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Art, Architecture & Print Culture Books in this online selection represent only a sliver of what we offer in the store. If you've got a particular book in mind and want to check on its availability, call us at 415-362-8193.

1 2 3 >>>     sort list by author | publication date All Over Coffee Paul Madonna The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin You could spend years trying to read Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project--after all, he spent much of the last 13 years of his life doing the research. When he committed suicide in 1940, he destroyed his copy of the manuscript, and so for decades the work was believed lost. But another copy turned up, and... Bibliodeath My Archives (With Life in Footnotes) Andrei Codrescu Award-winning author Andrei Codrescu's Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes) surveys the evolutionary relationship between language and technology by examining his own career as a prolific American writer for more than four decades, The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jane Jacobs A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961... Designing San Francisco Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay Alison Isenberg Designing San Francisco is the untold story of the formative postwar decades when U.S. cities took their modern shape amid clashing visions of the future. —Recommended by Paul Doc/Undoc Documentado/Undocumented Ars Shamánica Performática Felicia Rice MacArthur Genius Guillermo Gómez-Peña and award-winning book artist Felicia Rice create a multi-media, border-crossing hybrid: the book as performance art. Everything Is Its Own Reward An All Over Coffee Collection Paul Madonna "The book is fantastic. Of time and tenderness. Beautiful drawings. Beautiful text. Ethereal and serious at once. The book is its own reward." -- Maira Kalman, author of "And the Pursuit of Happiness" Grapefruit A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono Yoko Ono Quiet.It's a bomb. --Recommended by Tân, City Lights Books Back in print for the first time in nearly thirty years, here is Yoko Ono's whimsical, delightful, subversive, startling book of instructions for art and for life. "Burn this book after... How to Read Buildings A Crash Course in Architectural Styles Carol Davidson Cragoe This practical primer is a handbook for decoding a building’s style, history, and evolution. Every building contains clues embedded in its design that identify not only its architectural style but also the story of who designed it, who it was built... Just Kids Patti Smith Just Kids illuminates the impressive lover of literature that Patti Smith is. Her memoir will be of particular interest to City Lights enthusiasts as she is our quintessential reader, a fan of the Surrealists... Kenneth Patchen A Centennial Selection Kenneth Patchen, Jonathan Clark Lee Miller A Life Carolyn Burke Lee Miller’s life embodied all the contradictions and complications of the twentieth century: a model and photographer, muse and reporter, sexual adventurer and domestic goddess, she was also America's first female war correspondent. Carolyn... Literary Wonderlands A Journey Through The Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created Laura Miller Nothing is better than a book about books. This is exquisitely curated and wonderfully illustrated. Here are the fictional landscapes of Wonderlands, from ancient myths to the computer age. For every book we are given an essay, its history, the original covers, and quotations and fun facts. —Recommended by Don, City Lights Books Prison/Culture Sharon E. Bliss, Kevin B. Chen, Steve Dickison, Mark Dean Johnson, Rebeka Rodriguez Nearly fifty artists, poets, and activists examine the contemporary prison system through heartrending art and community 1 2 3 >>>