“Fuller’s favorite neologism, ‘dymaxion,’ was concocted purely for public relations. When Marshall Field’s displayed his model house, it wanted a catchy label, so it hired a consultant, who fashioned ‘dymaxion’ out of bits of ‘dynamic,’ ‘maximum,’ and ‘ion.’ Fuller was so taken with the word, which had no known meaning, that he adopted it as a sort of brand name. The Dymaxion House led to the Dymaxion Vehicle, which led, in turn, to the Dymaxion Bathroom and the Dymaxion Deployment Unit, essentially a grain bin with windows. As a child, Fuller had assembled scrapbooks of letters and newspaper articles on subjects that interested him; when, later, he decided to keep a more systematic record of his life, including everything from his correspondence to his dry-cleaning bills, it became the Dymaxion Chronofile.” Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker on Buckminster Fuller’s favorite word, just in time for major exhibitions at the Whitney and the Center for Architecture. (With a great symposium at Cooper Union coming up this September.)

Designers talk about the “text-image relationship” a lot, and this relationship figures prominently into our lessons and our lore. Its subtleties were probed and plumbed by Swiss Modernists and American Postmodernists alike. Its power is the reason we remember Julian Koenig and Helmut Krone’s “Lemon” ad for Volkswagen more than a half century after it was created. Its logic is something you can observe Daniel Eatock working with in his “Word / Format” assignment and Tibor Kalman working around in his “1,000 Words” assignment. I think I first became aware of it in grade school or thereabouts, whenever I was given my first copy of Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, which is a book that still enraptures me today.

Nowhere else is the text-image relationship on such regularly enlightening display as it is when, once a week, I flip open my newest copy of the New Yorker to its fiction page. Well, that’s not entirely accurate—I don’t “flip” right there but rather try to ease up to it, forcing myself to savor the spot art and cartoons, digest pithy captions and newsy asides, until, at the tail end of the well, there is what amounts to a clearing in this word-dense, Caslon-set forest: the opening page of that week’s fiction piece.

For the last three or four years, packrat that I am, I have been saving these pages for no particular reason, but I’ve joined the 21st Century and am now a networked packrat, so 48 of my collected New Yorker Fiction Pages are on Flickr. I’ve added all of these to a Flickr Group so please post more of your own if you have old New Yorkers lying around. I would love to see them. Our group mascot is of course the great Eustace Tilley, his monocle trained on a butterfly in careful study—like a photo editor, loupe in hand, ready to choose the perfect image. (If you’d rather tag pages than join the group, I’ve used the tag “nyerfictionpages” and you are welcome to do the same.)

Looking over the set now, I have some definite favorites. The hulking tree that confronts A Boy in the Forest for example. Or the disembodied oven mitt hand reaching for the telelphone in Harvey’s Dream. Some pages are fragmentary, like the twin snapshots used in Breakup Stories or the sequence of office lights flickering on and off in the eerily monolithic buildings used for The Brief History of the Dead. Some images are rich with narrative, like the visitor at the door in The Surrogate. Others can be jarring non sequiturs, drawn perhaps from a moment in the story or its setting, like the pooling, sticky face of the popsicle in Measuring the Jump. Still others, like Cowboy, deliver on their promise, but not at all in the way you’d expect. Throughout, one feels the work of what must be a small army of researchers and photo editors digging through portfolios and photo banks to pick, pair, crop, commission, and collaborate with authors and editors to strike the right tone, make the right match, marry their chosen images to others’ chosen text to create—at least before I turn the page—a perfect relationship.

“On the morning of July 8, 1980, Raymond Carver wrote an impassioned letter to Gordon Lish, his friend and editor at Alfred A. Knopf, begging his forgiveness but insisting that Lish ‘stop production’ of Carver’s forthcoming collection of stories, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.’ Carver had been up all night reviewing Lish’s severe editorial cuts—two stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten—and he was unnerved to the point of desperation.” The New Yorker has an incredibly in-depth package on one of my favorite writers, Raymond Carver, and his relationship with his longtime editor, Gordon Lish. The package focuses on the title story of Carver’s collection, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” which was in fact given its title by Lish. Carver’s original story, titled “Beginners,” along with his letters to Lish and Lish’s edits to the story that transformed it into the published work it became, are all available online. A fascinating look inside the editorial process in an admittedly extreme case.

“[Dr. Elizabeth] Spelke’s renown in psychology is based, in part, on her use of looking-time measures to answer questions not only about perception but also about cognition. Did infants have expectations of how the world worked—and could you tell what those expectations were by determining what surprised them? Spelke and several other researchers […] developed a provocative variation on the preferential-looking scheme, usually called the ‘violation of expectations’ study. These experiments were staged a little like magic shows. Babies sat in a darkened room, watching scenarios of varying degrees of plausibility unfold on a small stage. Spelke, for example, showed the babies a ball rolling along a path with an obstruction in the middle of it. A screen was lowered and then raised to reveal the ball either resting against the obstruction—where it logically should be—or on the other side of it, as though the ball had magically rolled through a solid surface. Spelke found that babies looked longer at the unexpected event.” The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot on Harvard University’s Laboratory for Developmental Studies. See also this incredible image of the famous experiments.

After reading Joan Acocella’s illuminating New Yorker review of Dante’s newly-translated Paradisio, I started thinking about setting a goal to read the Inferno by the end of the year. But how to dive in? Via Kevin Kelly’s wonderful Cool Tools blog, I may have found a way. Read it in 36 installments via RSS Feed from the wonderful site Dailylit. I can also get book by email, on weekdays or weekends, before breakfast or after dinner, etc. More books by RSS here.

From Sasha Frere-Jones’s recent New Yorker column on Scritti Politti: “the covers of Scritti Politti’s first singles foregrounded the means of production, so to speak, by listing the records’ manufacturing costs and the addresses of local pressing plants […]” This technique was adopted for the spine of Dot Dot Dot 9, which Rick Poynor reviewed for Design Observer.

Malcolm Gladwell on the rise and fall of the American shopping mall, and especially on its inventor, Victor Gruen: “Gruen’s most famous creation was his next project, in the town of Edina, just outside Minneapolis. He began work on it almost exactly fifty years ago [1954]. It was called Southdale.” I grew up just a short bike ride away from Southdale.

“‘The Cat in the Hat’ is 1,702 words long, but it uses only two hundred and twenty different words. And (as the cat says) that is not all. Geisel put the whole thing into rhymed anapestic dimeter. It was a tour de force, and it killed Dick and Jane.” The New Yorker’s excellent Louis Menand on the evolution of Dr. Seuss’s childhood classic.

Sure, you’ve heard of Garbage Pail Kids. Maybe you’ve even collected most of them. But did you know that they were created by Art Spiegelman, New Yorker cover artist and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist?

The New Yorker’s Alex Ross shares an illuminating list of his 100 definitive classical music recordings of the last century.