29 VOLUME
Holding this book in your hands is a bit like having an entire year’s worth of Readymade magazine show up in your mailbox all at once. There’s so much content—from lifestyle articles to DIY projects—that there’s no way to absorb it all at once. Instead, it’s the kind of thing you pull off the bookshelf whenever the creative urge hits.

“Guides aren’t traditional books that you read from cover to cover and put down for good,” says Eric Heiman, cofounder of the book’s designer Volume. “It’s a very nonlinear experience.” To create the ultimate guidebook feel, designers nixed a dust jacket in favor of a raw chipboard cover. This choice helps turns the physical book into something you’d actually use—especially with the handy ruler running along the spine. “The book was designed as an object,” says coauthor Grace Hawthorne. And true to the Readymade ethos, it’s an object that can be transformed into something else entirely: Just follow the instructions on page 16 for turning the cover into a picture frame. by Michelle Taute