Billy Bookcase

What’s on our reading list?

We’ve been asked this a few times and we’ve been a bit flummoxed. We haven’t actually come across that many books about what we do. Copywriting or business writing books are usually too narrow (writing helps with our day job, but it’s not all we do). And the branding ones tend to be a bit academic and stuck in the mud.

We’ve found that the best books (and the ones we use), aren’t guides to writing, branding, design or whatever. They’re collections of ideas we wish we’d thought of, or well-thought out, elegant books in their own right.

Here are a few:

Sparkle and Spin
by Ann Rand

REWIND: Forty Years of Design and Advertising
by Michael Johnson

Art of McSweeney’s
by Editors of McSweeney’s

Well-written and Red: The Story of the Economist Poster Campaign
by Alfredo Marcantonio

Janet’s Last Book
by Allan Ahlberg (out of print)

The Art of Looking Sideways
by Alan Fletcher

Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art
by Liza Kirwin

The Copy Book
by Alastair Crompton (out of print)

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
by Marshall McLuhan

It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be
by Paul Arden

Essentially Odd: A Catalog of Products Created for and Sold at the 826 Stores
by Elaina Stein