Analog Books to Die For: Five Fantastic Die-Cut Books

What cutting-edge digital culture has to do with an unmakeable book, lasers, and Sherlock Holmes.

For all their wonder and promise, one crucial component of the joy of reading still eludes the publishing platforms of the future: holding a beautifully bound, meticulously designed, thoughtfully crafted tome in your two hands. Hardly does that tactile delight get more intense than with a magnificent die-cut book. (Die-cutting is a process using a steel die to cut away sections of a page.) Here are five old-timey treasures that will make you swoon in rediscovered awe of the analog.

THINGS I HAVE LEARNED IN MY LIFE SO FAR

Every seven years, Stefan Sagmeister takes a year-long sabbatical, during which he does absolutely no commercial work. Instead, he retreats to Bali or another off-the-grid corner of the world, where he immerses himself in creative exploration and self-improvement. Things I have learned in my life so far, sitting atop our selection of beautifully designed books by prominent graphic designers, grew from a list in his diary compiled during his first such sabbatical. The book, which consists of 15 unbound signatures in a gorgeous die-cut slipcase producing 15 different covers, is a reflection on life, being human, and the meaning of happiness, relayed through the language Sagmeister is so masterfully fluent in — elegant, eloquent graphic design. Each spread presents a beautifully and thoughtfully designed typographic sentiment, or fragment of a sentiment continued on the following spread, about one of life’s simple truths — part Live Now, part Everythign Is Going To Be OK, part The 3D Type Book, yet it both predates and outshines all three.

TREE OF CODES

Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Tree of Codes topped our list of the best art, design and photography books of 2010 — and for good reason. So ambitious was Foer’s project that nearly all bookbinders he approached deemed it unmakeable. When Belgian publishing house Die Keure finally figured out a way to make it work, what came out was a brilliant piece of “analog interactive storytelling” — a book created by cutting out chunks of text from Foer’s favorite novel, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish author Bruno Schulz, rearranging the text to form an entirely different story. The die-cut narrative hangs in an aura of negative space for a beautiful blend of sculpture and storytelling, adding a layer of physicality to the reading experience in a way that completely reshapes your relationship with text and the printed page.

I thought: What if you pushed it to the extreme, and created something not old-fashioned or nostalgic but just beautiful? It helps you remember that life can surprise you.” ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Our full review here, including remarkable making-of footage.

HOLY CLUES

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is one of the most beloved and enduring literary characters of all time, to this day culturally relevant and alluring. In the 1999 unlikely gem Holy Clues : The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes, author Stephen Kendrick explores how Holmes’ legendary methods of Zen-like awareness, observation and deduction can be employed in our relationship with spirituality. (Cue in our omnibus of 7 essential meditations on the science of spirituality.) The book’s dust jacket features a single die-cut hole, through which peeks Sherlock’s iconic silhouette on a patterned pictorial cover.

OFFF, YEAR ZERO

For the past decade, the OFFF festival of post-digital culture has been a beacon of contemporary art, design and media innovation, offering a provocative lens for understanding modern culture. Every year, OFFF releases a lavish book that’s both a catalog of work from the festival and a scrumptious keepsake tome of visual culture. This year, as the festival celebrates its roots and its return to Barcelona, it produced what’s easily the most ambitious book yet: OFFF, Year Zero: Artwork and Designs from the OFFF Festival, published by our friends at Mark Batty and featuring astounding, visually gripping work around the “Year Zero” theme.

Each of the tome’s 300 pages is die-cut, so the stunning artworks can be hung on the walls of homes, studios, classrooms and creativity hubs alike.

CURIOUS BOYM

Since 1986, designer Constantin Boym and his partner Laurene Leon Boym, working as Boym Partners, have been finding humor in the humdrum and magic in the mundane to churn out relentlessly whimsical work across product design, furniture, installations and more. Curious Boym from Princeton Architectural Press and design duo Hjalti Karlsson + Jan Wilker is an appropriately playful volume covering the many mediums of Boym’s creative curiosity. The tactile, interactive book features a die-cut cover, pop-ups, pull-outs, and other analog surprises that play into Boym’s irreverent, exuberant and fun approach to design.

The lovely Abe Books has even more die-cut gems for your gushing pleasure.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Obsessive Consumption: Life in a Material World, Illustrated

How a visual record of consumerism is paving the way for mindful consumption.

I’ve been a longtime fan of Kate Bingaman-Burt‘s Obsessive Consumption project — a wonderfully illustrated visual record of personal consumption running since February 5, 2006. So I was delighted when last year Princeton Architectural Press (of The Map as Art fame) added the project to this running list of blog-turned-book success stories and published Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today? — a charming illustrated chronicle of Bingham-Burt’s adventures in a material world, spanning 200 pages and three years’ worth of selected ink drawings from the project.

The project is particularly interesting examined in parallel and contrast to Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff, which also uses black-and-white line illustration but explores the flipside of personal consumption by exposing the dark underbelly of the seemingly innocuous products we buy.

Images courtesy of Kate Bingham-Burt

And while Obsessive Consumption may at first seem in stark contrast with my advocacy of collaborative consumption and having more by owning less, its underlying message is one of introspection and insight, of paying closer attention to how we make sense of the world and our place in it through “stuff” and, in the process, becoming more mindful consumers.

You can snag an original drawing by Kate over on Etsy.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

In The Wilds: Illustrating the Charm of the Countryside

An antidote to urbanity by way of bails of hay, or what Irish quasi-postmen have to do with art.

For all its blessings, one of the great tragedies of urban life is that we’ve lost the granularity of nature, the calm of the countryside, the quiet details of the soil after rain or a tree’s cracked bark or the soft glimmer of a summer field. That’s exactly what you’ll find in illustrator Nigel Peake‘s new book, In The Wilds — a lovely collection of hand-drawn illustrations that capture the near-forgotten charm of rural life. With his penchant for obsessive detail and neatness, Peake portrays the wild in a captivatingly structured, patterned way, blending whimsy and order in stunning pen sketches, ink drawings and soft, muted watercolors.

The country is peaceful. It is a place to draw and work and be surrounded by things that we could never make.” ~ Nigel Peake

And Peake should know — he lives in an Irish village with just one road, where he gets a rare outsider’s view of the inside of farm life and is frequently mistaken for the postman.

'Bails of hay collected (end of summer).'

Image courtesy of Nigel Peake via The Morning News

'Pallets stacked in yard'

Image courtesy of Nigel Peake via The Morning News

'The barn structure stands alone, surrounded by discarded and ordered fragments.'

Image courtesy of Nigel Peake via The Morning News

'The fallen scarecrow.'

Image courtesy of Nigel Peake via The Morning News

'Bails wrapped in plastic (for winter).'

Image courtesy of Nigel Peake via The Morning News

Images courtesy of the artist via The Morning News

This book is a record of a quiet place that nearly everyone has visited at some point, and the farmland is part of this—a place where the lanes of farms run along the lake that is beside the hill of trees that is neighbor to open spaces.” ~ Nigel Peake

In The Wilds comes from Princeton Architectural Press, who have a knack for thoughtful visual delights, as you might recall from The Map as Art and FORM+CODE.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Creative Cartography: 7 Must-Read Books on Maps

From tattoos to Thomas More’s Utopia, or what Moby Dick has to do with the nature of time.

We’re obsessed with maps — a fundamental sensemaking mechanism for the world, arguably the earliest form of standardized information design, and a relentless source of visual creativity. Today, we turn to seven fantastic books that explore the art and science of cartography from seven fascinating angles.

THE MAP AS ART

Map As Art, The: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography is the definitive overview of today’s bravest, boldest creative cartography, featuring 360 colorful creations by well-known artists and emerging visual experimenteurs alike, including Brain Pickings favorites Maira Kalman, Paula Scher and Olaful Eliasson. Insightful essays by Gayle Clemans complement the maps and overlay a richer sheath of insight onto the work and creative process of these cartographic artists.

Matthew Cusick, 'Fiona’s Wave,' 2005

Cusick's oversized collages are painted with fragments of vintage atlases and school geography books from the golden era of cartography, 1872-1945.

Qin Ga, 'Site 22: Mao Zedong Temple,' 2005

In 2002, China's Long March Project embarked upon a 'Walking Visual Display' along the route of the 1934-1936 historic 6000-mile Long March, and Beijing-based artist Qin kept tracked the group’s route in a tattooed map on his back. Three years later, Qin continued the trek where the original marchers had left off, accompanied by a camera crew and a tattoo artist, who continually updated the map on Qin’s back.

We reviewed it in full here.

YOU ARE HERE

You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination is a beautiful and meditative compendium of maps and musings on maps exploring, in the broadest possible terms, the human condition. Divided into three sections — “Personal Geography,” “At Home in the World” and “Realms of Fantasy” — the book features 50 full-color and 50 black-and-white cartographic illustrations, ranging from a humorous diplomatic atlas of Europe and Asia to a canine view of the world to hand-drawn maps of shelters along the Appalachian Trail.

A selection of diverse essays, from the academic to the personal to the humorous, contextualize the maps within the larger conceptual narrative exploring humanity’s compulsion to map and chart its place in the universe.

FROM HERE TO THERE

We’re longtime fans of the Hand-Drawn Maps Association, an ongoing archive of user-submitted maps, diagrams and other spatial illustrations.

From Here to There: A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association is exactly what it promises — a delightful anthology of ephemeral documents that give direction, from quirky doodles to remarkably detailed drawings on anything from Dallas skate parks to questionable tourist routes in Bulgaria’s mountains.

Eccentric yet unassuming, From Here to There offers a charming visual treat and, in the process, reveals fascinating slivers of human stories.

RADICAL CARTOGRAPHY

An Atlas of Radical Cartography is as much about the art of cartography as it is about social activism, pairing artists, designers, architects, urban planners and cultural institutions in an ambitious volume that explores mapping projects across social justice, globalization, energy, human rights and more.

It features 10 eye-opening maps on everything from marginal land settlement in Calcutta to the Los Angeles water cycle by 10 different artists, alongside 10 compelling essays on sociopolitical issues examined through the prism of cartography.

An Atlas of Radical Cartography comes from The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, an inspired editorial collective hosting dialogs and initiating art projects that facilitate idea exchange and pro-social action.

STRANGE MAPS

Based on the excellent blog of the same name, Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities features 138 of the most fascinating, absorbing and remarkable maps from the blog’s 3-year history of culling the world’s forgotten, little-known and niche cartographic treasures. From the world as depicted in Orwell’s 1984, to a color map of Thomas More’s Utopia, to the 16th-century portrayal of California as an island where people live like the Amazons, the book is brim-full of priceless anecdotes from our collective conception of the world over the centuries.

Strange Maps is one of our favorite blog-turned-book success stories. We reviewed it in full here.

CARTOGRAPHIES OF TIME

Since antiquity, humanity has had an ongoing fascination with the nature of time, struggling not only to understand it but to also visualize it and thus make it more digestible, more tangible, more graspable.Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline traces the history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. The gorgeous, lavishly illustrated collection of timelines features everything from medieval manuscripts to websites to a chronological board game developed by Mark Twain. BibliOdyssey has a sneak peek.

Cartographies of Time is easily one of the most beautiful books to come by in the past year, both a treasure trove of antique artwork and a priceless cultural timecapsule containing humanity’s understanding of time and place in the larger context of existence.

MAPS OF THE IMAGINATION

On a most fundamental level, maps are visual storytelling about the world — about what exists in it, what matters in it, and where we belong relative to it. In Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Peter Turchi explores how some of greatest storytellers in literary history employed maps as narrative devices, revealing some remarkable similarities between mapmaking, traditionally perceived as an analytical science, and the art of writing fiction. From Melville to Nabokov to Stevenson to the Marx Brothers, the book features hundreds of extraordinary illustrations from and about iconic works of literature.

Maps of the Imagination is a genre-defying gem that straddles art book, writer’s manual and cultural critique in an utterly captivating way that makes you look at both old maps and familiar fiction with new eyes.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

♥ $7 / month♥ $3 / month♥ $10 / month♥ $25 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.