A RICH DISPLAY OF SOME OF THE BEST PROSE WRITTEN TODAY IN THE USA.

Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design brings together the best of designer Michael Bierut's critical writing—serious or humorous, flattering or biting, but always on the mark. Bierut is widely considered the finest observer on design writing today. Covering topics as diverse as Twyla Tharp and ITC Garamond, Bierut's intelligent and accessible texts pull design culture into crisp focus. He touches on classics, like Massimo Vignelli and the cover of The Catcher in the Rye, as well as newcomers, like McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and color-coded terrorism alert levels. Along the way Nabakov's Pale Fire; Eero Saarinen; the paper clip; Celebration, Florida; the planet Saturn; the ClearRx pill bottle; and paper architecture all fall under his pen. His experience as a design practitioner informs his writing and gives it truth. In Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, designers and nondesigners alike can share and revel in his insights.

"Some of the finest examples of contemporary, genuinely American prose. White's style incorporates eloquence without affection, profundity without pomposity, and wit without frivolity or hostility. Like his predecessors Thoreau and Twain, White's creative, humane, and graceful perceptions are an education for the sensibilities." — Washington Post The classic collection by one of the greatest essayists of our time. Selected by E.B. White himself, the essays in this volume span a lifetime of writing and a body of work without peer. "I have chosen the ones that have amused me in the rereading," he writes in the Foreword, "alone with a few that seemed to have the odor of durability clinging to them." These essays are incomparable; this is a volume to treasure and savor at one's leisure.