On Wednesday evening, many art lovers not dining at David Zwirner for the Friends of the High Line benefit could be found several blocks east at the Strand, where painter Christopher Wool (above, at far left) and writer/musician Richard Hell (center) sat down to talk about words with Barry Schwabsky (far right), the poet and art critic. Hell and Wool, which only sounds like an unstoppable vaudeville duo, teamed up to create Psychopts (JMC & GHB Editions), a slim paperback that collects 57 images of deceptive word pairs that caught Hell's attention over decades of reading. Out of the corner of his eye, he would spy "incest." The word was "nicest." He saw "Sinatra" in "sirens" and mistook "salve" for "slave," while "facts" turned into "farts."

"I've been collecting these pairs of words for years, but hadn't been able to figure out how to use them," Hell told the capacity crowd, which included painter Dana Schutz and a group of art students visiting from Stockholm. "For 30 years these things had just been mildly frustrating me." The idea for the collaboration was born after Hell and Wool, already friends, saw the 2006 exhibition at the New York York Public Library on artist/writer collaborations. They spent more than a year of Thursdays together to choose word pairs from Hell's list, experiment with typefaces, and figure out how to combine them into a single image. At first, Hell said, they "looked too much like design, something that could be in an advertisement." A breakthrough came when they turned to one of Wool's favorite tools. "We attacked the words with a Xerox machine," said Hell. The resulting images (like the salve/slave example, pictured above) wobble and glow with the ghostly fuzz of degraded copies.

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Wonder what it's like to spend time with our friends over at Chronicle? Now over at the publisher's blog, the lucky people who were selected for the company's five Design Fellowship, each with their own emphasis, from industrial to publishing design, are writing up what their experiences were like in the form of "colorful analogies" and showing off the wide variety of projects they worked on during their time there (including Chloe Fung's terrific new packaging for our friend Amy's Little Pea book). Here's from Brad Mead:

The Publishing Design Fellowship is like seeing a giant squid wearing sunglasses. It's intimidating and surreal until you actually encounter it. Then, it's still awe-inspiring, but not quite so foreign and you actually begin to feel like you have something in common with the thing you so admired. Plus it looks totally cool.

In an article published today on mediabistro.com, Rachel Kramer Bussel discusses the complex dance that author and designer enter into when it comes time to devise a book's cover. Case in point: Sloane Crosley's briskly selling essay collection (and potential future HBO series) I Was Told There'd Be Cake. Says Crosley:

"When we started thinking about covers, my one big fear was, do not put the title in icing. No smudged icing, no icing on a kid's face, just no icing." Of the cover image of a blue mattress with white text superimposed, she says, "It's a very risky choice but I would rather have that than some body parts or some icing or what happens when an author objects 11 times and you hit a compromise and have something that doesn't anger anybody; that doesn't always make for the best cover."

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you're not a member yet, you can register for $59 a year, and start reading those articles, receive discounts on mediabistro.com seminars and workshops, and get all sorts of other swell bonuses.

We love a sale, and with the exception of a Ralph Rucci sample sale (which we're pretty sure exist only in our wildest dreams), our favorites take place at the handful of Philippe Starck-designed Taschen bookstores scattered around the globe (the newest is slated to open in Miami Beach late next year). And so, what with the impending solstice, Taschen warehouse sale time is again upon us, having started today for those lucky enough to be in Cologne, Germany or Paris. The stateside sales (at the Taschen emporiums in Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and New York) begin tomorrow morning and run through Sunday, offering beautiful books of "art, anthropology, and aphrodesia" priced at 50% to 75% off. Come early and wear your game face, because we might look sweet, but we will totally jump you for the last discounted display copy of Contemporary Graphic Design.

We've long been meaning to give a nod here to Maggie Macnab, our friend and occasional tipster, and her new book Decoding Design, but we always have a billion things going on around here at UnBeige HQ, so it's difficult to crack open nearly any book, read it through, and give it the time it deserves. But this weekend, in between projects, we finally got a chance to get into it, and once we'd opened it, we really couldn't stop coming back. It's a fascinating read, with Macnab getting into what's going on behind logos and identity packages, to the roots of why that line is squiggly or what exactly that crescent shape is doing there next to the type treatment. The first chunk of the book is dedicated to getting into the history of creating representational symbols, from way back before there was even a name for what was going on with drawing pictures in those dank, dark caves, to changes in the Master Card logo. After having all that info in tow, she launches into analysis of modern logos and how they function, providing loads of examples and getting quotes from the designers themselves about how everything is operating and why. It's a really fantastic, enlightening book and we can't recommend it enough. Even if you're the second coming of Paul Rand, we think you'd get a lot out of it. So pick it up the next time you're out. In the interim, we recommend checking out David Airey's site, who has a great piece up about Maggie's Decoding, including the promo video she put together for it.

New Yorkers still have a few more days to stock up on eco-friendly cleaning products at Method's bright and cheery pop-up shop in SoHo, but anyone can de-toxify their home with the help of a new book written by the company's founders. Squeaky Green: The Method Guide to Detoxing Your Home (Chronicle) is a spiral-bound, room by room guide to dirty little secrets such as off-gassing paint and carpeting, dust mites, and pesticide-infiltrated bedsheets—and how to avoid them (our favorite: don't make your bed!). In the below video, Method founders and Squeaky Green authors Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan discuss the book whilst lounging in Marimekko-patterned Fatboy beanbag chairs, along the way confirming that Method headquarters is exactly as idyllic as we dreamed it would be.

Architect, collagist, and budding knitwear designer Richard Meier will be at the Taschen store in New York City on Tuesday evening (6-8 p.m.) to sign copies of the shimmering 568-page Meier monograph published earlier this month by Taschen. Then he'll cap his Sharpie, but not for long. On Friday afternoon, Meier is scheduled to sign up a storm at Art Basel in Switzerland. Richard Meier & Partners, Complete Works 1963-2008 was a collaborative effort among Meier, author Philip Jodidio, and graphic designer Massimo Vignelli. Edited by Jodido (former editor of Connaissance des Arts), the book includes a preface by Spanish architect Alberto Campo Baeza. In the below excerpt, Jodido takes on Meier's favored color palette (or absence of color palette, as the case may be):

Why is white, the absence of color, Richard Meier's choice? His own words answer this question best, explain the link between his method and his fundamental concerns, and betray a poetic nature: "White is the ephemeral emblem of perpetual movement. White is always present but never the same, bright and rolling in the day, silver and effervescent under the full moon of New Year's Eve. Between the sea of consciousness and earth's vast materiality lies this ever-changing line of white. White is the light, the medium of understanding and transformative power."

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From Galleycat comes literary trendspotter Ron Hogan's musings on the rise of doodle-laden book covers. He points to the casually sketched or scribbled covers (larger photo here) of Joe Dunthorne's Submarine, Megan Hustad's How To Be Useful, and Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, which we think feels positively Rauschenbergian, although that observation could very well be a manifestation of our mourning of the artist, who passed away earlier this week and whose 1969 work "Red Body" sold last night at Sotheby's for $993,000 (including buyer's premium), well above the high estimate of $700,000. Meanwhile, a doodly Dubuffet work made in 1975-76 soared over its high estimate of $2 million to sell for $3.6 million, including buyer's premium, while Jeff Koons' polychromed aluminum doodlebug ("Caterpillar Chains") sold for just under $6 million.

"The circus is the only spectacle I know that, while you watch it, gives the quality of a happy dream," wrote Ernest Hemingway. You may recall our enduring fascination with circuses (and not just those of the mediabistro.com variety, where we hope to see you later this month), and so we're particularly excited about Taschen's mammoth, photo- and poster-laden book on the subject. Slated for June publication, The Circus, 1870-1950 is edited by Noel Daniel and written by circus historians Linda Granfield, Dominique Jando, and Fred Dahlinger, Jr. The book includes over 900 color and black-and-white illustrations, including photographs by everyone from Matthew Brady and Walker Evans to Lisette Model and get this, Charles and Ray Eames. In this excerpt, Jando discusses the circus posters that "plastered barn walls, wooden fences, and the sides of city buildings" with images of "roaring lions and tigers, charging rhinos, and furious hippos attacking natives hunting on the river Nile."

These powerful and colorful depictions became an integral part of circus magic, a tempting tease of the wonders that awaited you. The circus was the main user of printed advertising at the time. Larger shows plastered thousands of lithographic posters each day; no other industry ever came close to these numbers. A few printing companies specialized in this very lucrative business....Some designs were elaborate, others relatively simple, some were elegant, many were gaudy, but all were colorful, charged with energy, exalting the mundane, improving the extraordinary, exaggerating the extravagant. Even before you saw the actual show, the circus was already delivering its wonders far and wide with its advertising.

A new book makes us yearn for the good ol' days, when presidential candidates went beyond the red, white, and/or blue signage to design exotic, collectible paraphernalia to sway votes and commemorate their inaugurations. In Campaigning for President (Smithsonian), lawyer and magazine publisher Jordan M. Wright draws upon his vast personal collection of presidential election memorabilia to tell the story of campaign swag -- think log cabin-themed brooches (William Henry Harrison), kneesocks (Alfred E. Smith), and a metal token of a sneering James Garfield sporting a devil's tail. Then there are the post-election goodies. Wright notes that, "John Adams's inauguration memorabilia included china pitchers with his picture, and a button featuring a stylishly bewigged Adams, referring to him with the hip nickname, 'Jo.'"

"The book's more than 300 color photographs show us campaign accessories in all their gaudy variety," writes Mark Lasswell in the Wall Street Journal. "The 1960s offer ghastly paper dresses emblazoned with the faces of Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, or Nelson Rockefeller. A century ago, parasols featured images of Theodore Roosevelt and his running mate, Charles Fairbanks, neither of them looking particularly sunny." Many of the objects will be displayed in an exhibition opening June 24 at the Museum of the City of New York. With a collection of more than one million items, Wright comes from a largely apolitical family, noted Sam Roberts in a recent New York Times profile, "except for his Uncle Nat, who revealed at a family dinner in 1972 that he had been a lifelong Communist (and who donated his buttons and other items to the collection)."