Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways is an absolutely extraordinary and inexhaustible "guide to visual awareness", a virtually indescribable concoction of anecdotes, quotes, images and bizarre facts that offers a wonderfully twisted vision of the chaos of modern life. Fletcher is a renowned designer and art director and the joy of The Art of Looking Sideways lies in its beautiful design. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters with titles like "Colour", "Noise", "Chance", "Camouflage" and "Handedness", Fletcher's book, which he describes as "a journey without a destination", is "a collection of shards" that captures the sensory overload of a world that simply contains too much information. In one typical section, entitled "Civilization", the reader encounters six Polish flags designed to represent the world, a photograph of an anthropomorphic hand bag, Buzz Aldrin's bootprint on the moon, drawings of Stone Age pebbles, a painting of "Ireland--as seen from Wales" and a dizzying array of quotations and snippets of information, including the wise words of Marcus Aurelius, Stephen Jay and Gandhi's comment, "Western civilization? I think it would be a good idea". Fletcher's mastery of design mixes type, space, fonts, alphabets, colour and layout combined with a "jackdaw" eye for the strange and profound to produce a stunning book that cannot be read, but only experienced. --Jerry Brotton

It?s an inspired, eye-opening, colorful gallimaufry of a book about the world and everything that is in it. It deserves to be treated as an immediate classic.

Alan Fletcher's book challenges both dogma and habit by questioning how we see things, how we read things and how we understand things.

Essential reading for anyone with imagination, a pair of eyes and a sense of humour

Ideas are priceless. This book is crammed with great ideas and you can't afford to be without it.

"A truly poetic canvas is an awakened dream." I'm sure Alan's magnum opus will awaken many dreams.

Master designer Alan Fletcher has spent a lifetime collecting images, ideas, quotations, anecdotes, jokes, memories, reflections and scraps of useless information that take his fancy. In The Art of Looking Sideways, all this stuff is distilled into a quirky and highly entertaining feast for the eye and the mind. Loosely arranged in 72 'chapters', this book explores the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination in a wonderfully inventive sequence of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the art of design. This book does not set out to teach lessons, but everybody who opens it will be captivated by Alan Fletcher's witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, colour, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value. The Art of Looking Sideways is the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay of word and image, who relish the odd and the unexpected, and who don't like to take the visual world seriously.

Describing himself as a "visual jackdaw", master designer Alan Fletcher has spent a lifetime collecting images, useless information, quotations and scraps that take his fancy. This work distils this collection into a quirky and entertaining feast for the eyes and the mind. Loosely arranged in 72 "chapters", the book explores the workings of the eye, the hand and the brain.

This book is the most amazing collection of curious facts, visual puns, anecdotes, serious science, insights, images, jokes, memories and reflections.

I am intrigued by apparently useless information, such as 8% of the population is left-handed; giraffes only sleep five minutes every 24 hours; Italians kiss twice, the Swiss three times; is a zebra a white animal with black stripes or vice versa; and, are you left or right eyed? This book is everything I was never taught at school. It has no thesis, is neither a whodunit nor a how-to-do-it, and has no beginning, middle or end. It is a book for visually curious people, full of things to make you think twice.

2008-03-24 Stuck for an idea? Dive in here...

Alan Fletcher was one of the creative powerhouses of design from the 1960s on, and this book puts together some of his musings on life, the Universe and everything. The book is designed to spark ideas and thought, so even the paper used changes from page to page.

In typically quirky fashion, only the left hand pages are given a number so if you buy this book you actually get over a thousand pages of inspiring graphics, calligraphy, typography and photographs collected over the course of a long and illustrious career: he founded Pentagram; he designed logos for Reuters and the Victoria and Albert museum. The book gives a glimpse of the thought processes that went in to that work. For the money it's an astonishing bargain.