Essay By Design | Book cover highlights of 2021 December 09, 2021 Adjusting to pandemic life in the past two years, we’ve learned new ways to live, work, innovate, and flourish. Despite uncertainty, we’ve done great things, shown abounding resilience and creativity. Read More
Interview By Design | An Infinite History June 04, 2021 Emma Rothschild’s An Infinite History is a history of infinite possibilities. The book traces the fortunes of a single family and its descendants across space and time, beginning with an ordinary, illiterate woman—Marie Aymard—in an ordinary, provincial part of France—Angoulême—in a time that was drifting towards political revolution and economic transformation. Read More
Interview By Design | Books about books, or the cataloging of ideas November 27, 2020 Sales catalogs have a noble lineage, one that an academic press would gladly embrace. The first catalog was published in Venice in 1498 by Aldus Manutius, founder of the Aldine Press. Read More
Interview By Design | Setting A Series of Fortunate Events in motion October 26, 2020 In a world governed by chance, one book peers into the randomness of existence. From cosmic collisions and tectonic shifts to the infinitesimal accidents of biology, Sean B. Carroll’s A Series of Fortunate Events ranges across time and space, showing how chance occurrences brought us to where we are, fashioned us as we are, and contributed to all the beauty and diversity we see around us. Read More
Interview By Design | Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe August 24, 2020 Porcelain, once dubbed “white gold” after being reproduced by an eighteenth-century Saxon alchemist, may seem to us today like a quaint rarity, a beautiful relic confined to elegant china cabinets. But in Suzanne Marchand’s absorbing history, this translucent ceramic comes to life as a once-ubiquitous commodity linked to geopolitical upheaval and the global transformations of the last three centuries. Read More
Interview By Design | Karen Siatras on designing for Humboldt July 20, 2020 Karen Siatras is a graphic designer in SAAM’s Publications office. For her most recent project, the massive exhibition catalogue that accompanies Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture, she created special decorative letters at the start of each chapter in the book. Read More
Essay By Design | The 2020 AUPresses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show June 18, 2020 A book’s design communicates to readers before the book even has a chance to. It tells us something essential. The most successful book design goes a step further: it compels us to hold the book in our hands for a little while, turn it over, leaf through it, and admire its form. Read More
Interview By Design | The Papers of Thomas Jefferson May 17, 2020 In a ceremony at the Library of Congress on May 17, 1950, President Harry S. Truman accepted the first volume of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, an ambitious project that would span multiple decades and vastly different modes of production. Read More
Interview By Design | Oddly Modern Fairy Tales April 24, 2020 Fairy tales exert a keen influence on the collective imagination. By turns entertaining and frightening, didactic and illuminating, they are the stuff of dreams, but also of reality. Read More
Interview By Design | The World According to Physics March 24, 2020 Every branch of knowledge seeks to provide an account of—something: the past, the present, the mind, culture, institutions, social and physical phenomena. Read More
Interview By Design | The making of The Obama Portraits February 12, 2020 Every book’s backstory includes the intricacies of its production. That fact was brought home to me in my recent discussion with Steve Sears, Production Manager for art books at Princeton University Press, about the design and manufacture of one of the Press’s most important books of 2020, The Obama Portraits. Read More
Interview By Design | Sunnis and Shi’a: A Political History January 31, 2020 A typographic cover design poses a unique challenge. Unlike book covers that avail themselves of rich imagery, an all-type cover has to articulate a book’s subject with a greater economy of means. Read More
Reading List By Design | The Lives of Great Religious Books December 17, 2019 Breath is an integral element of most religious traditions, scriptures, and practices. One recalls the narrative of creation in Genesis, the life-circulating force of prana in the Upanishads, or the drawing in and releasing of air that accompanies the dhikr, or remembrance of God, in Islamic devotional rites. Read More
Essay By Design | Fungipedia: A Brief Compendium of Mushroom Lore November 05, 2019 Playfully illustrated by Amy Jean Porter, Fungipedia is an accessible, and sometimes irreverent, tour of mycology: a mini encyclopedia of mushrooms, for all intents and purposes. Read More
