Award-winning photojournalist Zoran Milich captures a world of words in the simplicity of big, bold signs. As young children discover the thirty colorful photographs in City Signs, they will delight in seeing people and places that are a part of their everyday world. With that delight comes the growing recognition of the words that are all around them --- and the exhilarating discovery that they can READ!
"Don't let the title fool you. It's about more than street signs: it's about life in the big city; it's about history and the loss of history; it's about neighborhoods that were and never were, but still could be; it's about illusion and the real thing...." Studs Terkel.
Signs orient, inform, persuade, and regulate. They help give meaning to our natural and human-built environment, to landscape and place. In Signs in America’s Auto Age, cultural geographer John Jakle and historian Keith Sculle explore the ways in which we take meaning from outdoor signs and assign meaning to our surroundings—the ways we “read” landscape. With an emphasis on how the use of signs changed as the nation’s geography reorganized around the coming of the automobile, Jakle and Sculle consider the vast array of signs that have evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Treu tackles the architectural history and signage of Main Street and the strip—from painted boards nailed over crude storefronts to sleek cinemas topped with neon glitz. Honorable Mention, Architecture and Urban Planning, 2012 PROSE Awards Signs, Streets, and Storefronts addresses more than 200 years of signs and place-marking along America’s commercial corridors. From small-town squares to Broadway, State Street, and Wilshire Boulevard, Martin Treu follows design developments into the present and explores issues of historic preservation. Treu considers “common” architecture and its place-defining business signs as well as influential high-style design examples by taste-making leaders. Combining advertising and architectural history, the book presents a full picture of the commercial landscape, including design adaptations made for motorists and the migration from Main Street to suburbia. The dynamic between individual businesses and the common good has a major effect on the appearance of our country's Main Streets. Several forces are at work: technological advances, design imagination and the media, corporate propaganda, customer needs, and municipal mandates. Present-day controls have often led to a denuding of traditional commercial corridors. Such reform, Treu argues, has suppressed originality and radically cleared away years of accumulated history based on the taste of a single generation. A must-read for city planners, town councils, architects, sign designers, concerned citizens, and anyone who cares about the appearance and vitality of America’s commercial streets, this heavily illustrated book is equally appealing to armchair historians, small-town enthusiasts, and lovers of Americana.
The city has always been a locus of research and discussion within the debates of modernity and, more recently, postmodernity. This volume brings together some of the most recent and exciting work on the city from within sociology and cultural studies. The book is organised around the following major themes: the theoretical imagination; ethnic diversity and the politics of difference; memory and nostalgia; and the complex and complimentary narrative of the city ways.While these representations bring the past and the present together, the final section of the book elaborates the present and future in relation to the idea of the virtual city. Hence, the world of cyberspace not only recasts our imaginaries of space and communication, but has a profound effect on the sociological imagination itself.
Henkin explores the influential but little-noticed role reading played in New York City's public life between 1825 and 1865. The "ubiquitous urban texts"--from newspapers to paper money, from street signs to handbills--became both indispensable urban guides and apt symbols for a new kind of public life that emerged first in New York.
Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy. Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression.
