Houston's sprawl has come with controversy, but it has created a blank canvas for the public art community. It all started in the Telephone Road Place subdivision, where retired mail carrier Jefferson Davis McKissack built the Orange Show, an extraordinary and eccentric monument to self-reliance, hard work and, yes, the fruit itself. McKissack's installation spawned more of its kind in the Bayou City, like the Beer Can House, the Flower Man's House, Pigdom--one woman's "shrine to swine"--a...

Recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts grants and with works exhibited at the prestigious Biennale de Paris, New York’s Whitney Museum, the de Menil Collection in Houston, and other venues, Bob “Daddy-O” Wade started “keeping it weird” in 1961 when he arrived in Austin with his ’51 custom Ford hot rod and his slicked-back hair. Primed to study art at the University of Texas, Wade’s coif and dragster earned him his trademark moniker, and the abstract, welded sculptures he fashio...

Winner, 2019 Ron Tyler Award for Best Illustrated Book, sponsored by the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA)In this expansive and vigorous survey of the Houston art scene of the 1970s and 1980s, author Pete Gershon describes the city’s emergence as a locus for the arts, fueled by a boom in oil prices and by the arrival of several catalyzing figures, including museum director James Harithas and sculptor James Surls. Harithas was a fierce champion for Texan artists during his t...

Selected from 15 years of radio-show archives and re-edited by the author, this onderfully eclectic essay collection gives a glimpse into the thoughtful mind at work behind The Vinyl Cafe. From meditations on peacekeeping to praise for the toothpick, The Vinyl Cafe Notebooks runs the gamut from considered argument to light-hearted opinion. Whether McLean is visiting a forgotten corner of the Canadian Shield, a big-city doughnut factory, or Sir John A. Macdonald's gravesite, his ob...

“You’ll never understand America until you’ve driven Route 66—that’s old Route 66—all the way,” a truck driver in California once said to author Rick Antonson. “It’s the most famous highway in the world.”With some determination, grit, and a good sense of direction, one can still find and drive on 90 percent of the original Route 66 today. This travelogue follows Rick and his travel companion Peter along 2,400 miles through eight states from Chicago to Los Angeles as they discover t...

Take a seat and settle in—it's a gigantic treasury of trivia and humor for our twenty-fifth (is that porcelain?) anniversary!IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award Gold Winner in HumorForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards, Honorable Mention in Humor"Fully Loaded" is putting it mildly. This behemoth of a book is overflowing with incredible stories, surprising facts, weird news, little-known origins, forgotten history, fun wordplay, and ever...

Whether navigating the backroads of Louisiana or Thuringia, exploring the snowy Quebec woods, or performing onstage at Rush concerts, Neil Peart has stories to tell. His first volume in this series, Far and Away, combined words and images to form an intimate, insightful narrative that won many readers.Now Far and Near brings together reflections from another three years of an artist’s life as he celebrates seasons, landscapes, and characters, travels roads and tra...

The twenty-seventh Bathroom Reader in the beloved, bizarre trivia series with more than fifteen million copies in print!At a whopping 544 pages, Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader is overflowing with everything that Bathroom Readers' Institute fans have come to expect from this bestselling trivia series: fascinating history, silly science, obscure origins . . . plus fads, blunders, wordplay, quotes, and a few surprises (such as some of the "creative" m...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “One of contemporary literature’s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest ... her acute observations of the country’s culture and history feel particularly resonant today.” —Harper’s BazaarJoan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, has always kept notebooks—of overheard dialogue, interv...

It's safe to say that world-famed speaker and author Og Mandino has as many friends as any man alive, thanks to his inspiring motivational lectures and his bestselling books. This new book is a special gift to all his friends, old and new, a book they may cherish above all the rest. Secrets for Success and Happiness is Og's beautifully written journal, an intimate record of his innermost thoughts and feelings, the heartwarming events of his day-to-day life.Whether he's writing in hi...

Uncle John loves New York, so he's taking the plunge…into the land of bagels, bluebirds, and the Brooklyn Bridge.Start spreading the news. You’re reading today. You’re going to be a part of it--New York, New Yooooork! In this ode to the greatest place on Earth, Uncle John takes you through Ellis Island and down the Hudson to bring you the tome about New York that could only come from the Bathroom Readers’ Institute. Find out why the Empire State is the Big Apple of...

This "rollicking newspaperman's memoir" offers a personal tour of Chicago's cultural history and makes "a strong case for Second City exceptionalism" ( The New York Times).In 1952 the New Yorker published a three-part essay by A. J. Liebling in which he dubbed Chicago the "Second City." From the skyline to garbage collection, nothing escaped Liebling's withering gaze. Among the outraged responses from Chicago residents was one that Liebling descri...