“To my mind Graphis Diagrams has to be one of the seminal publications on diagrams. Less acedemic than Tufte, this book showcases a wealth of styles from the crazy to the intensely Swiss. Here are some of my favourite parts.” (Thanks Noah Brier!)

The Bookslut review: “Norman Rockwell’s best painting may very well be Blood Brothers, a grim depiction of two dead soldiers, one white and one black, laid out beside each other with their blood intermixing on a Vietnamese battlefield. The white soldier’s eyes are closed, but the black one’s are wide open in a perpetual expression of shock. Unfortunately, it was killed by Look magazine in 1968.”

Hey! I’m going to be the Guest Editor for the month of June over at coudal.com. My new book, “Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found,” just came out (more info here) and Jim Coudal was gracious enough to write the foreword of the book — I figured he’d perfect considering he’s the founder of the wonderful MoOM. And Coudaler Susan Everett contributed a great stack of lists. So, once again, a big thank you to the Coudal crew! I’m looking forward to a month of good linking.

We now interrupt this normally useful weblog with a blatant self-link from xBlog editor Bill Keaggy: Today my book is released. It’s based on one of my web sites, grocerylists.org, and is published by HOW Books (publishers of Print and HOW magazines and a wonderful variety of design books).

“Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost & Found” features nearly 300 discarded grocery lists from all over the U.S. — and a few from around the globe. The foreword is written by Jim Coudal, of Coudal Partners and Museum of Online Museums fame. Sorted into surprisingly obvious chapters (lists with poor spelling, healthy vs. unhealthy lists, lists made by elderly people or people planning parties, lists with drawings, doodles and notes on them, etc.), each list is displayed, dissected and commented on. You’ll probably never leave your list in the grocery cart again.

Where else will you find a 2,000-year-old grocery list, lists from all 50 U.S. states, the most commonly misspelled words on Americans’ shopping lists, delicious recipes made using only ingredients listed on other people’s discarded lists, a shoplifting list and a chance meeting with Chevy Chase in the bathroom at Yankee Stadium? Where? (Probably nowhere.)

But why collect found grocery lists? Because lists tell us a lot about our neighbors, our friends, our ancestors, our species and ourselves. They’re supposed to be private and that’s why it’s so enjoyable to look through the ones that people discard — unless one of those lists happens to be yours. Then it might not be so enjoyable, because if there’s one thing I like more than finding a lost grocery list — it’s making fun of it.

→ Order MEV from Amazon U.S.
→ Order MEV from Amazon Canada
→ Order MEV from Amazon U.K.
→ Order MEV from Amazon Japan
→ Order MEV from Barnes & Noble
→ Order MEV from Powell’s Books

I also made a promo site at milkeggsvodka.com (with a new blog here to document the weird journey of releasing and promoting the book). This was an extremely fun project to work on — and I think you’ll find it pretty fun to read as well. If you like food, freaks and/or Found Magazine, you’ll dig this.

—Bill Keaggy

“Rosenfeld Media is proud to announce that Todd Zaki Warfel has begun work on a book on developing prototypes. ‘A Practitioner’s Guide to Prototyping’ will help you quickly flesh out your design ideas, test your assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users. The book will discuss how prototypes are more than just a design tool, demonstrating how they can help you market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team.” (Thanks Airbag!)

“Interviewing Cory Doctorow is easy. You just flip the on switch by asking the first question, and he emits a constant stream of brilliant, insightful stuff. Editing interviews with Doctorow is easy as well. He generally speaks in coherent, whole sentences and frequently expresses complex ideas for some length that don’t get lost mid-paragraph. So it’s a pleasure to present this conversation…”

“As commercial book publishing crashes, personal book publishing is booming. Personal book making entails printing high-quality books in very small quantities, including quantities of one. New technologies permit anyone to print one copy of a softcover or hardcover book, including all-color photo books. These printed-on-demand books are indistinguishable from commercially printed books. In fact, some of the books you buy on Amazon are manufactured with this same technology. You just can’t tell the difference. However, being able to print as few as one copy — instead of a minimum of a thousand — shifts the economics of bookmaking toward individuals with more passion than money.”

Greg Storey: “I’m often asked what books I’m reading, what books I’ve read. Here is a core sample of my larger library. These are the books and subscriptions that I have around me at all times — with a gadget fetish twist at the end…”

“Random thoughts [and links and images] from a passionate bookplate collector.”

Publishers are starting to report an uptick in sales from Google Inc.’s online program that lets readers peek inside books, two years after the launch of its controversial plan to digitally scan everything in print. Google has been enlisting publishers to voluntarily submit their books so that Web searchers can more easily find titles related to their interests, but some fear the project could lead to piracy or exploitation of their copyrighted content. ‘Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers,’ said Colleen Scollans, the director of online sales for Oxford University Press.”

Completely unrelated to XPLANE, information design, etc… I’m happy to see that the book I just finished is available for pre-order it on Amazon!

It’s a strange and entertaining collection of found grocery lists based on one of my web sites, Grocerylists.org. It’s called “Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost & Found” and is being published by HOW Books, which is part of F+W Publications, publishers of the excellent Print and HOW design magazines.

Anyway, here are a bunch of other books that feature or mention XPLANE’s, founder Dave Gray’s or xBlog editor Bill Keaggy’s work or projects. Check ‘em out! -bk

Weblog books:
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Ed
• The Weblog Handbook
• Who Let the Blogs Out?: A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs
• No One Cares What You Had For Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog

Business and technology books:
• Selling To the VP of No
• Selling to the Old Brain
• The Networking Survival Guide
• Network Security Illustrated

Information and graphic design books:
• Magazine Design That Works
• Marketing Genius
• Marketing Playbook: The Manual for Growing Organizations
• Advertising and Promotion, 6th Ed
• Technical Communication, 6th Ed
• 39th Publication Design Annual

Web design books:
• What Is Web Design?
• Self-Promotion Online

Other books:
• Trash (part of the Alphabet City series by MIT Press)

“Tom Suzuki, an art director and graphic designer who in the 1970’s transformed academic textbooks by introducing vibrant color and pictorial variety to a genre long strait-jacketed by outdated formats, died on Sept. 3 in Fairfax, Va. He was 76.”

“I will have to take Tufte’s word that the drawings of counter-dancing on pages 32 and 33 helpfully depict how to engage in this activity. After a few drawings in, I’m lost as to which dancer is where, and what they are supposed to be doing. It actually ended up raising what for me became a significant question — yes, these drawings compel with their aesthetics and diagrammatics, but are they really the best way to communicate this information? Tufte, you see, presumes the printed page as the tool for explanation. My tendency to question assumptions leads me to wonder — shouldn’t people learn counter-dancing by counter-dancing?”

“Last week I attended a reunion of people who used to work at a certain nonprofit literary organization. Some are in publishing now, many are writers, and all are bookish people who buy and read books–past page 18–regularly. Yet I was asked several times, while catching up with folks, what it is that a book interior designer does. ‘So, like, you pick the fonts?’”

“Now on to the publishing history, beginning with this post on January 5, 2006: I have completed Beautiful Evidence, except for the index and a few loose ends. We are currently proofing some difficult images on press, negotiating with printers, planning the order for paper and binding, and working through other production issues. Probably the major threats to breaking the schedule will be in color-correcting images and in importing some paper used in one section of the book… Printing complete on Thursday, May 11. At the bindery, folding is underway. I picked the cloth and the color of the ink stamping on the cloth some time ago. Major issue now is the carton for mailing single books; the total weight of book and carton is just over 3 pounds, which is a substantial break point on shipping prices. We found a lighter shipping carton that works well to protect the book, but of course it is made in Switzerland…. Copies were ready Friday but the bindery was concerned that the glue wasn’t dry and thus the shipped copies might warp. So Tuesday it is for the first copies here. There are certainly some virtues to web publishing, such as glue drying avoidance. But such reflections will vanish when I hold the first book. And I in fact enjoy the physicality of bookmaking…. 10 copies this morning. It’s wonderful, just about everything I hoped it would be when printed.”