Communication Arts is nothing less than a beacon to the design industry. The magazine’s unparalleled relevance and superb presentation are very much to the credit of Patrick Coyne, its editor and designer, a man who is as gracious as he is gifted. Here, he writes about the Communication Arts library and his lifelong reverence for books.

[Alyson Kuhn] I was recently thinking, as I am wont to do, about small bits of printed paper and the stories they tell. In particular, I was thinking about small-scale personal papers, as differentiated from mass-marketed things like postage stamps, theater stubs and metro tickets.

[Alyson Kuhn] If you haven’t seen Pictorial Webster’s, published last July by Chronicle Books, you are in for a visual treat and a great story. But the story is not in the book. Nor are any definitions. Just pictures. It’s brilliant, it’s intriguing, it’s divinely distracting.

[Alyson Kuhn] I recently chatted with Jessica Helfand about scrapbooks in general and the hundreds she’s collected in particular. Her recent book Scrapbooks has a simple subtitle: An American History, which is shorthand for “A long look at the socio-gastro-economic-esthetic-parenthetic tales they tell.”

[David Mayes] My father, Richard Inskip Mayes, was an English professor, a raconteur, a Beat, a poet, and more. He entrusted four decades worth of his poems to me in 1988, hoping I would be able to print them at my job. Twenty years later, I have finally fulfilled that wish.