Here are 100 books that Ben Shahn fans have personally recommended if you like
Ben Shahn.
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I've been a guest lecturer and featured presenter at colleges and conferences, served on the Board of Directors for ICON6, and authored eight published books on illustration and design. I'm a retired college art professor and freelance illustrator and still teach fine art, design, and cartoon classes for kids and adults; I’m also an English Dept. writing tutor at a local college. Right now, I am exploring the medium of cardboard. Cardboard taps into a material that is so ubiquitous and common, it’s often maligned as being inconsequential, but I’m positively tickled to be working in a material that was wonderfully simple and presents a simply wonderful challenge.
I guess, if you polled illustrators and designers as to who was the GOAT, it would probably be Milton Glaser. On my list, he’s certainly up there.
A supreme talent, Glaser was (still is, and I think, always will be) incredibly influential; when you read this book, you’ll see why.
While writing my book, I had the honor and pleasure to work with his life-long friends and studio mates, Reynold Ruffins and Simms Taback. All three of these guys demonstrated superlative skills coupled with super smart concepts. I should also mention they were just plain mensches.
Available again, the enduring, iconic volume showcasing the key early-career work and process of the godfather of modern graphic design
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 design to toy creations; and magazine formats including New York magazine and logotypes, all of which define the look of our time. Here Glaser undertakes not only a remarkably wide-ranging representation of his oeuvre from the incredibly fertile early years, but,…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I've been a guest lecturer and featured presenter at colleges and conferences, served on the Board of Directors for ICON6, and authored eight published books on illustration and design. I'm a retired college art professor and freelance illustrator and still teach fine art, design, and cartoon classes for kids and adults; I’m also an English Dept. writing tutor at a local college. Right now, I am exploring the medium of cardboard. Cardboard taps into a material that is so ubiquitous and common, it’s often maligned as being inconsequential, but I’m positively tickled to be working in a material that was wonderfully simple and presents a simply wonderful challenge.
In a book that thoroughly examines the world of art and design, it would be remiss to not discuss the business side of things. So, in my book, I do.
Why? I can’t think of a better way to earn a living than to make a living by doing something you love and that replenishes your soul. And no, selling your art does not mean you are selling your soul.
Hear me out: selling shoes is a worthy occupation. I’ve done that; people will always need shoes. But me, I’d rather sell art. This is the bible of how to sell your work cleanly and not get taken to the cleaners.
The industry bible for communication design and illustration professionals, with updated information, listings, and pricing guidelines.
Graphic Artists Guild Handbook is the industry bible for communication design and illustration professionals. A comprehensive reference guide, the Handbook helps graphic artists navigate the world of pricing, collecting payment, and protecting their creative work, with essential advice for growing a freelance business to create a sustainable and rewarding livelihood.
This sixteenth edition provides excellent, up-to-date guidance, incorporating new information, listings, and pricing guidelines. It offers graphic artists practical tips on how to negotiate the best deals, price their services accurately, and create contracts…
I've been a guest lecturer and featured presenter at colleges and conferences, served on the Board of Directors for ICON6, and authored eight published books on illustration and design. I'm a retired college art professor and freelance illustrator and still teach fine art, design, and cartoon classes for kids and adults; I’m also an English Dept. writing tutor at a local college. Right now, I am exploring the medium of cardboard. Cardboard taps into a material that is so ubiquitous and common, it’s often maligned as being inconsequential, but I’m positively tickled to be working in a material that was wonderfully simple and presents a simply wonderful challenge.
There are some artists who are so talented they are, simultaneously, incredibly inspirational anddiscouraging.
Mike Mignola is one of those guys. Mignola is the commander of figure/ground. His beautiful sense of shape and form and utter control of black and white is just amazing. He builds story beautifully and constructs his pages cinematically.
When I looked for people to grace the pages of my book, I shot for consummate talent like that, and, if I can blow my own horn just a bit, the book succeeds along those lines. When I grow up, I want to be able to draw like that.
A murder in a New York wax museum and a missing corpse lead Hellboy into ancient Romanian castles on the trail of a sleeping legend: the original nobleman vampire. Nazi scientists prepare for the return of their occult master and the end of the world, and Hellboy confronts his purpose on earth.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I've been a guest lecturer and featured presenter at colleges and conferences, served on the Board of Directors for ICON6, and authored eight published books on illustration and design. I'm a retired college art professor and freelance illustrator and still teach fine art, design, and cartoon classes for kids and adults; I’m also an English Dept. writing tutor at a local college. Right now, I am exploring the medium of cardboard. Cardboard taps into a material that is so ubiquitous and common, it’s often maligned as being inconsequential, but I’m positively tickled to be working in a material that was wonderfully simple and presents a simply wonderful challenge.
Haunted House so enthralled and inspired me, I bought it three times! It originally came out in a full-scale edition, then in half-size. I bought both, and the smaller version again, as a gift.
This is a pop-up book on steroids. The mechanics behind it is stunning—a tour de farce of paper engineering. The story line is riotous. Smart writing, great illustration, and a super clever concept, Haunted House is a kid’s book only on the surface.
Revisit - if you dare! - one of the best-loved pop-up books of all time, now more gleefully ghoulish then ever with the addition of several spooky surprises.
Enjoy a tour of this spooky old house where a spine-tingling surprise lurks in every dark corner. Re-issued in its original full-size format, with four new pop-ups, this definitive edition brings the classic novelty to a whole new generation.
My journey as a writer began in correlation with my career as a family doctor. After reading Dr. Jacques Ferron’s, books, I knew I wanted to be an author as well as a doctor. While pursuing my medical career, I wrote medical articles and books. My husband and I have also been featured in Chicken Soup for the Soul of Quebecers with the story Witness of the Last Breath. This is the story of the last night of my daughter-in-law dying of lung cancer. Before she died, I promised Marie-Noëlle that I would pursue my writing career to change the world one young reader at a time. And I did.
What does Thingamabob mean? The mystery will keep you reading from the first to the last page of this well-illustrated picture book.
I challenge you to guess the surprising ending. This book meets readers’ needs looking for originality, humor, and beautiful illustrations. The author proves that the world of the imagination knows no bounds. This book is only for the fun of reading.
What is a thingamabob? A thingamabob can be anything . . . and so can you! A sweet, empowering picture book about self-discovery from the acclaimed author-illustrator of Petra.
In the beginning, the universe was one great big thing. Then that thing exploded into gobs and gobs of thingamabobs.
All of the thingamabobs had a purpose . . . all except for one small, shapeless thingamabob. No one knew what it was for. It wasn't this or that. It wasn't here or there. What's the use of this thingamabob?
But everything changes for Thingamabob when it makes a friend in…
War is perhaps the most extreme human activity. I have seen firsthand some of these extremes in Iraq and Afghanistan. I now write about the philosophy and ethics of war and geopolitics, exploring some of the impacts and enduring truths that war and its conduct tell us about ourselves that might be hidden under the surface of our everyday lives. The books I have chosen here explore, with elegance, sensitivity, and sometimes brutal and unflinching honesty, what the battlefield exposes, showing us that there is both tragedy and comedy at the extremities of human nature, and without one, you cannot really truly appreciate the other.
I have recommended this novel as it is one of the few to come out of the Iraq war written by an Iraqi writer, telling its story from the point of view of the local Iraqis.
Hadi, an old junk dealer, dismayed by the hasty burials of incomplete bodies after the daily bombings, puts together a body from the parts he finds. This composite body, he calls “Whatsitsname,” becomes possessed with the soul of a bombing victim and sets about killing those responsible for turning Baghdad into a slaughterhouse.
Blending its style between war fiction, horror, and fantasy, this darkly effective satire of the fatal logic of sectarianism follows Whatsitsname as he expands his scope, claiming: “There are no innocents who are completely innocent, and no criminals who are completely criminal.”
"Gripping, darkly humorous . . . profound." -Phil Klay, bestselling author and National Book Award winner for Redeployment
"Extraordinary . . . A devastating but essential read." -Kevin Powers, bestselling author and National Book Award finalist for The Yellow Birds
From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi-a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local cafe-collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial.…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’m a writer and teacher from Ama, Louisiana, who has also been a reader of comic books since I first learned how to read. I spent many years as a columnist, reviewer, and podcaster for a now-defunct comic site, while also working on my own novels, humor columns, and even the occasional stage play. My time these days is split between my day job as a high school English teacher, my dream job writing, and my full-time job of being the father of a five-year-old.
In the world of Lafferty’s Playing For Keeps, super-powered types fall into one of three categories. The heroes are powerful, but arrogant jerks. The villains have all the charm and charisma, but are still villains. Then there are people like Keepsie Branson, whose “useless” powers don’t let them fall into either category. After all, what good is the power to prevent something from being stolen from your own possession when it comes to fighting crime – or committing it? Lafferty’s style is slick, funny, and very original. This book isn’t like any other superhero story I know.
The shining metropolis of Seventh City is the birthplace of super powers. The First Wave heroes are jerks, but they have the best gifts: flight, super strength, telepathy, genius, fire. The Third Wavers are stuck with the leftovers: the ability to instantly make someone sober, the power to smell the past, the grace to carry a tray and never drop its contents, the power to produce high-powered excrement blasts, absolute control. over elevators. Bar owner Keepsie Branson is a Third Waver with a power that prevents anything in her possession from being stolen. Keepsie and her friends just aren't powerful…
I have been creating picture books for 30 years. Picture books are a combination of words and language - that’s what I am drawn to. I love vivid language and art that tells stories. I love wordplay and cornball puns. I savor a perfectly crafted sentence in proper English, but I am not a stickler for perfect grammar. I like slang, pig-latin, and mistakes. I enjoy the sound of languages that I know and that I don’t know. I hope that you enjoy all of these wordy books, including mine.
This book is an ode to the pleasures of words - their sound, look, and meaning. It consists of lists of words such as "words to read backward" including drows, mulp and gubdeb. Or "heavy words" such as duffle, blunderbuss, and galoshes. "Words for times of day" include dusk, owl cry, dewfall, and gloaming.
It is perfectly illustrated by Ben Shahn with black and white line drawings. The scratchy, uneven, expressive lines perfectly capture both the humor and gravity of the words.
I have loved these books since I was a child and The Wordy Book sprang out of that love.
What can words be, or rather, what can’t they be? Poet Alastair Reid introduces children and adults to the wondrous waywardness of words in Ounce Dice Trice, a delicious confection and a wildly unexpected exploration of sound and sense and nonsense that is like nothing else. Reid offers light words (willow, whirr, spinnaker) and heavy words (galoshes, mugwump, crumb), words on the move and odd words, words that read both ways and words that read the wrong way around (rezagrats), along with much else. Accompanied by Ben Shahn’s glorious drawings, Ounce Dice Trice is a book of endless delights, not…
I’ve spent the past thirty years leading the movement to integrate the humanities, and especially literary study, with evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience. I got my PhD in comparative literature right about the time the academic literary world was being convulsed by the poststructuralist revolution (Derrida, Foucault, et co). I felt a profound antipathy to the sterile paradoxes and attenuated abstractions of that theory. I wanted a theory that could get close to the power literature had over my own imagination. The evolutionary human sciences have provided me with a basis for building a theory that answers my own need to make sense of literature.
Jonsson argues that humans are suspended between a need to see reality and an urge to mythologize. Darwin’s theory is impersonal and mechanical, but authors in the later 19th and early 20th centuries still found ways to turn evolution into morally charged dramas. Jonsson convincingly demonstrates that those same myth-making impulses shape our imaginative experience today. The literary criticism in this book is superb, and Jonsson’s own rhetoric has classic power.
Darwinian evolution is an imaginative problem that has been passed down to us unsolved. It is our most powerful explanation of humanity's place in nature, but it is also more cognitively demanding and less emotionally satisfying than any myth. From the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has pushed our capacity for storytelling into overdrive, sparking fairy tales, adventure stories, political allegories, utopias, dystopias, social realist novels, and existential meditations. Though this influence on literature has been widely studied, it has not been explained psychologically. This book argues for the adaptive function of storytelling, integrates traditional humanist…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’m a traditional sculptor with more than 25 years of experience. Being a dyslectic student in the 2000s, I developed a systematic approach to translating medical anatomy texts into visual information that I could use while sculpting. All the anatomy books for artists at the time were text-centered. My reference sketches became quite popular among colleagues. It was clear that visual artists perceive information best when it’s visual, and that is how I got the idea for my first book. Now the Anatomy for Sculptors handbooks are bestsellers among visual artists striving to better understand the human form.
While the West was busy with postmodernism, the Soviet world cultivated social realism based on the 19th-century figurative tradition of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. East Germany was no exception with its own figurative tradition at Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. Gottfried Bammes was a professor of art there, and he further developed classical anatomy studies by introducing a more scientific approach. Illustrations in Der Nackte Mensch are precisely measured and reliable, and each of them introduces a new way to look at human anatomy. Concepts such as wire-framing and splitting organic form into geometric shapes appear here. This book is full of ideas, and it has been a huge influence on how I perceive human anatomy. Gottfried Bammes is, in my opinion, the greatest anatomist of the 20th century!
Gottfried Bamme - The naked man. Hand and textbook of anatomy for artists VEB Verlag of Art | 1982 | ISBN: 3364000166 | German | 480 pages Shown with special reference of their own tasks, objectives and methodological problems. With around 840 individual anatomical drawings by the author, over 120 examples of masterpieces of the fine arts, model 190 single shots and many students work.
