Books about Stilgoe from Amazon.com

What lies along the highway, just out of sight? How about behind that building? Or under the street? Most of us muse idly about such things as we take our walks or drive our cars, but only a few go further and explore the secret histories of the places where we live. Landscape historian John R. Stilgoe is one of these intrepid explorers; for years he has taught Harvard students to open their senses to the created environment we share, to gently dissect our neighborhoods and public spaces for the knowledge hidden in plain sight. In Outside Lies Magic, he lets us all in on these wonderful secrets.

Guiding us on tracks laid by utility and railroad companies, showing us the hidden territory of postal systems, Stilgoe reminds us that important frontiers lie invisible in our backyards and side streets, waiting for our attention. Though more interested in showing us how to see than telling us what there is to see, his descriptions of power-line right-of-ways, alley-side entrances, and hobo jungles provide compelling incentive for the reader to take his advice to heart and start looking around and asking questions of the community. If you think it's important to "think locally," Outside Lies Magic is an outstanding training manual. --Rob Lightner.
Price: $2.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this enchanting book, John R. Stilgoe takes us on a tour of the seacoast, evoking its sights, sounds, and textures, and showing how it illuminates issues of landscape and American culture. Telling fascinating stories of fishing boats and lighthouses, wharfs and piers, quicksand and buried treasures, this book is ideal beach reading and a guidebook for anyone intrigued by the shore..
Price: $19.15 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Shallow Water Dictionary is both a celebration of the richness of our vernacular language and a lament on its passing – and with it, the passing of the words we need to understand our shallow water regions, once the primary landscape of America and now facing extinction, both physical and linguistic.
This small book is an intriguing and valuable addition to our knowledge of a changing landscape. Literary, etymological, historical, and vernacular investigations of such varied terms as “guzzle,” “creek,” and “chartreuse,” Stilgoe’s definitions are lyric explanations of words whose original meanings have been eroded by time..
Price: $5.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

What do objects mean to us? What messages do they send? What values and lifestyles do they represent? From blue jeans and surfboards to cosmetics and kitchen gadgets, twelve everyday objects are recast as icons -- single, physical forms that embody a complex universe of associations -- and explored as benchmarks for the current state of design. This striking volume accompanies the groundbreaking exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to run April to August 1997. With essays by Chee Pearlman, David E. Nye, Steven Flusty, and Aaron Betsky, Icons forges a new relationship between design, consumer culture, and the aesthetics of desire..
Price: $93.52 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Imagine a "gold and mercury image on a layer of silver bonded to copper," an all-metal photographic process that poisoned some its practitioners Imagine an era long before a surfeit of images began to dull the viewer, when a visual reality--not a virtual one--captivated the imagination. The daguerreotype process is not only "one of the great artistic vehicles for rendering the human face," says John Wood, but an equally potent and elegant means of rendering a scenic image. The author has assembled the largest collection of daguerreotypes ever seen in book form, including Jean-Louis-Baptiste Gros's masterful studies of the Acropolis and the Seine, and Joseph Wilhelm Pero's striking images of Lubeck, Germany..
Price: $22.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]