Font Matters: A Dreary E-World 'Where Every Book Is Identical'
"In fact, [Matthew] Carter doesn't own an iPad, Kindle, or other reading device, as he is waiting for them to mature. (He does own an iPhone.) He frets that, as things stand, reading devices and programs homogenize all the tangible aspects of a book, like size or shape, as well as font. They are also poor at hyphenation and justification: breaking words at lexically appropriate locations, and varying the spacing between letters and between words. This may sound recondite but it is a visual imprint of principles established over the entire written history of a language. 'Maybe people who grow up reading online, where every book is identical, don't know what they're missing.' "
--From an Economist profile of legendary type designer Matthew Carter, headlined: "The most-read man in the world."
On
March 5, 2011, 20,000 passionate readers will give away a million books
to people across the U.K. and Ireland during the inaugural 
Shenzhen's planners "decided that a world-class city needed--and we certainly wouldn't argue with this--bookstores," Teicher observed. "In fact, one of Shenzhen's leading public officials said that for a city to be great there never should be more than 10 miles between bookstores!
General retail sales last month were up, offering "more evidence that the lackluster U.S. economy may finally be gaining momentum, despite stubbornly high unemployment," the 
Personally,
I think if you can't figure out what kind of book to get for someone, a photography
book is a good bet--there is something for everyone. A good book to start with
is Hands at Work: Portraits and Profiles
of People Who Work with Their Hands (Heron Moon Press, $34). It was
published in 2008, but has recently gotten national distribution through Baker &
Taylor. Written by Iris Graville, with photography by Summer Moon Scriver, it
profiles 42 people who "are passionate about laboring with their hands."
A sign language interpreter, a blacksmith, a physical therapist, a vibraphonist
("I'm a carpenter by day. It's skilled labor, and I'm proud my hands know
how to do that. But when I'm doing carpentry I don't feel I have a relationship
with the cosmos. With music, my hands connect me to all of creation."), an
automotive technician ("Sometimes things get cussed out and sworn at a
bit. That doesn't help, but a cup of tea and a change of attitude do.")--hands
have never looked so elegant and capable and eternal as they do in this book.
The elegant
hands of Victoria Chipps, a 90-year-old Oglala Lakota Sioux elder, can be seen
in her portrait on the cover of Views
from the Reservation by John Willis (Center for American Places, University
of Chicago Press, $50). Taken over several long visits to the Pine Ridge Indian
Reservation in South Dakota, Willis's photographs are haunting, respectful and
often luminous, like his landscape of a future sundance site, or "Daybreak,"
where bushes in the foreground give the impression of warriors walking toward a
tepee in the morning mist. A young grassdancer at a community powwow, a
veterans' honor guard at a graduation, Vern Sitting Bear and his niece's pet
wolf--the photographs are augmented with older family pictures, with Dwayne
Wilcox's ledger drawings, with poetry and with a CD, Heartbeat of the Rez, of traditional and contemporary songs. It's
an important and handsome book.
Two
landscape photography books are equally stunning. Christopher Brown first hiked
across the Grand Canyon when he was 15, later spent 40 years as a mountain and
river guide, with 20 of those years as a Grand Canyon boatman. In Path of Beauty (St. Martin's Press,
$39.99), he celebrates his love of the canyon with exquisite photography
complemented by his essays on topics ranging from geology to life on the river
to wilderness to the photographic process, mental and physical. The canyon is
rendered in malachite, peach, deep orange and lavender--rocks and water, brambles
and trees, sky and infinite beauty. The 
other book is Arctic Sanctuary (University of Alaska Press/University of Chicago,
$55). The photographs of Jeff Jones and essays by Laurie Hoyle commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. Jones has spent 20 years documenting the refuge, and
the images often have the same intense colors of the Grand Canyon, mixed with
subtle blues and grays. "Sunlit Pinnacles" looks like a lush Alfred
Bierstadt painting, and the clouds in "Late Autumn Tundra" are ocean
waves breaking on a brown beach. "Upper Southside Valley" is a
delicate study in grays and "Sunlit Valley, Shadowed Peaks" looks
like the dawn of the world. Spectacular.
Trees.
Trees are good. They are dramatic, they are soothing, they are comforting, they
are, in a sense, brave--they keep on keepin' on in spite of all we do to bring
them down. (I love trees.) The World of
Trees by Hugh Johnson (University of California Press, $34.95) is not,
strictly speaking, a photography book in the picture book sense--it's more of a
reference book; however, it's beautifully illustrated – a magnificent magnolia,
romantic plane trees in Languedoc, larches in the Dolomites. Informative and
opinionated text by Johnson (yes, the wine guy, but he's also the garden guy),
is just as enjoyable: "Familiar as the plane is, it is hard to fault it
for style.... Its winter silhouette is one of the most graceful of all: a
tracery in which the weeping twigs form 
countless little Gothic arches...."
For a closer look at trees, one needs go no further than Bark: An Intimate Look at the World's Trees by Cédric Pollet
(Frances Lincoln, $45). The photographs are dazzling--the red neon intensity of
lipstick palm canes, the abstract in mauve, olive and peach of spotted gums, the
Australian aboriginal pattern of grass trees, the geographical striations of ocotillos
and coast redwoods, the orange archipelagos in a gray sea of Chinese zelkovas;
this marvelous book will amaze you and change how you look at trees.--
In this work of fiction, Grass writes in the voices of his eight children who record memories of their childhoods and of their father, who was often absent. They also remember Marie, Grass's assistant and family friend and perhaps a love whose snapshots, taken with an old box camera, help every see the past and future differently--and raise all sorts of questions.
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is the author of The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City (Princeton University Press) and Starstruck:
The Business of Celebrity (Faber &
Faber), published in November 2010. She is assistant professor at the University
of Southern California's School of Policy, Planning and Development. She lives
in Los Angeles.
Your top five authors: 
Elliott Sawyer has set this fast-paced thriller as the men of Kodiak platoon, itching for action but also wishing for an end to action, spend their final days in Afghanistan before being shipped Stateside to prepare for discharge. Captain Jake Roberts is the leader of Kodiak platoon, U.S. Army, in a war that mixes on-the-ground troops with high-tech marvels like Hellfire missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles. It's a challenging assignment for Roberts, since the troops under him are troublemakers who have screwed up, for reasons ranging from DUIs, drug abuse and fighting to insubordination. 
Here I invoke the ghost of George Orwell, who wrote, "When I worked in a second-hand bookshop--so easily pictured, if you don't work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios--the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one.... Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop."