[Patrick Coyne] I love books. Love them. I love to read them, to hold them, to turn the pages and to always learn something new. Books allow me to dive much deeper into a subject that would be too agonizing to explore in any other medium. Many contain information unavailable on the internet. Books instantly provide a sense of place, a window into our shared history.
I was raised by a couple of voracious readers and was taught from a young age to respect books. Defacing a book was a much worse offense than drawing on the walls. One of my most painful memories as a young adult was the loss of a portion of my own personal book collection when my garage-based studio was flooded.
One of the perks of being a publisher is that we receive lots of books for review. Many are directly applicable to our readership. Some have absolutely nothing to do with visual communications, and I can’t figure out why they were sent to us in the first place. Regardless, they have been the source for most of our collection.
We have two distinct libraries in our offices. Both are housed in simple shelves made of MDF and painted black. Our visual communications library contains about 1500 books covering graphic design, advertising, interactive media, illustration, photography and typography. Many of these, especially the more esoteric ones, will probably never make it onto a Kindle, but I’m surprised how often we refer to them when researching an individual, firm or some obscure production process. They are organized using a mutated version of the Dewey Decimal System. Within each discipline, subsections include Creativity/Theory, Business/Practice, Biographies, Agency/Firm Profiles, History and Collections.
In the middle of the C-shaped space created by the freestanding bookshelves is a small table with a good-old-fashioned Webster’s Dictionary, which we still use frequently.
On the outside, we have a bank of shelves for annuals and sourcebooks — about 300 of them, including early volumes from Graphis, the Art Director’s Club and Society of Illustrators. These are especially valuable when doing historical research. Another side contains our periodical section, where we keep issues from 30 different publications. It’s not just other trade magazines, but Texas Monthly (great writing), Preservation (the magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation) and Consumer Reports (I love the car reviews).
Our second library contains about 1700 books on other applied arts, fine arts, reference books and general interest titles.
If this all sounds very organized, it really isn’t. We don’t have a master list, database or even a card file system, and there are always small piles of books scattered about waiting to be filed. There’s also a collection of technical books in the online department, Dover clip-art books in a production office and reference books dispersed throughout the editorial department. The best we’ve been able to do is get books of a similar subject into the same general location. Fortunately this often leads me to a book that better answers my question than the book I was actually searching for.
If we had more shelves, we’d probably have even more titles. But space limitations have forced us to pare down our collection over the years, which on occasion has allowed us to barter for some great titles at the local used bookstore.
While we all seem to be spending more and more time online, I actually find it comforting to step away from the screen and open a book and read. The intimate conversation between author and reader is something I will always cherish.
Patrick Coyne is the editor and designer of Communication Arts magazine, the largest international trade journal of visual communications. When he’s not at work, he’s trying to read several books at the same time, which makes for a messy nightstand.
Photography by Nancy Lewis
