Luke Sebastian Scalone

Schmidt, Craig. The Trouble with Good Advice Is It Usually Interferes with My Plans. Middleville, MI: C. Schmidt, 2005.

Short weekly advice my friend Craig wrote for his middle-school students, self-published and recognizably still him twenty-one years on. What makes it good good advice is that it never instructs: each piece tells the story that shows why, so the lesson is lived, not handed down.

Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. 3.2 ed. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks, 2008.

A book about typographic design that is itself beautifully made: archival paper soft in the hand, the page cut near the golden section. Bringhurst is bracingly opinionated—Times New Roman and most of the nineteenth century dismissed—and his appendices outshine the closing parade of favored fonts. Read slowly, kept for reference; what it left was a sharper eye and the reminder that good typography is invisible yet shapes everything we read.

Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō. In Praise of Shadows. Translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker. Sedgwick, ME: Leete's Island Books, 1977.

An essay on aesthetics that arrives through the senses rather than abstraction: beauty lives in the gaps—shadow, rest, empty space—and design is only ever the framing of them. The stark East/West national-character frame is wrong; the praise of the gaps is exactly my taste. Less a book to read than one to think with.