{"id":13594,"date":"2013-12-02T02:00:27","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T09:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/?p=13594"},"modified":"2013-11-25T18:45:00","modified_gmt":"2013-11-26T01:45:00","slug":"cool-tools-2013-holiday-gift-guide-beautiful-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/cool-tools-2013-holiday-gift-guide-beautiful-books\/","title":{"rendered":"2013 Holiday Gift Guide: Beautiful Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the days leading up to the holidays, we are presenting a series of gift suggestions. Today: our favorite visual reference books. (Previous gift guide post: Low Cost Tools<\/a>)<\/p>\n

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Art Forms in Nature<\/a>, by Ernst Haeckel, is a library of possibilities. Artists, engineers, and natural scientists use this album for inspiration, since each of these bizarre forms is a living highly-evolved organism. $17<\/a><\/p>\n


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Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia<\/a> There are so many levels to these tattoos that they were officially collected and copied by the authors in order to decipher them. Each one is a small bomb of meaning; as visual source material you can\u2019t have more power than these. $23<\/a><\/p>\n


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Secret Museum of Mankind<\/a> It\u2019s sort of a combination of early uncensored National Geographic<\/em> and Ripley\u2019s Believe It or Not<\/em>. Reproduced without a known author, or copyright, or even authentication of the captions, it was for many years a \u201csecret\u201d underground publication. And for pure gawking pleasures it still can\u2019t be beat. $25<\/a><\/p>\n


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Parallel Encyclopedia<\/a>, by Batia Suter, is a fat encyclopedia of thousands of pictorial gems taken from old books. These old-timey results won\u2019t show up on Google image search. Each page is a wonderful orthogonal view of our world \u2013- Items are roughly grouped by category. It\u2019s a constant source of amazement, kind of a visual curiosity cabinet. (Out of print, but copies are available on Amazon<\/a>)<\/p>\n


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Natural Art Forms<\/a>, by Karl Blossfeldt, is similar to Haeckel\u2019s book, but primarily close ups of plants and seeds. There is an other-worldly aspect to these organic forms, in monumental black and white. A great inspiration for sculpture and 3D thinking. (Out of print, but copies are available on Amazon<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visual cornucopia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[238],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13594"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13594"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13761,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13594\/revisions\/13761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}