Monographs

Extra Bold is the inclusive, practical, and informative career handbook for designers that we've all been waiting for. Written collaboratively by a diverse team of authors, the book opens with critical essays that rethink design principles and practices...

From the snap and crackle of Pop to the florid excesses of the hippie  era, explore the most memorable designs from the transformative 1960s.  Drawn from the much-coveted Decorative Art, The Studio Yearbook, this colorful survey of interiors,...

For the past 30 years, Shepard Fairey has been using art and graphic design as a means of social interrogation. Drawing from graffiti  tradition, Fairey employs a distinctive combination of stylized imagery and impactful typography to address a wide...

With special emphasis on Berks and Lehigh Counties, PA, this groundbreaking work is an unparalleled presentation of the area's most publically-acclaimed regional folk art, known as Hex Signs or Barn Stars. This valuable collection offers the rare...

This third and expanded 25th Anniversary Edition is a classic sampling of Don Yoder’s massive body of work in folklife studies. The essays cover folk religion, folk medicine, sectarian costume, traditional cookery, and the folklife of the Pennsylvania...

Parents obsess over their children’s playdates, kindergarten curriculum, and every bump and bruise, but the toys, classrooms, playgrounds, and  neighborhoods little ones engage with are just as important. These objects and spaces encode...

In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career’s...

Understand how graphic design works and develop your visual sensibility through puzzles and activities!An entertaining and highly original introduction to graphic design, the Graphic Design Play Book uses puzzles and visual challenges to demonstrate how...

This American art form has long been an enduring  part of the country’s skylines. Early church steeples were graced with weathercocks, following a European tradition that dates to the MiddleAges. America’s first documented vane maker,...

John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in...

This series of paintings seamlessly fuses contemporary basketball  imagery with Edo-period Japanese art and culture, with captivating results. Each image riffs on a classic Japanese painting or subject, adding a surprisingly weighty visual twist as...

This book covers the 20 years that transformed Philadelphia into a city of neighborhoods, from Kingsessing to Wissahickon. At the turn of the 20th century, Philadelphia was the "workshop of the world," with builders toiling tirelessly to fill the...

Through eye-popping colors and simple forms, rejoice in the restless creativity and infectious energy of Henri Matisse, the artist who never stopped making art, and whose vivid palette gave nudes, landscapes, and interior views a whole new modernity...

Most commonly associated with the birth of the Impressionist movement in mid-19th-century Paris, Edgar Degas (1834–1917) in fact defied easy categorization and instead developed a unique style, strongly influenced by Old Masters, the body in motion, and...

For Marc Chagall (1887–1985), painting was an intricate tapestry of dreams, tales, and traditions. His instantly recognizable visual language carved out a unique early 20th-century niche, often identified as one of the earliest expressions of psychic...

In the latter half of the 19th century, in the verdant countryside near Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), busily plied his brush to landscapes and still lifes that would become anchors of modern art.  With compact, intense dabs of paint and...

Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is one of the most influential artists living today. Over the past 65 years, he has produced a radical and varied body of work marked by constant reinvention. Inspired by the artist’s long-standing fascination with mirroring...

With the amount of progress humankind has made in attitudes and achievements to-date, the time cannot be more apt than now to celebrate how far women have come in the creative industry today. DESIGN(H)ERS is a stunning showcase of up-and-coming talent...

Product design is not art, engineering, or craft, yet the skills and understandings it calls for touch all these areas. In 101 brief, illustrated lessons, this accessible guide leads students and design lovers into the vast field of product design...

Bringing a film to life requires skills in storytelling, the visual arts, logistics, and more. This book presents many critical principles of film making, including: How to structure and pitch a screenplay How to make visible the invisible, such as...

Originally published in 1971, A Documentary HerStory of Women Artists in Revolution documents the efforts of W.A.R., a loose group of women artists,  filmmakers, writers and cultural workers organized around advancing the place of women in the art...

Despite the number of women who have shaped the discipline, female architects still frequently struggle to receive the recognition their work deserves. This volume serves as a manifesto for the great achievements of contemporary female architects the...

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America is an urgent call for architects to accept the challenge of reconceiving and reconstructing our built environment rather than continue giving shape to buildings, infrastructure and urban plans that...

For more than five decades, Lee Friedlander has repeatedly been drawn to the signs that inscribe the American landscape, from hand-lettered ads  to storefront windows to massive billboards. Incorporating these markings with precision and sly humor,...

Engaging,informative and open to everyone, Talk Art established itself as the must-listen cultural podcast in both the UK and the US, and it has now garnered 1.5 million downloads. With infectious enthusiasm, Russell and Robert have opened the doors to...

Cameraless Photography presents a concise historical overview of photographic images created independently of a camera. It surveys the corresponding techniques—including photograms, chemigrams, luminograms, dye destruction prints, and...

Come on, you know you’ve thought it—while viewing a "masterpiece" of abstract art, you mutter, "A kid could do that." Here Susie Hodge, author of How to Survive Modern Art, explains why the best examples of modern art are actually the result of...

This collection charts the history of poster design, from the time when paper was first affordable in the 18th century, through developments in print technology, to the more subtle visual communication of the 21st century. Along the way, it showcases the...

Good design, like good storytelling, brings ideas to life. The latest book from award-winning writer Ellen Lupton is a playbook for creative thinking, showing designers how to use storytelling techniques to create satisfying graphics, products, services...

Hans Ulrich Obrist has been conducting ongoing conversations with the world's greatest living artists since he began in Switzerland, aged 19, with Fischli and Weiss. Here he chooses 19 of the greatest figures and presents their conversations, offering...

Here, from Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Paul Goldberger, is the first full-fledged critical biography of Frank Gehry, undoubtedly the most famous architect of our time. Goldberger follows Gehry from his humble  origins—the son of working-class...

With its unique focus on visual language, Ellen Lupton's How Posters Work  is more than another poster book. Rather than provide a history of the genre or a compilation of collectibles, the book is organized around active design principles. Concepts...

Inspiring Young Minds to Love and Enjoy Art Everyone tells children that art matters— but the truth is that very often it's hard to know why it really does. Museum visits can feel like a chore as does having to learn the names of the big artists we're...

This is a book that students of architecture will want to keep in the studio and in their backpacks. It is also a book they may want to keep out of view of their professors, for it expresses in clear and simple language things that tend to be murky and...

Offers a unique personal perspective on the journey of collecting American art and antiques Start with House, Finish with a Collection is the story of how a couple's use of American art and antiques evolved  from furnishing a house into a full-blown...

Gustave Caillebotte was a French painter who was a member and patron of the Impressionists, although he painted in a more realistic manner than  many others in the group.  Caillebotte painted many domestic and familial scenes, interiors, and...

Throughout his life, the visionary artist Édouard Manet (1832–1883)  strove to leave behind the conventions of painting of his time.  Genre paintings, maritime landscapes, still lifes or portraits – for Manet, painting has always been the...

A mother stitches a few lines of prayer into a bedcover for her son serving in the Union army during the Civil War. A formerly enslaved  African American woman creates a quilt populated by Biblical figures  alongside celestial events. A quilted...

The allure of color is time honored and undeniable, but its inspired use in product design is a relatively new development. More than a century ago the Bauhaus movement changed the use of color in design. After World War II, pigment-imbued molded...

Milton Glaser: Graphic Design, perhaps the most famous book of its kind, explores the early decades of America’s pre-eminent graphic artist. Glaser’s work ranges from the psychedelic Bob Dylan poster to book and record covers; from store and restaurant...

A limited-edition artist book by Tammy Nguyen, A Surreal Archive:  The Young-Mallin Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is  inspired by an astonishing archive of Surrealist photographs,  correspondence, ephemera, and artwork that...

Vincent  van Gogh's letters are an exceptionally vivid and moving testimony to the artist's struggle to survive and work. They have always been widely read, but this book's combination of letters and illustrations gives an intimate insight into the...

From legendary classics to anonymous objects that are indispensable in homes and offices, this one-of-a-kind collection of original patent documents celebrates the creative genius of designers, inventors, creators, innovators, and dreamers the world over...

Take a colorful tour of 500 eye-poppingly brilliant spots around the world with The Rainbow Atlas. Spanning  natural phenomena, architectural wonders, art installations, and more,  the contents of this book range from the pink salt lakes of...

English joiner John Head (1688–1754) immigrated to Philadelphia in 1717 and became one of its most successful artisans and merchants. However, his prominence was lost to history until the author’s discovery of his account book among papers at the...

What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?  That was the question posed by the curators, artists, scholars, and students who comprise the Philadelphia-based public art and history studio Monument Lab. And in 2017, along...

For centuries artists and designers have recorded places, people, and life in travel sketchbooks. Over a period of fifty years, Laurie Olin, one of America’s most distinguished landscape architects, has recorded aspects of France: its cities and...

Few product designs have the staying power of creations by Dieter Rams.  Almost everything produced by the most influential designer of the twentieth century is today considered a classic. This new and revised edition...

For decades, anyone who cared about product design looked to the Braun label when choosing their appliances, radios, and other consumer items. Dieter Rams, the guiding force behind the Braun look, breaks down his design principles and processes in this...

To create his award-winning multicolored typefaces, Mark van Wageningen first returned to the past for his research: wood-type printing. His subsequent form and color studies led to a series of popular digital typefaces and awards for typographic...

It takes a very inclusive anthology to encompass the protean personality and range of interests of Benjamin Franklin, but The Portable Benjamin Franklin  succeeds as no collection has. In addition to the complete Autobiography, the volume contains...

Design for Children, a must-have book for all style-conscious  and design-savvy readers, documents the evolution of design for babies, toddlers, and beyond. The book spotlights more than 450 beautiful, creative, stylish, and clever examples of...

Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde is the first book to examine Philadelphia's cultural impact from the 1950s to the Bicentennial. As an interdisciplinary exploration, Invisible City highlights...

Today, people carry powerful computers in our pockets and call them “phones.” A generation ago, people were amazed that the processing power of a mainframe computer could be contained in a beige box on a desk. This book is a celebration of...

With dramatic expressions of futurism alongside rustic eco-trends, this  book collects the best of 1970s design in one expertly curated and annotated volume, drawn from the now-classic collectible, Decorative Art, The Studio Yearbook. Across...

Latex, plastics, and fervent consumerism: discover the design trends and materials which literally shaped the American 1950s. This overview explores a decade of postwar rebuilding driven by idealistic vision and  positive spirit, applied from the...

 A crash course in designing and constructing buildings. Too often, textbooks turn the noteworthy details of architecture into tedious discourse that would put even Frank Gehry to sleep. Architecture 101 cuts out the boring explanations, and...

This a great book for pencil collectors, admirers, historians, artists, writers—anyone who gets excited about the new Palomino Blackwing, the Philadelphia Museum of Art exclusive Diana pencil for example, or a perfectly sharpened No. 2...

How to Rule at Photography features 50 bite-size tips and tricks to help you improve your photo skills with your phone's camera. Creating brilliant photos with your phone isn't as hard as you might think, and the easy-to-follow advice in this book goes...

German printmaker Kathe Kollwitz (1867–1945) is known for her unapologetic social and political imagery; her representations of grief, suffering, and struggle; and her equivocal ideas about artistic and political labels. This volume explores Kollwitz’s...

More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United  States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of  deprivation and abuse and subjects...

YES!! That poet and that poem!  This is a special edition of the poem "The Hill We Climb," read at the inauguration of the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, on January 20, 2021.On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and...

From the paperclip to the Eames Lounge Chair, the hundreds of everyday  objects included in The Design Book span the last five centuries and  shape our society in indelible ways. This extraordinary collection  includes classic pieces by...

Famed sociologist, writer, and Black rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois fundamentally changed the representation of Black Americans with his exhibition of data visualizations at the 1900 Paris Exposition.  Beautiful in design and powerful in content,...

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 , one of the best  known and immediately recognizable paintings in the history of 20th century art,  "is famous," as the critic Robert Hughes astutely observed, "for being famous." Indeed,...

Many scholars have called Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay on women artists the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. In her revolutionary essay, Nochlin refused to answer the question of why there had been no “great women...

Curator and scholar Glenn Adamson opens Fewer, Better Things by contrasting his beloved childhood teddy bear to the smartphones and digital tablets children have today. He laments that many children and adults are losing touch with the material objects...

At the center of the United States’ economic and social development, according to conventional wisdom, are industry, commodities, and technology—while craftspeople and handmade objects are relegated to a bygone past. Renowned craft historian Glenn...

Whirr, buzz, hum. Before busy machines in factories turned out most of what we need and use, people crafted these  items by hand. From a globe to a pie crimper, a butter churn to a rocking horse, this unique collection highlights fourteen...

Marvels of craftsmanship, beauty, and function, Joshua Vogel's hand-carved kitchenware is coveted far and wide. In The Artful Wooden Spoon, Vogel shares more than 100 gorgeous pieces from his workshop gallery, providing rich visual inspiration along with...

An unparalleled introduction to American folk art, accompanying a major traveling exhibition. A handsome and insightful survey of American folk art, this book includes paintings, sculptures, furniture, and household objects made by untrained—or...

The Backyard Birdwatcher’s Bible is that rare type of book, one that is as packed with information as it is pleasing to look at. An elegant aesthetic is paired with practical tips on identifying, attracting, and caring for backyard birds, as well...

You saw Woman in Gold, this is the perfect introduction to the man who created her. Gustave Klimt (1862-1918) was one of the most brilliant artists of the Austrian avant-garde. Admired for his sensual images of women and for his powerful and original...

The name which predominates in the development of art throughout the twentieth century is that of Pablo Picasso. Not only was he one of  the most influential artists, he was also one of the most versatile. This beautifully produced book surveys the...

Van Gogh's paintings revolutionized artistic practice and styles. The intensity  of his vision, his wonderful sense of color and the extraordinary  boldness of his technique created masterpieces that exercised a profound  influence on the...

Salvador Dalí (1904-89) was one of the most controversial and paradoxical artists of the twentieth century. He was initially influenced by Impressionism and Cubism, but  subsequently became involved with the Surrealists, the most revolutionary...

Spanning over 60 years of Jasper Johns’s (b. 1930) prolific career, this spectacular publication is the most comprehensive and definitive study of the artist’s work to date. Written by noted Johns expert Roberta Bernstein, the book explores...

Considered by many to be the founder of modern sculpture, Rodin created sculptures that would enjoy a lasting renown, including The Kiss, The Thinker, and The Burghers of Calais.  Philadelphia's own Benjamin Franklin Parkway is graced by a museum...

Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) was the last great woodblock print master of the Ukiyo-e tradition, and One Hundred Aspects of the Moon is regarded as his greatest achievement. The only complete set of the series, in the collection of the Museum of International...

The Rookwood Pottery was probably the most famous company making art pottery in the United States in the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century, achieving an international reputation and consistently promoting artistic innovation. Proud that...

Experience the art of Jerry Pinkney, a master of the American picture book whose unforgettable visual narratives reflect deeply felt  personal and cultural themes, bearing witness to the African-American experience, the wonders of classic...

More than ninety objects, painted in vibrant colors that have survived half a millennium with undiminished brilliance, are reproduced in color and in black and white. Together they represent the various shapes, ornamentation, ambitious compositions, and...

Encounters with Modern Art chronicles the formation of a distinguished collection of early 20th-century art through the reminiscences of Nannette F. Rothschild. Tales of extensive dealings and evolving friendships with artists, dealers, fellow...

For almost fifty years, Senga Nengudi has shaped an œuvre that  inhabits a specific and unique place between sculpture, dance, and  performance. And that work has been widely recognized as groundbreaking.  Her iconic R.S.V.P...

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is fortunate to have a collection of Italian drawings that encompasses a broad sweep of Italy’s art history, from the Renaissance to Futurism to the contemporary, and includes works by such famed artists as Batoni,...

Dutch earthenware has a universal reputation and is represented in the ceramic collections of the great museums. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has a comprehensive collection of Delft blue and white and polychrome earthenware. The collection contains a...

This text accompanies the first museum survey of the mature work of Warren Rohrer, one of the premiere abstract artists to work in Philadelphia in the 20th century, bringing together 32 large-scale paintings from the years 1972 to 1993. This selection...

This elegant monograph was published on the occasion of the opening of the new galleries of South Asian art, October, 2016. Two shrine hangings, called pichhwais, and depicting scenes from the life of Krishna were a focal point of the new galleries...

Throughout history, artists, scientists, and philosophers have attempted to explain and order the visible color spectrum. Color: A Visual History from Newton to Modern Color Matching Guides  offers the fascinating history of how color has been...

An intimate collection of Vincent van Gogh’s portraits and self- portraits—perhaps the work for which he is best known. Despite his posthumous fame as a painter of flowers, still lifes, gardens, landscapes, and city scenes, Vincent van Gogh himself...

This comics biography of one of the greatest sculptors who ever lived is brought to life by a collaboration with the Rodin Museum and includes a preface by its director. It views the artist's story through the eyes of the three women who shared his life,...

In 1930, the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired the collection of  medieval and Renaissance sculpture and decorative arts assembled by  Edmond Foulc (1828–1916). Foulc’s beautiful Paris residence was an important gathering place for...

Our nation's history fits neatly in the palm of your hand.  This palm sized leather bound book is a 192 page edition containing the complete United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and every constitutional amendment to the present day. Also...

Cats, cats, and more cats! Expressive or aloof, affectionate or enigmatic, cats have complicated characters that make them compelling artists' muses. Artful Cats explores the quirky and charming relationships of artists with their cats in 130 rarely seen...

In the late eighteenth century, mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner devised a standardized color scheme that allowed him to describe even the subtlest of chromatic differences with consistent terminology. His scheme was then adapted by an Edinburgh...

A beautifully produced book for art lovers and nature enthusiasts illuminating van Gogh’s belief that painting should “celebrate the finest qualities of nature” Vincent van Gogh felt a profound empathy with the natural environment and...

A beautifully produced gift book for gardeners and art lovers everywhere: a selection of Vincent van Gogh’s garden and flower paintings and drawings. Vincent van Gogh never owned a garden, but throughout his career he painted and drew outdoor...

Ever since his self-proclamation as part of the “New York Five,”  Richard Meier has risen through one top commission after another to the dizzy heights of architectural stardom. From Madison Square Garden to Shenzhen, China, his sleek, luminously...

Discover the audacious futurism of Zaha Hadid. As the first woman to win both the Pritzker Prize for architecture and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal,  Hadid broke the rules and re-defined the game, despite some saying her  designs were unbuildable...

The creative duo Charles Eames and Ray Kaiser Eames transformed the visual character of America. Though best known for their furniture, the husband and wife team were also forerunners in architecture, textile design, photography, and film.   The...