If memories of learning algebra bring you out in a cold sweat and thoughts of quadratic equations cause you feelings of fear and dread, I Used to Know That: Maths can help. A light-hearted and informative reminder of the things that we learnt in school but have since become relegated to the backs of our minds, this book will help you to brush up on your mental arithmetic, including percentages, averages and recurring decimals or work on your trigonometry skills, from Pythagoras' theorem to triangle areas and angles. A practical guide to turn to when an answer is eluding you, from helping a child with homework to calculating change or understanding statistics. I Used to Know That: Maths is a fun and accessible way to re-visit all those useful tips and maths tricks that you have forgotten from your school days.

Mathmatters is a humorous guide to the hidden calculations that are essential to everything we do. From making a cup of coffee to negotiating traffic to selecting candidates for an interview, we can’t make it through the day without employing some essential mathematics. Did you know that there are some serious calculations involved in making the perfect cup of coffee (involving ratios)? That an understanding of Braess's paradox will mean you can remain calm about road closures on your commute as they may make your journey faster (using equations relating to speed/distance/time)? Or that your online shopping habit can teach you about game theory (mathematical models of strategies)? Full of easy-to-understand mathematics and fun, if not entirely helpful, illustrations, Mathmatters is your essential guide to understanding the rules and measures that surround us every day, and determine the outcome of every move we make, every button we press and much of our decision-making, whether we are aware of it or not.

2021 Nebraska Book Award My Omaha Obsession takes the reader on an idiosyncratic tour through some of Omaha's neighborhoods, buildings, architecture, and people, celebrating the city's unusual history. Rather than covering the city's best-known sites, Miss Cassette is irresistibly drawn to strange little buildings and glorious large homes that don't exist anymore as well as to stories of Harkert's Holsum Hamburgers and the Twenties Club. Piecing together the records of buildings and homes and everything interesting that came after, Miss Cassette shares her observations of the property and its significance to Omaha. She scrutinizes land deeds, insurance maps, tax records, and old newspaper articles to uncover a property's singular story. Through conversations with fellow detectives and history enthusiasts, she guides readers along her path of hunches, personal interests, mishaps, and more. As a longtime resident of Omaha, Miss Cassette is informed by memories of her youth combined with an enduring curiosity about the city's offbeat relics and remains. Part memoir and part research guide with a healthy dose of colorful wandering, My Omaha Obsession celebrates the historic built environment and searches for the people who shaped early Omaha.

Discover the long-awaited new book from the author of Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth and Building Stories. 'The week after I finished the last page of Jimmy Corrigan I immediately started a new long story based on characters who had originated as parodies, but whom now I wanted to humanize... amidst a setting of memories of my Omaha childhood and Nebraska upbringing.' (Chris Ware, Monograph) Now, twenty years later, Ware is publishing Rusty Brown in book form. It is, he says, 'a fully interactive, full-colour articulation of the time-space interrelationships of six complete consciousnesses on a single Midwestern American day and the tiny piece of human grit about which they involuntarily orbit.' The six characters are Rusty Brown himself, a shy schoolkid obsessed with superheroes, his father 'Woody' Brown, an eccentric teacher at Rusty's school, Chalky White, another schoolboy, Alison White, Chalky's sister, Jason Lint, an older boy who bullies Rusty and Chalky and fancies Alison, and the boys' teacher, Joanne Cole. Ware tells each of their stories in minute detail (or as he puts it, 'From childhood to old age, no frozen plotline is left unthawed'), producing another masterwork of the comics form that is at once achingly beautiful, heartbreakingly sad and painfully funny. 'A treasure trove of invention... With its awe-inspiring exploration of regret and ageing, anxiety and ennui... Rusty Brown is a human document of rare richness' Guardian 'Chris Ware is one of the great writers of our generation...I spent 20 minutes reading the cover of Rusty Brown. Buy it. Buy all his work. Make your life larger.' Mark Haddon, Observer

Jimmy Corrigan has rightly been hailed as the greatest comic/graphic novel ever to be published. It won the Guardian First Book Award 2001, the first graphic novel to win a major British literary prize. It is now available for the first time in paperback.

"The New York Times Book Review, " Top 10 Book of the Year
"Time Magazine, " Top Ten Fiction Book of the Year
"Publishers Weekly, "Best Book of the Year
"2013 Lynd Ward Prize, "Best Graphic Novel of the Year
"4-time 2013 Eisner Award Winner, " including Best Publication, Best Writer/Artist and Best Graphic Album
"Newsday," Top 10 Books of 2012
"Entertainment Weekly," Gift Guide, A+
"Washington Post," Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2012
"Minneapolis Star Tribune," Best Books of the Year
"Cleveland Plain Dealer," Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year
Amazon, Best Books of the Year/Comics
"Boing Boing," Best Graphic Novel of the Year
"Time Out New York," Best of 2012
"Entertainment Weekly," Best Fiction of 2012

Everything you need to read the new graphic novel "Building Stories" 14 distinctively discrete Books, Booklets, Magazines, Newspapers, and Pamphlets.
With the increasing electronic incorporeality of existence, sometimes it's reassuring--perhaps even necessary--to have something to hold on to. Thus within this colorful keepsake box the purchaser will find a fully-apportioned variety of reading material ready to address virtually any imaginable artistic or poetic taste, from the corrosive sarcasm of youth to the sickening earnestness of maturity--while discovering a protagonist wondering if she'll ever move from the rented close quarters of lonely young adulthood to the mortgaged expanse of love and marriage. Whether you're feeling alone by yourself or alone with someone else, this book is sure to sympathize with the crushing sense of life wasted, opportunities missed and creative dreams dashed which afflict the middle- and upper-class literary public (and which can return to them in somewhat damaged form during REM sleep).
A pictographic listing of all 14 items (260 pages total) appears on the back, with suggestions made as to appropriate places to set down, forget or completely lose any number of its contents within the walls of an average well-appointed home. As seen in the pages of "The New Yorker," "The New York Times" and "McSweeney's Quarterly Concern," "Building Stories" collects a decade's worth of work, with dozens of "never-before-published" pages (i.e., those deemed too obtuse, filthy or just plain incoherent to offer to a respectable periodical).

This first book from Chicago author Chris Ware is a pleasantly-decorated view at a lonely and emotionally-impaired "everyman" (Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth), who is provided, at age 36, the opportunity to meet his father for the first time. An improvisatory romance which gingerly deports itself between 1890's Chicago and 1980's small town Michigan, the reader is helped along by thousands of colored illustrations and diagrams, which, when read rapidly in sequence, provide a convincing illusion of life and movement. The bulk of the work is supported by fold-out instructions, an index, paper cut-outs, and a brief apology, all of which concrete to form a rich portrait of a man stunted by a paralyzing fear of being disliked.


From the Hardcover edition.

A beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated biography of one of Chicago's greatest lost buildings For six months in 1961, Richard Nickel, John Vinci, and David Norris salvaged the interior and exterior ornamentation of the Garrick Theater, Adler & Sullivan's magnificent architectural masterpiece in Chicago's theater district. The building was replaced by a parking garage, and its demolition ignited the historic preservation movement in Chicago. The Garrick (originally the Schiller Building) was built in 1892 and featured elaborate embellishments, especially in its theater and exterior, including the ornamentation and colorful decorative stenciling that would become hallmarks of Louis Sullivan's career. Reconstructing the Garrick documents the enormous salvaging job undertaken to preserve elements of the building's design, but also presents the full life story of the Garrick, featuring historic and architectural photographs, essays by prominent architectural and art historians, interviews, drawings, ephemera from throughout its lively history and details of its remarkable ornamentation-a significant resource and compelling tribute to one of Chicago's finest lost buildings. A seventy-two-page facsimile of Richard Nickel's salvage workbook is tipped into the binding.

A visual compendium revealing the philosophy and life of America's renowned architect The story of Louis H. Sullivan is considered one of the great American tragedies. While Sullivan reshaped architectural thought and practice and contributed significantly to the foundations of modern architecture, he suffered a sad and lonely death. Many have since missed his aim: that of bringing buildings to life. What mattered most to Sullivan were not the buildings but the philosophy behind their creation. Once, he unconcernedly stated that if he lived long enough, he would get to see all of his works destroyed. He added: "Only the idea is the important thing." In Louis Sullivan's Idea, Chicago architectural historian Tim Samuelson and artist/writer Chris Ware present Sullivan's commitment to his discipline of thought as the guiding force behind his work, and this collection of photographs, original documentation, and drawings all date from the period of Sullivan's life, 1856-1924, that many rarely or have never seen before. The book includes a full-size foldout facsimile reproduction of Louis Sullivan's last architectural commission and the only surviving working drawing done in his own hand.

Whether you paid much attention to the mathematics you were taught at school or not, the inescapable truth is that one day, an equation could just save your life.

The real world is full of equations and a lot of our everyday decisions are calculated - we just don't always realize it. And that's ok - you unthinkingly use differentiation when you're crossing the road between traffic and you will pretty much always make it to the other side safely. But what if you were plummeting to your death in a plane with no engine and you needed to know what size parachute to make from your cabinmate's sari in order to jump and survive? Or you were in charge of pinpointing the origins of an important message from outer space? These entirely plausible real-life situations clearly require a little more thought. From how to work out the best guard configuration to protect a world-famous painting in the Louvre to saving the planet from total blackout during an energy crisis, Chris Waring demonstrates the mind-bending and humanity-saving beauty of equations.