We’ve long been fans of Princeton Architectural Press, a seriously intelligent publisher of books about architecture, design and….life. The Press specializes in content that defies easy categorization (like us). So we are thrilled that it has become Improvised Life’s first sponsor, of October’s posts.

Its 1000+ titles surprise, inspire, and inform about the visual world; many of its books landed in our stacks well before it became a sponsor. Our current favorite: You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, a collection of wonderfully inventive maps, charts of places both real and imaginary.

You Are Here cover
Along with maps from artists, cartographers, and explorers through many cultures and eras, You are Here includes a map of the ideal country estate from a dog’s perspective; a guide to buried treasure on Skeleton Island; a trip down the road to success; and the world as imagined by an inmate of a mental institution.

We learned to view DNA, made vivid through “x-ray crystallographers, with their electron density maps and three-dimensionals structures” as a kind of landscape of colorful “subtle ravines and outcrops”, each with a biological purpose.

DNA Maps

We were touched by A Map of the Various Paths of Life, from birth to death, made by B. Johnson in 1805. We would like to live in Serenity Province.

A Map of the Various Paths of Life

We’ve just discovered that Princeton Architectural Press published Paula Scher: MAPS, graphic designer Paula Scher’s (whose work we’ve posted before) obsessive, impressionistic, packed-with-info, hand-painted maps of continents, cities, countries. Dig her view of the world (click to embiggen):

paulascher-worldmap
Paula Scher

But the Press’s range of titles goes WAY beyond ‘maps. More on the Press’s books to come. In the meantime check out their entire catalog here (it’s big, so takes a while to load).

*Please excuse wonky gaps in text and other glitches we’re working to fix on our redesign.

 

 

testtesttestInspired Paula Scher: MAPStesttest test

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