Beautiful book | Reinventing the Wheel

Very good Research | Reinventing the Wheel | Jessica Helfand

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	• Reinventing the Wheel Jessica Helfand Princeton Architectural Press, 2006 - 160 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Graphically outstanding. Text is academic, dull and ill-formed.

Jessica Helfland appears caught here between her inner love of collecting trivia, and her academic role: and while the graphics put on display her remarkable collection of wheels and volvelles her text unfortunately veers toward academic pontificating of the worst order as she uses her collection in an attempt to ruminate on how we see life, and how linearity as in the design and format of books (left-to-right, one page after another) is confining compared to the multidimensional viewpoint afforded by circles. Helfand's writing is rigidly locked into the very paradigm she criticises, and in the end her more human Foreword is by far the most interesting text in this handsome hard back volume.

Handsome? Graphically, this is an outstanding book - well-designed, beautifully typeset, graphics gorgeously reproducing the collection of wheels, even the paper seems especially chosen - but I found Helfand's logic and her weak arguments quite frustrating. It reads like the first draft of a thesis - before the student's overseeing Professor has had a real go at the author. ("Come on - you've made a leap in logic here!")

So this is one book where the pictures can do all the talking. The text and the often redundant captions (they describe what we can already see, thank you) is frankly superfluous.

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Beautiful book

bought the book for the pictures and the paragraph about each one. haven't read most of the text and don't particularly care to.

a shoulder surfer actually thought some of the wheels were real, the reproductions are that good.

4 out of 5 because I didn't read/rate the text.

Very good Research

This book is an excellent research on the subjet with very good examples. Interesting for designers.

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Reinventing the Wheel

interesting trivia and great for a collector of wheels but I was looking more for a visual mapping type of collection. Nice book for nostalgia seekers.

I object: No Obverse

Fun book, brilliantly layed out, but would have liked to see the backsides. And really, the photographers were so lazy much of the time to not get the info disks in register with the die-cuts. I presume this was the author's collection or from like-minded collectors and/or conservators. This flouting of attention to detail is conspicuously disconjugate to the demanding esthete of this type of person. Enjoyable none the less. Despite my pleasure, in reference to my conclusion, I reject a reverse: I object; no obverse. Julian Mason, Beaufort SC

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"A locus for focus, a little engine, a thought generator.? ? Eye

"This thoroughly unusual book will delight graphic, information, and book designers. It will equally fascinate those interested in intellectual history, history of technology, and popular culture.? ? Library Journal

Now available in paperback, this delightful book spins the history of the information wheel, as inventive and instructive as intriguing, that has been used since the fourteenth century to measure, record, predict, and calculate everything from time and space to military history to recipes. In this fascinating book, designer and critic Jessica Helfand offers and in-depth look at these unique artifacts, which are not only clever and amusing but, Helfand argues, relevant as a model for modern interactive design. From circular mathematical slide rules to Captain Marvel phonetic decoders, Reinventing the Wheel demonstrates the astonishing range and remarkable utility of these ingenious "interactive? tools.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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