This huge book was initially published by Mitchell Beazley in London during the early nineteen seventies. It was originally in ten volumes (the last two were the Alphapedia section in this book) and it presented knowledge primarily visually with beautiful illustrations and captions on each spread with an essay filling the top third of the spread. Random House revised the material for the American market but kept the basic spread format. I bought this revised 1990 edition recently because as a publication designer I thought it looked quite exceptional.
Why would anyone buy this book with its contents available for free on the net? Firstly: you can buy a copy incredibly cheaply. Secondly: though it's all on the net you'll have to scroll around various websites to find all the information that's presented on individual spreads in this book. Thirdly: it's just a pleasure to read information beautifully presented in this book. The 2911 pages are in four sections: The universe; earth; life on earth; man; history and culture; man and science; man and machines (1823 pages) Time charts (49 pages) Alphapedia (905 pages) Atlas (130 pages).
The only downside (apart from being incredibly bulky) is that the technology section is obviously hopelessly out of date but you can always use the net to check up on tech from 1990.
A rather slim fifty page book with everything anyone needed to about how to use Bruce Blackburn's clever logo for the 1976 American bicentennial. Beautifully designed and printed (in color) and I thought it would make a useful starting guide to any design group that had to do a graphics manual for a company. Blackburn says the five pointed star was the starting point but it needed softening so thick red, white and blue lines were added to make a much softer star. There are interesting pages on how not to use the logo, the use of color, stationary, on vehicles et cetera and pages with the logo in various sizes.
The book has a black card wrap-around cover with the logo embossed on the front, both inside cover flaps have essays from Blackburn and Christopher Bonanos. I found a good copy on the net at a much reduced price so it's worth searching around.
The Serif company who produce Affinity software really should have called this book Designer and illustrator work book because 108 pages are devoted to creating illustrations which I wouldn't call design. The 436 page breakdown is this: 14 to 73 Interface tour; 74 to 127 Core skills; 128 to 307 Illustration projects; 308 to 429 Design projects; 430 to 436 Index, this followed by four tear-out pages (printed on card) with keyboard shortcuts for Mac or PC. I use Affinity Publisher so only about two thirds of the book is useful for me, especially the tour detailing what each part of the interface does. The book is designed in the usual contemporary way with extensive white space and leaded out text. I find it odd that the book is not much less than the cost of the Affinity software it describes.
