Buzz Poole

I’ve got maps on my mind again, having recently found W.W. Jervis’s The World in Maps: A Study in Map Evolution, published by Oxford University Press in 1937. I discovered this book quite unexpectedly one recent afternoon, running errands in my Queens neighborhood. New York’s mild winter has teased out the book vendors whom usually [...]

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The Electric Information Age Book, by Jeffrey Schnapp (the faculty director of Harvard's MetaLAB) and Adam Michaels (a cofounder of Project Projects), is the third installment in the “Inventory Books” series, which seeks “to advance the role of design as an integrated force in book editing and production . . . as a means of revitalizing the space [...]

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In the immensely enjoyable film How to Make a Book With Steidl, of the cavalcade of famous artists seen developing books with Gerhard Steidl, photographer Joel Sternfeld serves as the unwitting co-star. We watch Steidl jet around the world – a day with Robert Frank in New York, a quick trip to Paris for some face [...]

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After high school and during college, I worked in kitchens. Today, I work in publishing and have what some might call a bit of a book habit. Not always good about restraint when it comes to both food and books, I’ve boasted about the fact that I’ve never gotten deep into cookbooks. For one reason, [...]

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At The New Yorker Book Bench Macy Halford recently posed an important question: “What is wanting to write without wanting to read like? It’s imperative that we figure it out, because Giraldi’s right: it’s both crazy and prevalent among budding writers.” She was echoing a question asked by debut novelist William Giraldi who in the [...]

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I met Alyce Santoro in 2006, in Brooklyn, not too long before she moved to Marfa, Texas. Filled with curios and the materials of her multimedia artwork, her basement studio made an impression on me as a place of cramped enchantment. I was there to learn about Santoro’s SONIC FABRIC, an equal parts blend polyester [...]

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I first learned about The Institute for the Future of the Book while working on a magazine assignment that eventually became this piece for The Millions. In getting to know Bob Stein, his colleagues and the projects they championed I became convinced that concerns about the death of reading and writing were deeply misplaced. What [...]

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In the summer of 2009, the venerable Printed Matter in New York City exhibited “Hungry for Death,” a riot of ephemeral kitsch propaganda created by the Ann Arbor, Michigan, band Destroy All Monsters. I made several visits to the show, interested in how the founding members – Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagra – [...]

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You’re reading this, so on some level you consider yourself a visual person. On sublime spring afternoons, you sit through long, foreign films; when out to dinner you comment on the design of restaurant menus; you critique the composition of stupid cell phone ads; you make sure your socks always match your suspenders. Me too [...]

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As a student at Central Saint Martins in London, Rana Abou Rjeily devised the font family Mirsaal, which comprises Arabic and Latin alphabets that work together in typographic harmony. Growing up in Lebanon speaking Arabic, French and English, she found Arabic, her first language, the hardest of the three to learn. In her design classes [...]

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