Who cares about commas, semicolons, dashes, and hyphens? Well, you should. A misplaced punctuation mark can confuse physicians and surgeons, cause thousands of dollars in legal fees, misinform judges, puzzle bankers, misguide stockbrokers and create lumps in your pudding. You dont need a teacher with a mouthful of jargon to help you understand how to make yourself clearly understood. Better Punctuation in 30 Minutes a Day will help you teach yourself.

For anyone who has a say in what appears in print and need to know whether, as well as looking good, it will do its job by being read. It gives practical answers on choosing the right typeface, on colour, tints, and many basic aspects of layout.

Appearing for the first time in an English-language edition, The Stroke puts forward a genuine theory of writingthat is, the concepts behind letters on the page, whether by pen, pencil, or brush. Concerned not with art calligraphy and beautiful forms, The Stroke is a description of the phenomenon of letters and how they are made in writing. Starting from basic principles, Noordzij begins with the white space that creates definition by surrounding letters. Then, using simple geometrical concepts, he describes in minute detail how the strokes of writing can be formed. His theory serves to repair the split that grew up, with the invention of printing, between written and typographic letters. With The Stroke, Noordzij can be seen as a prophet of digital typography committed to freeing typefaces from the constraints of their embodiment in metal.

Recite your poem to your aunt. I threw myself to the ground. Where were you in the night? In a school among the pines. What was the meaning of the dream? Organs, hormones, toxins, lesions: what is a body? In 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson takes up her earlier concerns with form and literary precedent, and turns toward the timeliness of embodiment. What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The 10 poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices — Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras — in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time — embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences — can tell. "Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully."—The New York Times "Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture."— The Village Voice Lisa Robertson's books include Cinema of the Present, Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, R's Boat and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She lives in France.

The proliferation of desktop publishing has reawakened interest in the presentational aspects of printed communication; that is, in what writing looks like. When picking a fonts package, the image-conscious self-expresser would do well to consult Wheildon on the ins and outs of typography and graphic design; indeed, for those in advertising, his book will serve as a layout primer. In measured, detailed language, and drawing on nine years of research, Wheildon discusses page layout, typefaces, reader behavior, and more. Further, given subject matter that lends itself to insightful illustration, he accompanies the text with graphics that enhance and underscore his points at every turn. His writing seems a bit technical, even dry, at first, but detailed and crisp exposition combine with apt illustration to impart as much depth about the technical aspects of presenting printed communication as many readers may want. Mike Tribby. --