STRIKING IMAGES: VINTAGE MATCHBOOK COVER ART by Monte Beauchamp
From timeless, Kooky Characters such as Heckle and Jeckle Magpies to Girly Graphics and more, Striking Images marks the historical success of the giveaway matchbook. “By 1952 purportedly 63 million citizens carried matchbooks daily, making them—in terms of annual merchandising output— more prevalent than Mickey Mouse. … Today, barely 3 percent of the once-bustling industry remains—a charred splinter of its former self.” Let the imagery of the anonymous matchbook designer delight and the messaging contained within its pages provide a spark to your day: “You’re no match. Don’t get burned. Use cover … for V.D. ‘No’ is the best tactic … the next prophylactic.”
$16.95, softcover, 272 pages, Chronicle Books

FREIGHT TRAIN GRAFFITI by Roger Gastman et al
If you’re looking for another picture book to place on your coffee table, Freight Train Graffiti will roll over you. Rather than merely creating a cool book with beautiful imagery, the authors have done their homework: historical train evolution and expansion, a look at graffiti as vandalism to an emerging cultural art phenomenon, graffiti’s subculture and its effect on graffiti hobbyists/artists, and more. “This book contains stories, ideas, and thoughts from over 100 of the most influential and prolific freight train writers,” notes the preface, the back story to how this book came to be. “In order to contact each of them, we traveled all over the country, spending two years chronicling their stories. Some of the people we talked to had not been seen or heard from in years. Others were very hard to pin down. As we went along, the book just kept growing. Every bit of information seemed to urge us to find additional facts or add new sections to chapters. … What all this showed us was that freight train graffiti is a very large subculture within the larger world of graffiti. With a past closely linked not only to New York City subway graffiti, but also to the actual construction of the United States as a country, freight train graffiti is truly deserving of such a close examination.” Freight Train Graffiti harbors the first-ever published history of ‘monikers,’ the precursors to this type of graffiti, developed by hobos and rail workers to communicate en route. An inspiring book for anyone interested in graffiti, with many arresting photos of eye-catching freight train graffiti, it is indeed worthy of that space on your coffee table.
$29.95, softcover, 352 pages, Abrams

DESIGN YOUR SELF: RETHINKING THE WAY YOU LIVE, LOVE, WORK, AND PLAYby Karim Rashid
Renowned minimalist designer Karim Rashid applies his design philosophy—less is more—to all aspects of life in his how-to on living, Design Your Self: Rethinking the Way You Live, Love, Work, and Play. In Rashid’s appropriately subtitled section “Design Theory (Why me?),” he writes, “Design has a way of shaping people’s lives, their behavior, sensibility, and psyche. As a designer, I have a special vantage point. I not only think about every aspect of our daily lives but I see several different ways we could do any one thing. I observe and analyze behavior, design, and the interface of the two. I am a shaper of every day commodities and as such, I hope to impart some of my findings and lead you to rethink where and how you live, even what and whom you live with. Sometimes it amounts to a good dose of common sense and, often, it is merely a question of changing your perspective.”

In Rashid’s trademark candy-color design, Design Your Self teaches readers to use addition by subtraction, discover the five simple conditions to dreaming well, design your favorite location for having good sex, downsize your technology, understand why beauty is yours to give, embrace fashion that speaks your name, shift your ideas about color, and much more. Also included are Rashid’s must-do calendars—yearly, seasonally, monthly, weekly, and daily.
$25.95, softcover, 330 pages, HarperCollins Publishers

REINVENTING THE WHEEL by Jessica Helfand
In an interesting history of the paper wheel, Jessica Helfand, principal of Winterhouse Studio and founding editor of Design Observer, examines the terminology, technology, content, and stylistic intentions of these charming examples of design ephemera. “Ten years ago, my father gave me my first paper wheel chart … I was taken at once by the degree to which this wheel demanded a dynamic approach to reading,” Helfand says of her fascination of volvelles in her preface to Reinventing the Wheel. “Here, the art of the search was circumscribed, both literally and figuratively, by the hands-on act of rotation—a radical, if primitive, exercise in a kind of 2D interactivity. Even more than this, I was impressed by the idea that such complex information could be packaged so neatly in disk form, defying the basic conventional wisdom (and arguably, the prevailing modernist bias) of the kinds of logical alignments one would normally associate with reading in general, and with information design in particular.”

Helfand began to collect volvelles not only out of curiosity, but as an attempt to decipher their meaning and place in design history. “As I began to locate more paper wheels, I came across information organized radially, centripetally, even in spirals,” she notes. “The fact that these charts were used to map topics ranging from bird watching to bridge bidding to birth control only added to their eclectic cultural appeal. … I soon came to see the degree to which contemporary investigations of rotational form not only relate to this history but have grown over time to embrace disciplines including, but not limited to, architecture, music, film, sculpture, and timebased media.”

Reinventing the Wheel entertains the notion that the concept of interaction predates print and new media culture by thousands of years. With a detailed history of volvelles and many 20th-century examples, and a consideration for their future role in design, Helfand plays off the idea that paper wheel design could make a comeback in a “new kind of interactive future.”
$18.95, softcover, 160 pages, Princeton Architectural Press