"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)."

One of our favorite movie moments of all time is when Good Will Hunting's Will (Matt Damon) pulls out a historiographical can of whoop-ass on a snide young scholar looking for a scuffle. ("You're a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably....next year, you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about ya know, the Pre-Revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.") Although the film may have sold a few books for Wood, we suspect it was better at moving copies of another tome mentioned in the film: A People's History of the United States, written by Damon's childhood neighbor, Howard Zinn. Since its publication in 1980, the book has sold more than 1.7 million copies, but what about those who prefer comics to dense pages of text? Well, now they have their own version.

A People's History of American Empire is the classic told "in comic form," created by Zinn in collaboration with historian Paul Buhle and cartoonist Mike Konopacki. Published this month by Macmillan, the book "opens with the events of 9/11 and then jumps back to explore the cycles of U.S. expansionism from Wounded Knee to Iraq, stopping along the way at World War I, Central America, Vietnam, and the Iranian revolution," according to the publisher. And this being a comic book, there's an added hero angle:

The book also follows the story of Zinn, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as one of America's leading historians.

Blogger Franklin Habit has a hugely popular following. Not only do fans seek him out for the 1,000 Knitters Project, they are acutely interested in his cartoon characters Dolores the Sheep who frequently gets in trouble when Habit is away. Naturally the trouble is all yarn-related, and Habit manages to tell the story in a way that is laugh-out-loud funny. So it's not surprising that Habit now has a book coming out this fall called, "It Itches," a collection of essays and cartoons from Interweave Press. While he's in the last stretch of completing it, the tome is available for pre-order on his blog.

Ron Hogan of our sister blog, Galleycat, recently picked up on what we hope isn't a new trend in international publishing. A Hong Kong publisher has compiled years worth of blogger Darren Di Lieto's interviews with illustrators and hundreds of works by the interview subjects into a book--without the permission of the illustrators and without crediting Di Lieto or the blog (the illustration news portal The Little Chimp Society) as the source of the material. To make matters worse, the book includes a CD of all of the images in the book (with filenames that are identical to those on the LCS site), suggesting that they're without copyright and free to use.

Di Lieto learned of the plagiarized volume from Jonathan Edwards, one of the illustrators whose work is included in the book, and wrote about the horrific incident on his personal blog. "I'm currently in the process of contacting the included illustrators, to let them know they've been ripped-off," writes Di Lieto, who is working to track down the publishers, a company with the ironic moniker of "Great Creativity Organization." "I've been in contact with the [Association of Illustrators] to get legal advice, but I think at the end of the day I or the illustrators who have had their copy stolen will not be able to do much about this situation without major backing or support."

We're not exactly sure why Bloomberg's architecture critic, James S. Russell, is just now reviewing John Silber's book Architecture of the Absurd, seeing as it's been out for months and months now (maybe the publisher new he'd give it a lousy review? or his stack of mail is absurdly large?). Whatever the case, although it's kind of old news, Silber's book we mean, Russell spins it in a kind of unique way, turning the criticism onto writer himself, showing all the buildings that Silber thinks are the cream of the crop, like Boston University's School of Management or the Sydney Opera House, and saying, in effect, "You really think these buildings are so great?! Ha! I laugh because these are certainly not great buildings! And here's why..." then proceeding to give the details of their various failings. It's an interesting approach in disagreeing with Silber, beyond most of what we'd read when the book first came out, which was essentially, "Dude, you're way, way wrong about this." Except, of course, from Tom Wolfe and Prince Charles.

How do you convince people to purchase another copy of a book they most likely already have--particularly a tome that's been topping best-seller lists for centuries and can be found in hotel nightstands the world over? Design and demographic analysis! In Daniel Radosh's new book, Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture (Scribner), he discusses the trend of Bibles designed for niche markets, including new believers, couples, brides, cowboys, and surfers. Revolve (shown above, at left) makes over the New Testament like a glossy teen magazine, with cover lines such as "Do U Rush to Crush?" and pages that surround the Gospels with "quizzes, photos of beaming of teenagers, and sidebars offering Bible-themed beauty secrets," according to Radosh. And there's more where that came from.

A recent trade show of the Christian Booksellers' Association featured such innovations as The Outdoor Bible, printed on indestructible plastic sheets, and The Story, which includes selections from the Bible arranged in chronological order, like a novel. There are now Bibles covered in duct tape, faux fur, and simulated diamond plate. The Battlezone Bible has a scarred metal cover. TruGlo glows in the dark. For kids, there's The Super Heroes Bible: The Quest for Good Over Evil.

Looking to rationalize your next vacation? Just pick up a copy of Stefan Sagmeister's new book, Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far, a collection of projects inspired by sentences the designer penned during a year-long sabbatical. It all started when Sagmeister declared 2000 a "client-free year." After he pondered leaving the world of graphic design to become a filmmaker, Sagmeister decided to use the time to better understand the strengths and limitations of graphic design through a number of design experiments.

"We rearranged the whole trajectory of the studio. Before that we used to do mostly work for the music industry and have reduced that down quite significantly," Sagmeister told Ron Hogan in a interview just posted to mediabistro.com's Galleycat blog. "And a number of other things came out of it. For one, the thinking, or at least the initial idea, behind the book we've just published...as well as probably most importantly, we found the joy of being a designer within that year."

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While the magazine industry tries to figure out how to stop being so un-green, book publishing is also thinking of the same thing, just maybe a little more optimistically (or at least better at lying to themselves). According to this story over at Eco-Libris, the Book Industry Study Group and The Green Press Initiative has just knocked down a bunch of trees to publish the eighty-six page report, "Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts: Findings from the US Book Industry." In it, it examines what the publishers are doing to design a system where the major publishers are using less paper, more recyclables and working closer with environmental groups. To which we say bravo. But we recommend they just tell people what to do what we do: hold on to every book you've ever owned so every time you move you swear off ever buying another book for as long as you live. Granted, that plan probably wouldn't hold up too well on the financial end of things.

The medium is the message is the medium is the...it all gets rather messy these days, but Regina Joseph brings a fresh eye to the quintessential McLuhanism with her new mixed media installation, now on view in the Urbanity on Paper group show we told you about a couple of weeks ago. Joseph, best known as one of the creators of Blender magazine, calls this work a "contextual library," which seems appropriate given that it is comprised of 45 books tiled on a wall of New York's Anna Kustera gallery.

"They are collections for a world in which the printed word is a dying art form," says Joseph of her bookish installations. "The books form a narrative tableau," in which the arrangement of say, a book about the artist William Hogarth takes on new meaning when juxtaposed with tomes by sociologist of fear Mike Davis and Online Dating for Dummies. "There is also a decorative aspect to each library," Joseph tells us. "The books form an overall pattern." And the shape of this particular piece, heavy on architecture books and titles such as How to Become a Power Agent in Real Estate? "It suggests 'erection,'" says Joseph. "Both with regard to buildings as well as the obvious phallic implication." Adding a certain wistfulness is the installation's subtitle: "Marshall McLuhan, I Miss You."