Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Books that command attention
The new Chris Ware book has sat beside my desk for weeks. It’s been tough to miss. It’s about a foot-and-a-half tall with a canary-yellow spine, and the cover image is signature Ware: Comic book hieroglyphics of domestic ennui, linked by thin schematic lines, flow charts of word balloons and worried portraits of the genius himself. It’s like the blueprint for a bomb that leaves you melancholy. Even if I wanted to avoid it, I couldn’t: My desk is only slightly larger than the book, yet “Monograph” ($60, Rizzoli), a survey of an artist who turns only 50 this month, is perfectly outsized, correctly singular.
It includes giant reproductions of Ware’s New Yorker covers; a generous sample of his homemade toys and models (“dumb little gifts,” he writes); Ware even inserts, within the book itself, small, flippable reproductions of his smallest books. Until he receives the vast museum retrospective he already deserves, it’ll more than do.
It’s also a terrific example of the book as an object to savor, to obsess over.
For months I set aside works like this — books that distract, waving from corners of your vision, demanding another flip through. Think of these as excellent examples of inspired, and addictive, book design from 2017 — that each is also a good read is like icing. These are not books to compete with screens: Should you drop “Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past” ($100, Taschen) on an iPhone, you’ll need a new iPhone. Had I been a 10-year-old boy and found this absorbing history of the paintings commissioned by natural history museums to explain the discovery of dinosaurs, I might have faked a cold daily.
For book people, there’s sweet irony here.
The Age of Screens has meant a renaissance for physical books as keepsakes.
Obsession, in its repetition and way of forcing us to lean forward in horror and delight, is a thread through many of these books. It’s why you can get lost in “Sandwich Anarchy: The Cult Culinary Posters of Melt Bar & Grilled” ($29.95, 1984 Publishing), 200 pages of sandwich ads.
To flip through the long, thin “Bridges: A History of the World’s Most Spectacular Spans” ($29.99, Black Dog), the book itself must be turned on its side.
For some cheer, try “Star Wars,” the inspiration for the fun new story collection “From a Certain Point of View” ($35, Del Rey) — 40 tales, 40 writers, not one told by or about a Skywalker or a Vader but the Rosencrantz and Guildensterns of the galaxy, the Death Star middle managers, alien bartenders and droid eavesdroppers. And think Spielberg. There’s a point, as you poke around “Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Ultimate Visual History” ($50, Harper), when you question the necessity of knowing every last bar stool story from the set of the classic, of including actual schematics and a replica Western Union telegram — even if it is from Francois Truffaut to Steven Spielberg. But then book waves to you from the edge of your coffee table ....