The American Annual of Photography (1911)

From HERE.

Inside the Painters Studio (2009)

Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’ And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.

From an interview with Chuck Close by Joe Fig in his book  - Inside the Painters Studio. 

How to fit an elephant (1953)

A superb story HERE by Freeman Dyson about how a meeting with Enrico Fermi changed his career. At the heart of the story, Fermi quotes John von Neumann, who famously said:

With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.

An example of how to actually do this, with Python code is HERE. 

On the Disposition of Iron in Variegated Strata (1868)

More of these images HERE.

On Exactitude in Science (1946)

 By Jorge Luis Borges. More HERE.

Compassion, Empathy, Flapdoodle (2017)

An excoriating, but highly entertaining, review in the Dublin Review of Books by Seamus O’Mahony of three books on empathy and neuro science. HERE.  

O'Mahony is perhaps not the most typical book reviewer - he is a  Consultant Gastroenterologist at Cork University Hospital who also writes on medical humanities.

Peer review: not as old as you might think (2015)

 

Peer review - is not as old as you might think (HERE). Above the Google ngram for `peer review'.

Best Practices for Scientific Computing (2014)

 A really good, readable paper. HERE.

The Book on the Floor (2016)

This book begins with an in depth, but entertaining, analysis of the famous picture of Malraux and one of his books spread out in front of him in his salon taken in 1954. HERE.

Unendurable Line (2017)

Unendurable Line: A Fun Short Film that tracks the Movement of Everyday Objects as a Real-Time Graph. HERE.

Draft No. 4 (2017)

Here is Michael Durda's review of John McPhee's new book: Draft No. 4. He ends the review by quoting McPhee:

“Creativity lies in what you choose to write about, how you go about doing it, the arrangement through which you present things, the skill and the touch with which you describe people and succeed in developing them as characters, the rhythms of your prose, the integrity of the composition, the anatomy of the piece (does it get up and walk around on its own?), the extent to which you see and tell the story that exists in your material, and so forth. Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have.”

John McPhee - Structure (2013)

A great piece in the New Yorker by John McPhee on how he structures his long non-fiction pieces. The image is a series of the illustrations he has of his structural motifs. From HERE. 

Rules are for Fools! (1915)

Harmonics, Patterns, and Dynamics in Roman and Italic type (2016)

The website for Frank Bloklund's PhD Thesis at Leiden University - On the Origin of Patterning in Movable Latin Type. (HERE).

The Shape of Design - Frank Chimero

Frank Chimero's "odd little design book",  The Shape of Design, is available to read online HERE.

On Margins Podcast (2017)

On Margins is a podcast by Craig Mod on Book making (HERE).

The Data Visualisation Catalogue

The Data Visualisation Catalogue HERE.

To Make a Book, Walk on a Book (2017)

 A great essay on the practicalities of designing a book, by Craig Mod (HERE).