Strong as a Bear

Katrin Stangl

A lovely illustrated celebration of animals and their emotional presence in language:

Daytime Visions: An Alphabet

Isol

A tender illustrated alphabet celebrating the whimsy of words:

In the Land of Punctuation

Christian Morgenstern

A darkly delightful 1905 German ode to punctuation, newly illustrated in gorgeous typographic art by Indian graphic designer Rathna Ramanathan:

Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

David Whyte

Anger is the deepest form of compassion… Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.

Poet and philosopher David Whyte’s radical redefinitions of everyday words:

Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics

Anna Deavere Smith

“Some people use language as a mask. And some want to create designed language that appears to reveal them but does not.”

Anna Deavere Smith on the art of listening in a culture of speaking:

Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry

Paul Goodman

“There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy… the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul… the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.”

Paul Goodman on the nine kinds of silence, plus a beautiful recording – hear it at the link:

Take Away the A

Michaël Escoffier and Kris di Giacomo

A most unusual illustrated alphabet about how we make meaning:

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

Steven Pinker

“Every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it.”

Harvard psycholinguist Steven Pinker on the art and cognitive science of great writing, and why much of what you’ve been taught is wrong:

Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Italo Calvino

“The idea of the world as composed of weightless atoms is striking just because we know the weight of things so well.”

Italo Calvino on the unbearable lightness of language, literature, and life – metaphorical magic and wisdom from his final legacy, the Harvard lectures he wrote shortly before his death in 1985 and never got to deliver:

The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is

Roberto Trotta

Everything you need to know about the cosmos, explained in the 1,000 most common English words – absolutely brilliant project

Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play

Jennifer DeVere Brody

Theodor Adorno on the art of punctuation – a manifesto for the “friendly spirits whose bodiless presence nourishes the body of language”

It’s Been Said Before: A Guide to the Use and Abuse of Cliches

Orin Hargraves

“It takes only a little more time, but considerably more effort, to write mindfully than it does to write mindlessly. You have to engage your intellect and examine the requirements of what you mean to express, and the words available to do it for you. But writing mindfully can be developed to become a habit with some effort, just as writing mindlessly becomes a habit with no effort.”

The Best-Kept Secret of Clichés – how to upgrade our uses and abolish our abuses of language, a wonderful and necessary manifesto against mindless language:

Quentin Blake’s ABC

Quentin Blake

The great Sir Quentin Blake’s quirky illustrated alphabet

From Galileo to Google: How Big Data Illuminates Human Culture

Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel

“Through our scopes, we see ourselves. Every new lens is also a new mirror.”

Two scientists set out to unravel what 30 million books reveal about the evolution of human culture over time

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks

Keith Houston

Ironic Serif – a brief history of typographic snark and the failed crusade for an irony mark, from 17th-century France to digital emoticons, by way of kooky characters and spectacular failures: