{"id":44869,"date":"2025-09-29T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/?p=44869"},"modified":"2025-09-25T14:15:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T21:15:11","slug":"visual-reference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/visual-reference\/","title":{"rendered":"Visual Reference"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I go to books when I need to stimulate my imagination. Books never fail. I am a visual thinker, even when I write words, so I especially respond to visual books full of images, graphs, and pictures. Over the years I\u2019ve accumulated a pretty good library of visual source books. Today, used books are cheap. You can build a good library of inspiration rather easily and inexpensively. These reference books will be the last to be replaced by digital screens, and they will still work perfectly well in the next century \u2014 no obsolescence. If you can find space to keep them, a good reference library is a working treasure. I probably have several hundred visual reference books, so I will list only the two dozen or so that I would truly hate to lose. I am mostly omitting single-artist retrospective books, including my favorites, since these are easier to find than the ones I include here, which are not obvious and less well-known. Oh, the possibilities! \u2013 KK<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Secret Museum of Mankind<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This hefty softcover is a facsimile collection of thousands of exotic and sensational photographs dating from around the turn of the century when news of any sort from far away lands was rare. It\u2019s sort of a combination of early uncensored National Geographic and Ripley\u2019s Believe It or Not. 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. Cannibals, executioners, and fakirs, oh my! Toolwise, it serves as a mighty sourcebook of amazing costumes, body modifications and hairdos, architectural novelties, and extinct strange rituals. (I\u2019m convinced science fiction film directors mine this for alien worlds.) I like to think of this book as the best one volume catalog of cultural diversity on Earth. For the most part these societies are long gone, and remain only in rare books like this one. \u2014KK<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fantastic Illustrations of Grandville<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Surreal and whimsical did not start with hipsters. These book of 266 pen and ink illustrations by the Parisian Jean Grandville in the early 1800s depicts fantastical chimera, and phantasmagorical visions. It\u2019s old-timey hallucinogenic scenes, often switching animals for people. Always guaranteed to wake you up. \u2014KK<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Art Cars<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Why are cars so boring, uniform in color, undecorated, unpersonalized when they could be\u2026. covered in pennies, painted in polka dots, or traced in iron? You\u2019ve probably seen an art car on the road and smiled. This is one of several albums of homemade art car culture by Harrod Blank. If you can improve cars this way, you can do it with toasters and the rest of the stuff in Walmart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fantasy Worlds<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes, despite all pressures toward normalcy, people are compelled to construct their own worlds. The old lady who over the years arranges broken bottles into a house, or the man down the road covering his barn with tiny quotes from a channeling spirit\u2013each glues raw symbols into a whole that makes sense for them. This happens all over the world. I\u2019ve collected an entire stack of books about self-made worlds, and this one is the best for sheer exuberance, geographic inclusion, and variety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Street Art San Francisco<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A deep and wide collection of the best of San Francisco\u2019s murals. A bit of hippy style, plus Mexican, plus punk, plus hipster. Great mix, hundreds of examples. \u2014KK<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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1000 Steampunk Creations<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Steampunk is a contrarian reaction to the sleek minimalism of modernity and the \u201cnothingness\u201d of an iPod. It takes inspiration from the visible workings of brass pipes, rivets, and gears of Victorian technology and transfers that maximalism \u2014 how many doo-dads, filigree, extra decorations can one add? \u2014 to artifacts and clothing today. While this extreme counter-style is dated (by definition), it holds many potential ideas. This one volume compendium contains a thousand vibrant examples of excessive transparency. \u2014KK<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Street Graphics India<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This book inspired me to begin recording street graphics as I traveled so now I have my own collection, but this modest book will give anyone a good representation of the graphic landscape in India \u2014 from Bollywood billboards, to painted rickshaw covers, matchbox covers, wall advertisements, signage, and household symbols. \u2014KK<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once a week we\u2019ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, and the links to them may or may not work. We present these vintage recommendations as is because\u00a0the possibilities they inspire are new.\u00a0Sign up here<\/a>\u00a0to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tools for Possibilities: issue no. 157<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13684,"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":[2387],"tags":[2388],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44869"}],"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\/13684"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44869"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44877,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44869\/revisions\/44877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}