Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik.

    This book contains previously unpublished work that has never been exhibited.

    She shows the shocking and hilarious sketches that didn’t make the cut and explains how these are essential stages in the evolution of a cover that stands the test of time but retains its edge. Her book captures contemporary history—from the farce of Monica Lewinsky to the adventures of Michelle and Barack to nuclear meltdown in Japan—in images that are as acute as they are outrageous. More than that, it shows how the magazine that exemplifies journalistic excellence in America also dares to cultivate a sense of humor when grappling with complex moral and political issues.Praise for Blown Covers:“Interesting failures are the driving force behind BLOWN COVERS: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See (Abrams, $24.95), by Françoise Mouly. Mouly is the art editor of The New Yorker, and paging through this book is like standing in the corner of her office as she pins up rejected covers on the wall. Mouly has dozens of tales about images that failed for one reason or another. Now, presumably with the approval of her bosses at Condé Nast, she has created a tell-all (or tell-most) that even non–illustrators and designers will find enlightening.” —New York Times Book Review “Yes, Blown Covers sometimes offends—and that’s the audacious joy of it.” —NPR.org“[New Yorker] art editor Mouly offers some true delights.” —Sacramento Bee

    The anonymous messages are hopeful and hopeless, funny and sad. Ms. Blackall, award-winning illustrator of Ruby’s Wish and Big Red Lollipop, has turned some of the most evocative (or hilarious) of them into exquisite paintings. Missed Connections is a collection of illustrated love stories. There’s “We Shared a Bear Suit.” “If Not for Your Noisy Tambourine.” “Hairy Bearded Swimmer.” Each is told in the shorthand of a “missed connection,” and then illustrated in Chinese ink and watercolor. The paintings are extraordinary: delicate yet full of feeling, each springing from one little detail of the post into a fully imagined world. Each brings the voyeuristic pleasure of watching love at first sight, and the pleasure of watching an artist discover a fresh new way to tell a story. And not all the connections are missed. Hidden in the book are three pieces that conjure up the magic of love found.

    As varied and inventive as the volumes they hold, such buildings can be much more than the dusty, dark wooden shelves found in mystery stories or the catacombs of stacks in the basements of academia. From the great dome of the Library of Congress, to the white façade of the Seinäjoki Library in Finland, to the ancient ruins of the library of Pergamum in modern Turkey, the architecture of a library is a symbol of its time as well as of its builders’ wealth, culture, and learning. Architectural historian James Campbell and photographer Will Pryce traveled the globe together, visiting and documenting over eighty libraries that exemplify the many different approaches to thinking about and designing libraries. The result of their travels, The Library: A World History is one of the first books to tell the story of library architecture around the world and through time in a single volume, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern China and from the beginnings of writing to the present day. As these beautiful and striking photos reveal, each age and culture has reinvented the library, molding it to reflect their priorities and preoccupations—and in turn mirroring the history of civilization itself. Campbell’s authoritative yet readable text recounts the history of these libraries, while Pryce’s stunning photographs vividly capture each building’s structure and atmosphere.  Together, Campbell and Pryce have produced a landmark book—the definitive photographic history of the library and one that will be essential for the home libraries of book lovers and architecture devotees alike.

    This book by one of Wired magazine's art directors traverses the graphic world through a collection of pie charts, bar graphs, timelines, scatter plots, and more. Super Graphic offers readers a unique look at the intricate and sometimes contradictory storylines that weave their way through comic books, and shares advice for navigating the pages of some of the most popular, longest-running, and best-loved comics and graphic novels out there. From a colorful breakdown of the DC Comics reader demographic to a witty Venn diagram of superhero comic tropes and a Chris Ware sadness scale, this book charts the most arbitrary and monumental characters, moments, and equipment of the wide world of comics.

    Today, the more than 17,000 libraries in America also function as de facto community centers offering free access to the internet, job-hunting assistance, or a warm place to take shelter. And yet, across the country, cities large and small are closing public libraries or curtailing their hours of operation. Over the last eighteen years, photographer Robert Dawson has crisscrossed the country documenting hundreds of these endangered institutions. The Public Library presents a wide selection of Dawson's photographs— from the majestic reading room at the New York Public Library to Allensworth, California's one-room Tulare County Free Library built by former slaves. Accompanying Dawson's revealing photographs are essays, letters, and poetry by some of America's most celebrated writers. A foreword by Bill Moyers and an afterword by Ann Patchett bookend this important survey of a treasured American institution.

    M. Blume, invites you to consider whatever happened to cuckoo clocks? Or bed curtains? Why do we have so many "friends" but have done away with the much more useful word "acquaintance"? All of these things, plus hot toddies, riddles, proverbs, corsets, calling cards, and many more, are due for a revival. Throughout this whimsical, beautifully illustrated encyclopedia of nostalgia, Blume breathes new life into the elegant, mysterious, and delightful trappings of bygone eras, honoring the timeless tradition of artful living along the way. Inspired by her much loved column of the same name and featuring entries from famous icons of style and culture, Let's Bring Back leads readers to rediscover the things that entertained, awed, beautified, satiated, and fascinated in eras past.

    Most conservationists and environmentalists share this view. But what if the traditional view of ecology is wrong—what if true environmentalists should be applauding the invaders? In The New Wild, Pearce goes on a journey across six continents to rediscover what conservation in the twenty-first century should be about. Pearce explores ecosystems from remote Pacific islands to the United Kingdom, from San Francisco Bay to the Great Lakes, as he digs into questionable estimates of the cost of invader species and reveals the outdated intellectual sources of our ideas about the balance of nature. Pearce acknowledges that there are horror stories about alien species disrupting ecosystems, but most of the time, the tens of thousands of introduced species usually swiftly die out or settle down and become model eco-citizens. The case for keeping out alien species, he finds, looks increasingly flawed. As Pearce argues, mainstream environmentalists are right that we need a rewilding of the earth, but they are wrong if they imagine that we can achieve that by reengineering ecosystems. Humans have changed the planet too much, and nature never goes backward. But a growing group of scientists is taking a fresh look at how species interact in the wild. According to these new ecologists, we should applaud the dynamism of alien species and the novel ecosystems they create. In an era of climate change and widespread ecological damage, it is absolutely crucial that we find ways to help nature regenerate. Embracing the new ecology, Pearce shows us, is our best chance. To be an environmentalist in the twenty-first century means celebrating nature’s wildness and capacity for change.

    A collaboration between writer, filmmaker and artist Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher, this book brings together the best of the popular website learningtoloveyoumore.com, which asks ordinary people to contribute to assignments posted on the site and features responses that are surprising, touching, imaginative, and often hilarious.

    A painting of a corn dog. A clock made out of an old “mostly clean” cheese grater. All this and more await you in the pages of Regretsy, a veritable sideshow of handcrafts gone wrong. Based on the eponymous hit blog and arranged in categories such as Décor, Pet Humiliation, and Christmas, Regretsy showcases the best of the worst, ranging from the hilariously absurd to the purely horrifying. Each page of this jaw-dropping volume features the actual seller’s online listing with a light coat of snarky commentary to give it a good shellacking. So join us as we descend into handmade hell and gawk, gasp, and marvel at the disturbingly odd artifacts that Regretsy has collected for your viewing pleasure, proving that you can never have too much of a bad thing.

    And rightly so. The marriage of LaChapelle’s vivid, high-octane images with graphic artist, Tadanori Yokoo’s supersaturated designs make for an astonishing physical object. The reissue of this now classic, long out-of-print volume showcases all the lollipop giddiness of the original now lavishly reproduced in a larger format. “There’s a tradition of celebrity portraiture that attempts to uncover the ‘real person’ behind the trappings of their celebrity. I am more interested in those trappings,” says LaChapelle. Indeed, he exaggerates the artificiality of fame and Hollywood culture in a head on collision of color, plastic, and whimsy. His photographs confront our visual taste and challenge our ideas of celebrity, all the while taking us on a roller coaster ride through his hyper-sensationalized galaxy. Lil’ Kim becomes the ultimate status symbol, tattooed in the Louis Vuitton pattern. Madonna rises from pink waters as a mystical dragon princess. Pamela Anderson hatches out of an egg; and Alexander McQueen burns down the castle dressed as the Queen of Hearts. David LaChapelle’s uncompromising originality is legendary in the worlds of fashion, film, and advertising. His images, both bizarre and gorgeous, have appeared on and in between the covers of Vogue, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Vibe and more. La Chapelle Land is fun park America gone surrealistically wrong — but in such an attractive way.

    The full sweep of wonders-from pristine coral reefs to the Gettysburg battlefield to glaciers and all the glorious diversity in between-offers a breathtaking tour of the very best of America's national treasures.

    Now, Haskell brings his powers of observation to the biological networks that surround all species, including humans. Haskell repeatedly visits a dozen trees around the world, exploring the trees connections with webs of fungi, bacterial communities, cooperative and destructive animals, and other plants. An Amazonian ceibo tree reveals the rich ecological turmoil of the tropical forest, along with threats from expanding oil fields. Thousands of miles away, the roots of a balsam fir in Canada survive in poor soil only with the help of fungal partners. These links are nearly two billion years old: the fir s roots cling to rocks containing fossils of the first networked cells. By unearthing charcoal left by Ice Age humans and petrified redwoods in the Rocky Mountains, Haskell shows how the Earth s climate has emerged from exchanges among trees, soil communities, and the atmosphere. Now humans have transformed these networks, powering our societies with wood, tending some forests, but destroying others. Haskell also attends to trees in places where humans seem to have subdued nature a pear tree on a Manhattan sidewalk, an olive tree in Jerusalem, a Japanese bonsai demonstrating that wildness permeates every location. Every living being is not only sustained by biological connections, but is made from these relationships. Haskell shows that this networked view of life enriches our understanding of biology, human nature, and ethics. When we listen to trees, nature s great connectors, we learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty."

    After Congress viewed photos of Yosemite, President Lincoln was moved to sign a bill that paved the way for the U.S. National Park Service, which was founded in 1916 and is now celebrating its centennial. In Treasured Lands: A Photographic Odyssey Through America's National Parks, photographer QT Luong pays tribute to the millions of acres of protected wilderness in our country's 59 national parks. Luong, who is featured in Ken Burns's and Dayton Duncan's documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea, is one the most prolific photographers working in the national parks and the only one to have made large-format photographs in each of them. In an odyssey that spanned more than 20 years and 300 visits, Luong focused his lenses on iconic landscapes and rarely seen remote views, presenting his journey in this sumptuous array of more than 500 breathtaking images. Accompanying the collection of scenic masterpieces is a guide that includes maps of each park, as well as extended captions that detail where and how the photographs were made. Designed to inspire visitors to connect with the parks and invite photographers to re-create these landscapes, the guide also provides anecdotal observations that give context to the pictures and convey the sheer scope of Luong's extraordinary odyssey. Including an introduction by award-winning author and documentary filmmaker Dayton Duncan, Treasured Lands is a rich visual tour of the U.S. National Parks and an invaluable guide from a photographer who hiked - or paddled, dived, skied, snowshoed, and climbed - each park, shooting in all kinds of terrain, in all seasons, and at all times of day. QT Luong's timeless gallery of the nation's most revered landscapes beckons to nature lovers, armchair travelers, and photography enthusiasts alike, keeping America's natural wonders within reach.