focus is more on taking raw statistical data and making it meaningful, this book is probably the best resource for shifting your head into thinking about information design. Any of his books, however, will provide excellent examples of thoughtful and well-executed information design in print.

The Practical Guide to Information Design by Ronnie Lipton brings it down to the working level. Her book is clearly divided into three sections: Audience, Words and Pictures, which pretty much covers the kinds of books we develop as personal historians.

Information Design by Robert Jacobson (Editor), forward by Richard Saul Wurman

If you are interested in a more theoretical or academic treatise on information design—and I know that some of you are likely to be—Information Design collects the thinking of both scholars and practitioners and covers the range of presentation venues: print, online, signage, multimedia, museums and other public spaces.

It is also worth paying attention to for its design. Note particularly:

• size, format and margins
• the use of a second color and a screened value
• typographic choices–go to www.identifont.com for help in identifying the fonts used
• information design–what are the different types of information?
• handling of chapter divides, running heads and footers, and chapter introductions

Although these books are both available through amazon.com, where I would get an associate commission if you bought there, I am linking you directly to Smith’s website and recommend you order from him as small thanks for the tremendous contribution he has made to book arts over his lifetime.

Structure of the Visual Book by Keith A. Smith

From his product page: “…This is a book on concepts, not how to bind. It is an approach that conceives the book as a visual object not by imposed decoration, but through understanding and applying structure. Group, series and sequence are elaborately discussed and diagrammed. Composing the book, as well as the pictures it contains, creates pacing in turning pages. Just as poetry and cinema are conceived in time, so is a book.”

Text in the Book Format by Keith A. Smith

From his product page: “Structure of the Visual Book introduces strategies for organizing pictures in the book format. Text in the Book Format extends these ideas for the writer and artist working with words and pages. This book is not about binding, computers, design, typography or the history of books, but the possibilities of conceiving text which utilizes the format not to distract, but assist the written word. Text in the Book Format examines the possibilities of conceiving text which utilizes the format to assist the written word. By considering the physicality of the book and the turning pages, text becomes a book experience, rather than a running manuscript.”

I think this is a really important book for personal historians who work in print, as they are often more comfortable working with words rather than images. And while most of Smith’s handmade books start with images, unlike those of personal historians, this book will open your mind to the importance of the visual elements of a book as well as the idea of book as object, not merely the carrier of text.