“Attention spans are getting shorter, thanks to clutter,” Seth Godin wrote in his blog a while back. “In 1960, the typical stay for a book on the New York Times bestseller list was 22 weeks. In 2006, it was two.”

Here are three books to draw out an afternoon. All of them would make superb gifts.

A Beautiful Book

Fifty Uncommon Birds of the Upper Midwest
Watercolors by Dana Gardner
Text by Nancy Overcott
University of Iowa Press
978-1-58729-590-4

This book is beautifully designed, beautifully written, beautifully illustrated. A wonderful gift for the birder by the winter fireside.

“The sparser the food, the farther south snowies migrate. When they reach as far as southern Minnesota, they are often starving, which was particularly true during an unusually early winter irruption in 2005. Whenever I see these magnificent creatures from the Artic in my area, I am aware that my opportunity comes at a hard time for the birds.”

An Undefinable Book

Unrecounted
Poems by W.G. Sebald
Translation by Michael Hamburger
Art by Jan Peter Tripp
New Directions
978-0-8112-1726-2

W.G. Sebald liked to illustrate his novels with blurry black and white photos, but he’s quite clear in his essay defending the art of Jan Peter Tripp, that realism does not equal superficiality.

Here the poetry does the illustrating. Sometimes humorous, sometimes devastating, Sebald’s words speaks to the gaze of Tripp’s portraits. “And painting, what is it, anyway, if not a kind of dissection procedure in the face of black death and white eternity?” —W.G. Sebald on Jan Peter Tripp

So, when the optic nerve
tears, in the still space of the air
all turns as white as
the snow on the Alps.
    —After Nature, W.G. Sebald


A Completely Amusing Book, in the Best Sense

Men of Letters, People of Substance
Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
Preface by Francine Prose
David R. Godine
978-1-56792-338-4

“A letter is much more than a representation of a symbol, a letter depicts a time period, a certain mood and perhaps, in this book, the soul of the artist,” says Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich in his introduction. James Joyce, then, is represented with the font Baskerville, with its early industrial ironwork fancy. Tennessee Williams, born thirty years later, gets Bookman, a Baskerville with swagger. And look at Flaubert… Can’t you just hear him say: “I am Madame Bovary.”
 

This is a book for designers, writers, readers, and puzzlers. The last half is filled with word play, portraits that face off with titles like “Nice” and “Naughty,” “Passive” and “Aggressive.” (Hint: the “Passive” face has a baby’s butt for a nose.) Totally delightful and worthy of close in(tro)spection.