Here are 100 books that Walking Words fans have personally recommended if you like
Walking Words.
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I’ve always had an interest in art, growing up a military brat and constantly moving, left me time to doodle and read. I spent the first part of my life as an art professor and artist. I began writing three years ago when my manuscript was chosen for RWA’s Ramp program in 2021. With my art, my interest leans more towards the bizarre and unexplained. I believe the romance stories I write follow suit, dark and gothic romance my primary interest, but always with spiritual and hopeful undertones. I also write some non-fiction for a local magazine where I live, The Greenville Stroll and on substack a newsletter for romance writers.
This is what fairy tales would look like if they were gothic, so I love this book.
I read it a few years ago and fell in love with it. I purchased the print copy because I wanted the illustrations in front of me to look at too. Almost any story you read comes from a myth or a fairy tale if you deconstruct it, so reading this book keeps your brain tuned into this idea, but you don't need to be a writer to find delight in this book.
Once upon a time fairy tales weren't meant just for children, and neither is Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales. This stunning collection contains lyrical tales, bloody tales and hilariously funny and ripely bawdy stories from countries all around the world- from the Arctic to Asia - and no dippy princesses or soppy fairies. Instead, we have pretty maids and old crones; crafty women and bad girls; enchantresses and midwives; rascal aunts and odd sisters.
This fabulous celebration of strong minds, low cunning, black arts and dirty tricks could only have been collected by the unique and much-missed Angela Carter.…
I am a printmaker and book artist and author who is interested in visual narratives. I wrote a book about how to make woodcuts, linocut and engravings titled The Woodcut Artists’ Handbook. My hand-printed limited edition books and art can be found in many collections from the Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York City, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), New York City. I am an Associate Professor of book arts and printmaking at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada.
I think Die Idee is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the power of the graphic narrative as an extension of the written word. The painter and graphic artist Frans Masereel was born in the Belgian Blankenberghe in 1889. He studied art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he learned to make wood engravings. His first wordless graphic novel was made in 1918 titled Images de la Passion d’un Homme (The Passion of a Man). The success of this book and those that followed influenced three generations of artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers all over the world.
Text in German. A "book without words" where the illustrations by the author substitute for printed text. Introduction by Hermann Hesse. 83 woodcut illustrations by Masereel. Dust jacket torn at spine and worn at edges. Tanning on boards and endpapers. unpaginated. paper-covered boards, dust jacket. 16mo.
I am a printmaker and book artist and author who is interested in visual narratives. I wrote a book about how to make woodcuts, linocut and engravings titled The Woodcut Artists’ Handbook. My hand-printed limited edition books and art can be found in many collections from the Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York City, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), New York City. I am an Associate Professor of book arts and printmaking at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada.
This is a new edition of Otto Nückel’s wordless novel that was originally published in 1930 with the title Destinyby Farrar & Rinehart. Although this edition is in French with an introduction by Seth Tobocman and an afterword by yours truly, it is a nicely produced hardcover with new information about the life of this mysterious German artist. I would be happy to provide an English translation of my postface for anyone who wishes to email me a request. The book is very readable and demonstrates Nückel’s unique skill of engraving a very poignant visual narrative (on lead blocks).
Aux côtés de Frans Masereel et Lynd Ward, Otto Nückel compte parmi les auteurs classiques du roman graphique sans paroles, un genre créé dans les années 1930 et qui doit tout autant au cinéma muet qu'à l'expressionisme allemand. Dans Destin, un ouvrage époustouflant de maîtrise graphique et narrative, Otto Nückel signe sans aucun doute son chef-d'oeuvre. En 190 gravures sur plomb, l'artiste donne vie à la destinée tragique d'une femme née dans la misère - et ce à quoi aucune tentative ne parviendra de l'en délivrer.
I am a printmaker and book artist and author who is interested in visual narratives. I wrote a book about how to make woodcuts, linocut and engravings titled The Woodcut Artists’ Handbook. My hand-printed limited edition books and art can be found in many collections from the Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York City, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), New York City. I am an Associate Professor of book arts and printmaking at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada.
I first met Art Spiegelman in a show we were in together at the Morgan Library and Museum in 2014. We became fast friends with our shared love of the work of Ward and Masereel (examples of their work were in the same exhibition) we have since sent each other copies of books we thought the other would enjoy. I recommend Art’s collection of the six wordless novels of Frans Masereel as a great way to get copies of these rare books in a nicely designed box set with an excellent introductory essay by Art titled "Reading Pictures."
From the eve of the Great Depression to the start of World War II, Lynd Ward (1905-1985) observed the troubled American scene through the double lens of a politically committed storyteller and a visionary graphic artist. His medium-the wordless "novel in woodcuts"-was his alone, and he quickly brought it from bold iconographic infancy to subtle and still unrivalled mastery.
Gods' Man (1929), the audaciously ambitious work that made Ward's reputation, is a modern morality play, an allegory of the deadly bargain a striving young artist often makes with life. Madman's Drum (1930), a multigenerational saga worthy of Faulkner, traces the…
I am a printmaker and book artist and author who is interested in visual narratives. I wrote a book about how to make woodcuts, linocut and engravings titled The Woodcut Artists’ Handbook. My hand-printed limited edition books and art can be found in many collections from the Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York City, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), New York City. I am an Associate Professor of book arts and printmaking at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada.
David Beronä was a friend and fellow collector whose interest in this form of graphic storytelling was our shared passion. In his book Beronä examines the history of and art of pioneers of this form of narrative. The works of Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, Otto Nückel, William Gropper, Milt Gross, Giacomo Patri Laurence Hyde, and lesser known artists like Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová and István Szegedi Szüts. The woodcut images in these works are powerful and as relevant today as they were when they were first produced.
"Wordless books" were stories from the early part of the twentieth century told in black and white woodcuts, imaginatively authored without any text. Although woodcut novels have their roots spreading back through the history of graphic arts, including block books and playing cards, it was not until the early part of the twentieth century that they were conceived and published. Despite its short-lived popularity, the woodcut novel had an important impact on the development of comic art, particularly contemporary graphic novels with a focus on adult themes.Scholar David A. Berona examines the history of these books and the art and…
Telmo Pievani is Full Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Padua, where he covers the first Italian chair of Philosophy of Biological Sciences. A leading science communicator and columnist for Il corriere della sera, he is the author of The Unexpected Life, Creation without God, Serendipity, and other books.
I think that minor books could be real treasures. I love what Darwin wrote here: the secret of evolution is tinkering.
The creativity of life lies in ingeniously reusing already existing or useless structures, assigning them to new functions. Life is contrivances. Our DNA, our bodies, our brains are no exceptions.
In this investigation of orchids, first published in 1862, Darwin expands on a point made in On the Origin of Species that he felt required further explanation, namely that he believes it to be 'a universal law of nature that organic beings require an occasional cross with another individual'. Darwin explains the method by which orchids are fertilised by insects, and argues that the intricate structure of their flowers evolved to favour cross pollination because of its advantages to the species. The book is written in Darwin's usual precise and elegant style, accessible despite its intricate detail. It includes a…
I’m a poet, lover of great literature, and an English professor who has served as faculty advisor to my university’s student-run literary journal. I caught the bug as a teenager when I first started reading and memorizing poems that moved and intrigued me. Since then, reading and writing poetry—and having the pleasure of teaching it to students—has been my best way of checking in with myself to see what’s most important to me that I may have lost sight of in the daily bustle. It’s also my best way of going beyond myself—allowing my imagination to carry me to unexpected places.
Every time I revisit Gabriela Mistral’s poetry, I’m eager to start writing new poems of my own. She unlocks my imagination with her richly synesthetic images, her suggestive metaphors, and her intense emotions, including grief, doubt, joy, and gratitude.
Her first two books—Desolation (Desolación, 1922) and Tenderness (Ternura, 1924)—are my favorites. From the landscape of her native Chile and her personal experiences, she develops universal themes. Her voice is always humane, no matter what emotional region she journeys into.
Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and her works are among the finest in all contemporary poetry. She is loved and honored throughout the world as one of the great humanistic voices of our time.
This bilingual edition of selected poems was translated and edited by Doris Dana, a close personal friend with whom Gabriela lived and worked with prior to her death in 1957. These translations give a profound insight into the original poetry of this greatest of contemporary Latin American women. They were selected from her four major works…
Ever since my parents gave me a copy of Dorothy Aldis’ The Secret Place and Other Poems, I have enjoyed a lifelong love of poetry. Now, as a traditionally-published children’s author, I have had numerous books and poems published over the years, including books that began as poems, like Flashlight Night (Astra Young Readers, 2017) and Once Upon Another Time (Beaming Books, 2021). My poems can be found in various anthologies including The National Geographic Book of Nature Poetry (N.G. Children’s Books, 2015) and Construction People (Wordsong, 2020) as well as Highlights for Children magazine.
This book proves that poetry is thoughtful, succinct, and beautiful to read – and most importantly, accessible to all. From elephants and cheetahs to American bison and polar bears, David distills the essence of each animal into short poems that are brimming with insight and wit. While all of David’s books in this series are wonderful, In the Wild was one of the first and remains one of the best.
“A stunning combination of poems and illustrations celebrating some of Earth’s wildest and most beautiful creatures.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
The stellar team who brought us On the Farm presents a companion book evoking creatures of the wild in simple, clever poems and vibrant woodcuts. From the lion standing alone on the African savannah to the panda in a bamboo forest, from the rhinoceros with its boot-like face to the Arctic polar bear disappearing in the snow, David Elliott’s pithy verse and Holly Meade’s stunning woodcut and watercolor illustrations reveal a world of remarkable beauty and wonder.
I first started art when I was nine years old, but my art journey really started after seeing the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s work at age 14. This experience changed my life and from there, I continued on with fourteen years of formal art education. The book details my experience and journey as a student, instructor, and professional artist over a thirty-year time period across three continents. I wroteAn Artist’s Odyssey to help young artists or artists transitioning into art as a profession to help them avoid the pitfalls of the art world and supplement the necessary business acumen required to make a sustainable career in the art world.
For me, this book was a real education. It provided insight into how the greatest artists strive to break the rules and find interest in juxtapositioning different versions of reality and fantasy. The perfect summation, to me, of what Escher strived to do is communicated in this quote, “My topics are often playful too. I cannot stop fiddling around with our incontestable certainty. It is a pleasure, for example, to deliberately mingle two- and three-dimensions, flat and spatial and to poke fun at gravity.” One of the main takeaways from this book is to always strive to reimagine reality, break rules, be playful, and never be afraid to fail.
As beautiful and rigorous as an Escher work itself, this book is the classic study of a great maverick who so memorably linked the world of imagemaking with geometry and paradox. Escher's works, from the great master prints to numerous drawings, are brilliantly arranged to form a cinematic journey of discovery that reveals the magical world of the artist's mind, an uncharted realm lush with exotic conceptions and inventions.
I’m a journalist and critic who fell in love with the ancient art of rhetoric through Shakespeare, Chaucer… and Barack Obama. It was when I watched Obama’s consciously and artfully classical oratory as he campaigned for the 2008 election that my undergraduate interest in tricolons, epistrophe, aposiopesis and all that jazz surged back to the front of my mind. I went on to write a 2011 book arguing that not only is this neglected area of study fascinating, but it is the most important tool imaginable to understand politics, language, and human nature itself. Where there is language, there is rhetoric.
This 1644 book is one of the most charmingly mad documents in the history of rhetoric.
Bulwer thought (rightly) that rhetoric wasn’t just about words: body-language matters, too. So he attempted to catalogue the meaning of hand gestures, which he believed were a universal language, and to explain how best they might be used in oratory.
You discover, if you read Bulwer, that we’ve been blowing kisses and flipping the bird since the seventeenth century; and that clapping your hands as you talk is “a gesture too plebeian and theatrically light for the hands of any prudent rhetorician”. Better yet, the book Is abundantly illustrated with woodcuts.
It’s a tragedy that Bulwer died before producing the planned sequel, Cephalelogia…Cephalenomia, on gestures of the head.
Bulwer’s Chirologia… Chironomia is an extremely rare work. Only thirty-one copies have been located, and they are of dubious legibility of the printed text.
This first modern edition—the first in three centuries—is based on the first printing as sold by Richard Whitaker in 1644. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized, but changes in punctuation and syntax have been conservative. Translations for Greek and Latin passages have been provided, either in the text or notes. And copious notes have been furnished to clarify and dilate all textual obscurities and alterations.
The editors aims, therefore, have been, first, to provide a clear…
