Rudy Burckhardt is probably best known for photos of artists and their work during the fifties and sixties in New York. He was familiar with artists long before that, there is a photo here of his neighbor Willems De Kooning which he took in 1938 and dance critic and poet Edwin Denby was Burckhardt's companion for years.

What makes this book rather different and special from the usual photographer monograph is that it is a facsimile of one of Burckhardt's photo scrapbooks, the original is in the Metropolitan Museum. The fifty-four pages are printed in four color (with a 200 screen) though all the photos are black and white but color gives the pages a faded look and picks up the slight shadows created by the edge of the prints in the scrapbook. The title page is in Burckhardt's handwriting and dated 1938 though a copy of Life magazine on a newsstand photo is a September 11, 1939 issue (he could, of course, have started the book in 1938 and added photos over the coming months).

Burckhardt divided the photos into three sections with a poem by Denby introducing each part. The first eleven one-to-a-page photos are sidewalk close-ups of buildings showing fire hydrants, grills and parts of entrances. Part two has thirteen straight on shots of advertising signs, barber shops and newsstands. Part three, over sixteen pages, has forty-three street scenes of pedestrians walking past Burckhardt's camera. Some of these shots are four or three to a page.

Overall I thought this was an intriguing look at the work of a lesser known émigré photographer (he was born in Switzerland) and made even more fascinating because it is a beautifully produced facsimile of Burckhardt's original scrapbook. Somehow I feel closer to his work while turning the pages because of the intimate presentation.

The back of the book has an interesting illustrated twelve page essay by Doug Eklund, Associate curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum. A nice touch is that this essay is printed on matt white paper.

A mildly amusing book with a few really fun photos amongst all the rather bland ones. The 106 show what you can expect to see in various parts of down-market London though I think it's possible to see most of the these in any major UK city. The majority of photos show the predictable defaced posters and signs with a few hand-lettered ones. Other shots show the falling apart environment, like an abandoned car full of weeds or a bike padlocked to some railings but minus both wheels and a saddle.

This has all been done before though and I think rather more successfully. The Caravan Gallery from Portsmouth, in southern England, has produced two lovely photo books that beautifully capture the holes in the fabric of contemporary British life. 'Is Britain great?' (ISBN 978-0955025815) and 'Is Britain great? 2 (ISBN 978-0956390103). The really nice thing about these two books is that none of it is contrived or false and the presentation is far superior to the Dalton's London title which is really nothing more than amateur snaps.

The book features several quirky London shop fronts. A really big selection, from around the country can be found in Guy Swillingham's 'Shop horror' (ISBN 0007198132) The art of the pun name clearly hasn't deserted Britain's shop owners.

I hope no other publisher is thinking of doing a book on menu design because Jim Heimann's wonderful collection in this Taschen title can't be beat. With almost eight hundred covers and nicely, many showing the insides so you can see what was available when your folks ate out decades ago.

It's the inside meal listings that I found intriguing: the Palmer House in Chicago, on May 17, 1885, offered Fried frogs, a la Crapotine; when the Iowa Register and Tribune papers had their banquet in 1917 they could tuck into Dross smothered in onions; United States Lines SS America on Monday June 9, 1930 listed a dessert called Blanc mange; the Sea Cave in Oakland, California, had thirty-three oyster dishes and claimed `We open our oysters daily'.

Little snippets of information pop up everywhere. The 1943 Red Sails Inn in San Diego menu said `We are closed on Tuesdays', because of wartime regulations required meatless Tuesdays. The Disney Studio in 1942 had very low prices for breakfast to prevent their workers going of the lot. Many of the menus before 1940 have daily dates printed on them, presumably they were frown away when the places closed at night. All the up-market menus used a mixture of French and English though the swanky New York Colony in 1954 had every thing in French and handwritten, too.

The menus included aren't just restaurants but from anywhere that provided cooked food, the Colony to Bob's Big Boy and everything in between, no early McDonalds though. The covers come in all sorts of sizes and shapes, a few shown include location maps and I found one that featured photographs meals.

The book is the usual well designed Taschen format. Good page layouts and printing with a 150 screen. I would have preferred to see a gloss paper to bring out the wonderful colorful graphics rather than the slightly soft matt art that has been used.

Jim Heimann's book will be a treat for those in the food business and graphic designers will appreciate all the amazing visual goodies. This is his second title on the subject, check out `May I take your order' (ISBN 0811817830) a large paperback from 1998.

The poster collection of Armin Hofmann is the seventh title in a series of poster books from the publisher. I believe twenty-two titles have so far been published. The sixty-seven posters in the book cover Hofmann's career and I thought it was interesting that his design principles have stayed constant over several decades. One word perhaps sums it up: simplicity.

Look at any of these designs and you'll see striking typography, sparse and careful use of color and graphics all carefully blended to create an instant statement. They are, of course, incredibly central European looking, helped perhaps because they are for non-commercial concerns like cultural institutions in Basel. Though many of these designs are from past decades they still look fresh today.

Hoffmann has spent a lifetime teaching and six pages in the book show forty-two large thumbnails of past students work, some of going back to the late 1950s. Karl Gerstner, Nelly Rudin are a couple of names I recognize. You can see the Hofmann approach in some of this student work though many designs seem overly complex. Hofmann's wonderful Giselle poster is included in the book, where he playfully turns the Standard Medium square dot on the i into a circle and you can compare the clarity of this poster with a student's work for the same ballet, a rather fussy type and graphic interpretation.

The book has two essays (in English and German) and the posters are well reproduced with a 175 screen on a good matt art. Overall I thought was an excellent coverage of the poster work by one of the founders of Swiss modernism.

How refreshing to come across a book that will grab you open it any page. Nick Veasey's photo art gives you fresh take on the humble x-ray which is interesting because the technology has been around for years but how many photographers, in the past, had a big lead-lined studio and the latest GE digital imaging equipment.

The two hundred plus photos are divided into: Objects; Body; Nature; Fashion. I thought the Body was the most fascinating chapter. Seeing a landscape bus with twenty skeletons or a plane in a hanger, this time with mini skeletons, is rather awe inspiring. Objects produces some winners, too. Looking inside everyday things like an MP3 player, computer mouse, mobile phone or a movie camera will just make you look and look. I thought the natural world section didn't hold my interest as much as the other three chapters. Nature provides a staggering range of outside shapes and textures without even looking inside them.

The book is handsome production using a 175 screen on good matt art paper though the many black pages will probably show up finger marks eventually. The back pages have two hundred thumbnails of the book's spreads with very comprehensive captions.

Nick Veasey has produced one of those books that generate many repeat viewings.

The book has gone through various editions since it was published as two digest-sized paperbacks in 2002. Reprinted in 2005 and now in 2011, each edition has had minor changes in the named photographers but essentially it looks at the background to great photos. I think it's worth pointing out that Koetzle's book doesn't consider the technical aspects of the photos he chose.

Rather predictably the pages open with a look at Nicephore Niepce's 1827 `View from the study window' and Daguerre's 1838 `Boulevard du Temple'. Both are generally considered to be the beginnings of photo art. The fifty photos continue up to Thomas Hoepker unusual shot five folk talking amongst themselves on the Queens side of the East River while across the water lower Manhattan burns away on September 11.

What gives these pages extra punch are alternate and other related photos, either from the same assignment or showing how others were used in books and magazines. These printed reproductions, in my view, are the best part of the book.

Each of the fifty photos opens with a large version, either over a spread or single page. The text explores the background to the photo, other versions and the photographer's viewpoint. Nicely the author has included some social history which makes the images accessible and not something to be considered as elitist art. Fortunately many of these photos are what could loosely be called documentary or news.

The pages are a handsome print job using a three hundred screen on matt art, though I thought the text, because of not quite adequate line spacing, gets a little hard to read at times. A nice touch is reproducing the fifty as thumbnails on the Contents spread so the reader can dip into particular image easily.

For the price this is another Taschen bargain.

The MQ24 seems to be Casio's basic watch range. The same inside quartz movement is available in several dial styles: black; white; with numbers or without and more. I bought this model because it looks simple and modern and a bit like the watch I normally wear, which is being serviced.

The problem with quartz units is that the batteries need replacing. My Henning Koppel watch, with only a minute and hour hand has lasted just over eight and half years on one battery. Add a second hand plus day and date and batteries run out after two years. With expensive watches the trade seems to think they can charge the earth for a battery change, though most batteries cost less than two dollars. Casio say, with this model, the battery (SR621SW) will last two years. You would have thought that solar or kinetic watches would have overtaken battery watches but strangely that is not the case.

So far, after a couple of weeks, the watch has kept very accurate time. I check it most mornings with the US Naval Observatory Master Clock on the net though Casio reckons there will be a plus or minus of twenty seconds over a month, I can live with that. The strap is pretty basic and oddly, for a replacement (it's only rubber) it costs plenty.

For the money I think this watch is a bargain and cheap enough to junk when the battery runs out, though I'm not sure it can be replaced anyway.

Ah yes, my kind of book and oddly I completely missed it when it came out in 2006. Marilynn Karp has hit on a rich vein of collecting with her book: the stuff we normally just throw away or at least junk when we get tired of it. A couple of really off-the-wall collectable items caught my eye: other folks shopping lists (page 151) and soap shards in a frame (pages 66/67).

Of course, much of the book features plenty of established collectables, like postcards, fruit crate labels, playing cards, political campaign buttons, matchbox labels and the old favorite: stamps. I thought the strength of the book was in picturing throw away everyday printed ephemera and cheap production items like wire shirt-hangers, skate keys or shoe taps that normally no one would bother to collect. Karp sees keepers of such stuff as true collectors.

As a designer for print I'm into any scrap of paper that has type on it so most of the book is quite fascinating for me, as it shows so mucg printed material. Recently I started to collect the menus from chocolate boxes and after a while, like any collector, I came up with the problem of finding out about the subject. Collect something too obscure and you're the only one doing it so there's no chance to trade or connect with others. You'll know when your collection has `arrived' because Schiffer Books will publish one of their dreadful looking titles on it with the predictable cover line: Includes Price Guide.

An interesting point all the lovely illustrations throw up is that individually so many things do look dull and boring but collect several of them and suddenly they start to look visually quite exciting. Page 204 has some sugar packets, which surely no one would look twice at by themselves but see just ten with their different colored type and graphics and something about them comes alive. Pages 198/199 has several crayon boxes from different companies and they look a treat.

The book's 368 well designed pages are stuffed with a thousand images of throwaway items, all in color and beautifully printed, as one would expect from Abrams. This is one of those books that you can open at any page and be grabbed by what you see. I thought it was a delight!

An impressive book with 115 photos of American commonplace which Jim Dow took over the last forty years. I have his previous book: Marking the Land: Jim Dow in North Dakota, which I thought was a beautiful photographic overview of North Dakota and this latest one doesn't disappoint.

The photos of what can be seen off the Interstate are comparable to the work of Stephen Shore, Jeff Brouws, Michael Eastman and David Graham. Dow, like them, focuses on the everyday to be seen in cities and small towns across the country though he, nicely, covers the interiors of restaurants, barber shops, stores and bars as well. Some of the detail in these interiors really pulls you into the frame. I thought this was a strong point of his North Dakota book.

Because the photos stretch over a number of years the first twenty-eight are mono then on page forty-two a mono photo of a billiard parlor, from 1977, is repeated on the opposite page but in color. The remaining pages are all color. Most of the shots are straight on because the compositions offer enough detail and don't need any extra visual input with unnecessary photo techniques. The only weakest photos, in my view, are the nineteen close-ups of hand painted signs on the walls of buildings, they look crudely amateurish and perhaps would have looked best four to a page rather than the large, one to a page.

This is an impressively big book in the classic photo book style with nearly all the images large and one to a page, with generous margins and printed on matt art paper with a 175 screen. A slight bit of unneeded designer whimsy has all the captions turned sideways on the outer edge of each left and right page. Dow writes an interesting illustrated sixteen page essay as an Afterword on the back pages.

`American studies' is an excellent addition to the commonplace photo library.

Wonderful stuff all wrapped up in a neat landscape size book. Didn't a lot of these ideas whiz round the internet as Red-neck hi-tech over the years? Certainly a user friendly book because in the front there is a page explaining the Kludge-O-Meter, five symbols that appear with each photo and it thoughtfully includes one called Epic Kludge, which translated into lawyer speak means DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME.

The McMeel publishing folk always turn out good looking titles and here the presentation is particularly suitable to the subject with the photos mounted on paper, wood, bits of cardboard and held in place with staples, rivets and a ton of duct and masking tape.

Hey! They forgot to plug the FREE pages on the front cover. At the back of the book there are five blank ones where you can add your own `I Fixed It!' ideas and stick them in with your adhesive of choice.

Before the CHEEZburger guys came along with this book a lot of smart living solutions could be found in Cracker Ingenuity: Tips From The Trailer Park For The Chronically Broke. The best non-mobile park living had to offer. Check it out.