The map is not the territory, but the exception also proves the rule, as in the case of this book, which samples over 1,000 different maps to deconstruct their design approaches and inspire designers through their visuals. It’s not about the territories the original maps were made to represent, but all of the different design strategies embedded in the pages of past atlases.

Kerim Bayer combined over 5,000 small map images in Map Section. “Deconstructing them really did help me personally to double down on my interest in the graphics, in reducing them to their empirical elements and appreciating them mainly for their beauty,” he explains. “Although presented in a book the size of an atlas, it contains not maps of countries but maps of the graphic devices we use to translate and produce spatial information: lines, dots, colours, symbols, illustrations, shading, text, insets, hachures, legends, grids and contours.”

At first, Bayer considered selecting the thumbnails manually, but worried that would lead to biases in the results — instead, he tapped into his collection of scientific, transit and city planning maps programatically, letting randomness work for him. “For the purpose of highlighting the graphics of the maps and providing a resource, which is the mission of the project was anyway, randomisation worked just as well, if not better.”

“I’ve been looking for a way to better relate to my own maps for a long time,” says the book’s creator. “Maps always have been a learning tool, even if I don’t necessarily fully yet understand how. They’ve also been a resource and an aide for learning a great many other things.”

An oft overlooked wonder of the urban wilderness, the common pigeon is much more than it appears, with a rich history of aristocratic breeding dating back centuries.

Photographer and native New Yorker Andrew Garn has spent years documenting these creaturing and collecting them into a book titled The New York Pigeon: Behind the Feathers to share their “personalities, expressiveness, glorious feather iridescence, and deeply hued eyes.”

Birds that used to be exchanged between the wealthy as gifts have grown to have different associations, and created a whole industry of pigeon defense systems for urban architecture.

The goal of Garn’s work is, in part, to cast them in a different light (both literally and otherwise), showing the elegance of these creatures when taken out of everyday contexts where some find them to be annoying pests.

Some shots put subjects against dark backgrounds, focusing the viewer necessarily on the birds themselves. Others put them in their urban contexts, highlighting them in flight or perched on windows.

For more on the history of this adaptive series, check out this episode of 99% Invisible. And for more photographs of pigeons at all stages of their lives, see Garn’s website or buy the book.

Spanning 40 years of gameplay and 40 different games, this new volume dives into the design and history of dozens of virtual realities, acting as a travel guide to imaginative places that only exist in cyberspace.

Game developer and writer Konstantinos Dimopoulos’s upcoming book is called Virtual Cities: An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities and features classic virtual environments from Fallout to Silent Hill, including some that overlap in uncanny ways with reality (like New Vegas). Maps and illustrations will accompany commentary from the author, who has a PhD in urban planning and geography and designs spaces for games, making him well-suited to explore the layouts of these places.

“Video games allow us to construct and visit believable imaginary cities, provide us with glimpses of ancient urbanism, and let us immerse ourselves in the wildest utopias and darkest dystopias of our possible futures. They are an unprecedented canvas for experimenting with the urban environment, and an utterly unique medium for experiencing cities both imagined and real in truly immersive ways.”

“I would describe game urbanism as a relatively new and truly intriguing area that allows for exciting research possibilities,” says the author. “Convincingly abstracting an actual urban setting into something both economical and believable can be very taxing.” But it has its rewards, too. “Tackling a truly exotic virtual city set in, say, outer space and inhabited by a variety of species, or attempting to imagine a fantasy town in an intricately crafted Tolkien-esque world can be immensely satisfying.”

The places have to be believable, following internally consistent rules that resonate with reality, while also being fantastical to experience. “A city can helps amplify a game’s atmosphere with its dark narrow streets and tall eerie buildings in a horror offering, provide with unique routes and good hiding spots in a stealth game, or even be used as a huge canvas for environmental storytelling.”

In a game with deserts, people will build places to shelter and get water, he recalls of one project. “The dev team went on and satisfied this almost mundane set of needs by having fresh water flowing over the roofs of the settlement in a network of connected, tiled pools and open canals that made sure all the digital denizens of the place lived in cooled buildings, and could easily access water,” Dimopoulos explains. In the end, each challenge is different, which is what keeps players coming back, too, when the cities within games are convincingly cool. The book, meanwhile, aims to unpack everything from the design process to user experience, and may hold lessons for real-life urban planners as well.

Back in the 1600s, long before science fiction authors dreamed up digital e-readers, this Jacobean traveling library was making the rounds, housing dozens of small books in a larger book-shaped case. Bound in leather like a large folio volume, it is thought to be one of the first of its kind.

The handcrafted wooden shell was purpose-built to house a collection of littler volumes that could in theory be swapped out for different journeys, much like loading up a modern device with novels or other entertainment.

Located at the University of Leeds Library, this case is presumed to have been commissioned by a lawyer and politician named William Hakewell in 1617 as a holiday gift (as the recipient’s and giver’s coats of arms are both found on the case). The case is quite compelling — it looks a lot like a book upon casual inspection — while the contents are neatly arranged in similar-looking bindings.

The gift included classics by Ovid, Virgil and Cicero among others, spanning a range of philosophical and theological subjects. Hakewell commissioned several similar cases over the years, which would also have facilitated trades across collections of friends if they were so inclined. Each case also contained a list of original books that came with the commission, which in turn have numbers corresponding to the list

This vast volume full of mixed watercolor swatches and other illustrations elaborating explains the art and science of combining waters and colors to create a huge array of tones, tints, shades and hues.

Created by artist  A. Boogert, this Dutch book is one-of-a-kind, a unique handmade production designed to educate students and artists about how to mix, make and deploy individual colors and color schemes. The entire work is thoroughly indexed and each process described in impressive detail.

Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel considers it a comprehensive coloring guide ahead of its time. “I encountered this Dutch book from 1692 in a French database today and it turns out to be quite special. For one thing, no Dutch scholar appears to have published on it, or even to know about it. Moreover, the object is special because it provides an unusual peek into the workshop of 17th-century painters and illustrators.”

More from the aforementioned scholar: “In the 17th century, an age known as the Golden Age of Dutch Painting, this manual would have hit the right spot. It makes sense, then, that the author explains in the introduction that he wrote the book for educational purposes. Remarkably, because the manual is written by hand and therefore literally one of a kind, it did not get the reach among painters – or attention among modern art historians – it deserves.”

If you want to see the volume yourself: Aix-en-Provence, Bibliothèque municipale/Bibliothèque Méjanes, MS 1389 (1228). Luckily, the entire book can be viewed here, in hi-res, zoomable images. Here is a description of the book. Thanks to the internet, this single-run work now finally has a shot at the global audience for which it was intended (via Colossal).