Book Quality


Over lunch the other day I was re-reading parts of a book for the third time. This particular book happens to be a relatively famous one in the world of design, by an author with a large following, who’s often cited, and who has many books published. It was my third time reading that chapter, but the first time doing so in-depth. I realized, with this close reading, that the chapter didn’t actually finish its point. It started with a thesis that I was eager for it to resolve and it never did. Oh sure, there was a lot of interesting material in there, with a lot of ideas on how to do things, but it never came to the point!

As an author, noticing other authors screw up is like kind of like a lawyer feeling better when they note another lawyer making a bad argument.

Of course, one mustn’t forget what Stephen King supposedly said: “If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I’m impressed.”

There are some books that are just completely perfect. The one I can think of off the top of my head is Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton, which is just an outstanding visual and intellectual treat, not to mention a heck of a teaching tool.

Note: Writing about books is all I’ve got for now, folks. It’s just been “books, books, and more books” on the brain over in my office, as all mapping related stuff has been pushed aside for a while. Focusing on getting Cartographer’s Toolkit out has been a long and winding road. The most recent challenge is figuring out just why Amazon is listing it as “Usually ships in 1 – 3 weeks” when it should be readily available. Hopefully the internets are right in that this particular bump will smooth out after a few weeks of sales, thus providing Amazon enough data to make them order enough stock to meet demand.

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