Alexandra Horowitz's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Alexandra Horowitz recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Alexandra Horowitz's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
How New York City subways signage evolved from a "visual mess" to a uniform system with Helvetica triumphant.

For years, the signs in the New York City subway system were a bewildering hodge-podge of lettering styles, sizes, shapes, materials, colors, and messages. The original mosaics (dating from as early as 1904), displaying a variety of serif and sans serif letters and decorative elements, were supplemented by signs in terracotta and cut stone. Over the years, enamel signs identifying stations and warning riders not to spit, smoke, or cross the tracks were added to the...
more
Recommended by Alexandra Horowitz, and 1 others.

Alexandra HorowitzThis book is a really nice example of the author’s obsession with lettering on signage. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

2

Manhole Covers

"The Melnicks' work occupies a rather indeterminate genre category: part history of material culture, part exercise in obsessive photographic cataloguing of related objects, part crypto-Pop artist's book. There is a crisp and even elegant matter-of-factness to their writing and their pictures, a spare functionalist precision."
-- Allan Sekula They lie underfoot, embellished and gleaming. They seal off and provide entry to an underground world of conduits, water mains, power lines, and sewers. They appear by the thousands in our cities, but very few people ever look at them or think...
more
Recommended by Alexandra Horowitz, and 1 others.

Alexandra HorowitzA picture history of many beautiful examples of 19th century ironwork that we drive or walk over. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

3
2012 Choice Magazine academic book award winner (zoology) The first-ever reference to the sign left by insects and other North American invertebrates includes descriptions and almost 1,000 color photos of tracks, egg cases, nests, feeding signs, galls, webs, burrows, and signs of predation. Identification is made to the family level, sometimes to the genus or species. It's an invaluable guide for wildlife professionals, naturalists, students, and insect specialists.Beetles, spiders, ants, flies, butterflies, mayflies, dragonflies, earwigs, crickets, grasshoppers, scorpions, centipedes,... more
Recommended by Alexandra Horowitz, and 1 others.

Alexandra HorowitzA guide to identifying the tracks that insects leave behind – a phenomenal book that should get a large amount of attention. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

4
Paradoxical portraits of seven neurological patients, including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds new creative power in black & white; & others. less
Recommended by Alexandra Horowitz, and 1 others.

Alexandra HorowitzSacks’s books are an inspiration to me in bringing together scientific and philosophical reflections on various human conditions. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

5

How to Use Your Eyes

James Elkins's How to Use Your Eyes invites us to look at--and maybe to see for the first time--the world around us, with breathtaking results. Here are the common artifacts of life, often misunderstood and largely ignored, brought into striking focus. With the discerning eye of a painter and the zeal of a detective, Elkins explores complicated things like mandalas, the periodic table, or a hieroglyph, remaking the world into a treasure box of observations--eccentric, ordinary, marvelous. less
Recommended by Alexandra Horowitz, and 1 others.

Alexandra HorowitzI love the idea that you can look at something so familiar that you have never really examined, and see this additional dimension. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

Don't have time to read Alexandra Horowitz's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

  • Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
  • Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
  • Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.