Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Writer and historian Lydia Pyne finds bookshelves to be holders not just of books but of so many other things: values, vibes, and verbs that can be contained and displayed in the buildings and rooms of contemporary human existence. With a shrewd eye toward this particular moment in the history of books, Pyne takes the reader on a tour of the bookshelf that leads critically to this juncture: amid rumors of the death of book culture, why is the life of the bookshelf in full bloom? Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Postcards are usually associated with banal holiday pleasantries, but they have been made possible by sophisticated industries and institutions, from printers to postal services. Historically, postcards' innovation and significance was their ability to send and receive messages around the world easily and inexpensively. Fundamentally, postcards are about creating personal connections: links between people, places and beliefs. In this book Lydia Pyne examines postcards on a global scale, to understand them as artefacts that are at the intersection of history, science, technology, art and culture. In doing so, she shows us that postcards were the first global social network, and how here, in the twenty-first century, postcards are not yet extinct.

An enthralling scientific and cultural exploration of the Ice Age-from the author of How the Canyon Became Grand From a remarkable father-daughter team comes a dramatic synthesis of science and environmental history-an exploration of the geologic time scale and evolution twinned with the story of how, eventually, we have come to understand our own past. The Pleistocene is the epoch of geologic time closest to our own. The Last Lost World is an inquiry into the conditions that made it, the themes that define it, and the creature that emerged dominant from it. At the same time, it tells the story of how we came to discover and understand this crucial period in the Earth's history and what meanings it has for today.