Weekly Wrap-Up & Preview: November 29
November 29, 2013The Online Design Book Fair is the place to be this weekend for discovering and buying the best in design books. New features we’ve added to the Fair include unique video trailers for key titles and themed lists that allow you to find books according to designer, specialized design topic—even color. Another way to find books for your gift list is by going to our Holiday Gift Book Lists, each focusing on a different design discipline. The first of these guides shows you which architecture books make great gifts. This week we also rounded up some of the most exciting current rare-book auctions, explored a new children’s library in Mexico, and revisited Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities in our latest installment of Book of the Week. Next week: the books that inspire the interior design team of Yabu-Pushelberg.
Weekly Wrap-Up

Discover hundreds of design books by theme, price discount, and and even color at the Designers & Books Online Book Fair.
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The first of our holiday gift guides offers a sampling of books published in 2013 selected with every architecture lover on your gift list in mind. Books range from a guide on how to draw like an architect, to surveys of great architectural accomplishments, to books on understanding how architects do what they do—and why. We’ll be adding to the list, and publishing new gift guides to books in other design areas in the coming weeks, so check back often!
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Each fall, the world's preeminent auction houses offer up a collection of rare and unique books. Here are five of the most exciting.
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At a time when the return to handcraftsmanship is often in the news and the community of design “makers” continues to grow, the custom bicycles built by Richard Sachs—and the attentiveness he brings to building them—are still a rare ideal. This same attentiveness is just as evident in what he calls the “pile“ of books he “built” for his list.
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Writer and activist Jane Jacobs had an urgent vision of urban spaces in the 1960s that retains relevance today.
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Critic and author Alexandra Lange is a fan of Jane Austen: “In my dreams I wake up one day and write the Pride and Prejudice of the contemporary design world,” she says in one of her answers to The Proust Questionnaire—Book Edition.
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Architects convert a former steel plant in Mexico into an awe-inspiring children’s library.
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The award-winning Toronto and New York-based interior designers George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg share a love of books as well as a creative life together.
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Announcements
Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister
Now is Better
By Stefan Sagmeister
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: October 2023
Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future
By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022
Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People
By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022
Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.
Milton Glaser: POP by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Milton Glaser: POP
By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023
This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022
Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition)
By Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Letterform Archives Books
Published: October 2023
This facsimile edition of Die Fläche, recreates every page of the formative design periodical in full color and at original size, accompanied by essays that contextualize the work, highlighting contributions by pathbreaking women, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.
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