How does one begin creating a Chinese typeface? In Ming Romantic: Collected and Bound, design studio Synoptic Office explores this question through a selection of writings, interviews, and historical material collected during the creation of Ming Romantic, a didone-inspired, Chinese typeface. Precedence and tradition, powerful forces in the Chinese imagination, are addressed in the context of contemporary design practice. Visual form, meaning, and technology are considered in how they might be employed to advance the field of Chinese typography.

Lovers of the printed book, arise! Thirty of today’s top writers are here to tell you you’re not alone. In Bound to Last,an amazing array of authors comes to the passionate defense of the printed book with spirited, never-before-published essays celebrating the hardcover or paperback they hold most dear—not necessarily because of its contents, but because of its significance as a one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable object. Whether focusing on the circumstances behind how a particular book was acquired, or how it has become forever “bound up” with a specific person, time, or place, each piece collected here confirms—poignantly, delightfully, irrefutably—that every book tells a story far beyond the one found within its pages. In addition to a foreword by Ray Bradbury, Bound to Last features original contributions by:Chris Abani, Rabih Alameddine, Anthony Doerr, Louis Ferrante, Nick Flynn, Karen Joy Fowler, Julia Glass, Karen Green, David Hajdu, Terrence Holt, Jim Knipfel, Shahriar Mandanipour, Sarah Manguso, Sean Manning, Joyce Maynard, Philipp Meyer, Jonathan Miles, Sigrid Nunez, Ed Park, Victoria Patterson, Francine Prose, Michael Ruhlman, Elissa Schappell, Christine Schutt, Jim Shepard, Susan Straight, J. Courtney Sullivan, Anthony Swofford, Danielle Trussoni, and Xu Xiaobin

In this accessible collection of creative projects, Rachel Hazell shares exciting paper crafting techniques to develop your bookbinding skills. After explaining the tools and materials needed, Rachel takes you through each project with step-by-step instructions. Different techniques for cutting and folding are demonstrated, and, once you are happy with the various techniques, you will then begin to bind your own books with stitches such as ladder, dash and chain. Projects include The Slit Book, A Concertina with Pockets and The Three-Hole Pamphlet Stitch, which can then be developed further to create unique and personal handmade notebooks, books and keepsakes that are not only fun and satisfying to make, but also make wonderful gifts. So whether you have already tried your hand at bookbinding or are a complete beginner, Rachel's knowledge and passion will inspire you to explore the many possibilities of bookart.

Jeffrey Todd Knight excavates the culture of book collecting and compiling in early modern England, examining how the pervasive practice of mixing texts, authors, and genres into single bindings defined Renaissance ways of thinking and writing.

"The rhinoceros, that is, any powerful man, is bound with a thong so that he may crush the clods of the valleys, that is, the oppressors of the humble."—Odo of Cluny, Vita Geraldi i.8 To the second abbot of the great monastery at Cluny, Saint Odo, tenth-century Europe was a world filled with violent men oppressing at whim the poor and the powerless. As royal authority waned, local magnates, unrestrained by any authority, divine or human, seized the opportunity to enhance their positions. Odo, along with Cluny's other founding spiritual and ideological leaders, created within the protective walls of the monastery a model of restraint, instituting in place of the instability of everyday life an interpretation of the Benedictine Rule that stressed ritual, order, and lawfulness. Such were the beginnings of the monastery that Pope Urban II in the eleventh century would call "the light of the world," the fountainhead of what would become one of the most far-reaching religious reform movements in European history. Barbara Rosenwein in Rhinoceros Bound focuses on Cluny's founding and early growth within the context of a society shaped by the needs of those set adrift in the social upheaval of the tenth century. Examining in the first chapter traditional approaches to Cluniac studies, the author reveals that historians have generally considered Cluny's eleventh-century role in church reform without analyzing the peculiar combination of forces and founders that created the Cluniac ideal and gave it its original momentum. This fundamental problem is the topic of the second chapter. She then examines how the early Cluniacs perceived the world outside the monastery and how they viewed their own world inside of it. Rosenwein concludes with a chapter on Cluny in the tenth century that combines traditional historical techniques with contemporary sociological insights. She provides in this study a significant reassessment of a period crucial to the political development of Europe, as well as a case study of institutional response to acute and political change.