This book was composed in the factory-studios of our houses and workplaces, supplemented by the occasional cafe and airplane. We couldn’t have written this book without the provocation and support provided by many people.
We met our editor, BJ Berti, after a lecture at Urban Center Books, New York City, in 2006. She introduced herself and proposed working with St. Martin’s Press on this project. Her advocacy and guidance have never faltered, and we are thrilled to be building a new relationship with one of the world’s premiere publishers.
Two “working fathers” deserve special thanks. Abbott Miller has provided an ongoing education in living with design; he is our muse. Kenneth Reinhard has responded to chapters with chuckles and the occasional quizzical eyebrow, provided snappy subtitles on short notice, and helped supervise four kids and two cats so that we could keep writing.
Our children, Jay and Ruby Miller, and Hannah, Isabel, Lucy, and Eliot Reinhard, provided the comic relief and the daily challenges that made this book worth writing.
Our parents, Bill and Shirley Lupton. and Mary Jane Lupton and Kenneth Baldwin, have supported our ventures since 1963. This book is no exception. We especially thank Bill for making life in Baltimore an ongoing design experiment, and Mary Jane for demonstrating a life of letters and creativity.
From Baltimore and New York, we thank Inna Alesina, Joy Hayes, Claudia Matzko, Jennifer Cole Phillips, Marybeth Shaw, Michelle Qureshi, and Jennifer Tobias for their friendship and ideas. From California, we thank Julka Almquist, Ava Arndt, Suzanne Bolding, Barbara Cohen, Vivian Folkenflik, Steve Franklin, Helene Hecht, Anna Kornbluh, Peter Krapp, Catherine Liu, Elizabeth Losh, Lynn Mally, Sanjoy Mazumdar. Mia McIver, Alladi Venkatesh, and Jennifer Hardy Williams for services ranging from bibliography and essay ideas to babysitting and virtual massages.
One of the great pleasures of creating this book was producing the illustrations. Although Ellen studied painting as a student at The Cooper Union, she gave it up for design and hadn’t picked up a paintbrush for nearly twenty years until Nicholas Blechman asked her to create an illustration for The New York Times Book Review in Spring 2007. That experience, which was followed by additional NYT commissions, triggered the visual concept of this book. The work of many artists stimulated our thinking, including Maira Kalman, who makes picture books for adults, and Richard Scarry, whose visual dictionaries were among our very first (and most treasured) possessions.
Brett Leveridge at Media Bistro and Jane Delury at University of Baltimore helped us focus our writing, as did many friends who looked at early drafts of this book.
Various institutions have provided rich intellectual contexts for our work; we thank the Headlands Center for the Arts (Marin County, Caifornia), the Design Alliance at the University of California, Irvine, Kippy Stroud’s Acadia Summer Arts Program, Princeton Architectural Press, ReadyMade magazine, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.—Ellen and Julia Lupton