What makes us love our things? Why do we attach certain sentiments to certain items? How is it that sometimes objects can tell stories more eloquently than people? These are questions explored and answered in The Uncommon Life of Common Objects. Author Akiko Busch devotes a chapter to each of 12 common objects, and discusses her and other's experience that give everyday things their significance. Through her examination of a video camera, a cellular phone, a vegetable peeler, a snowboard, a baby carriage, a chair, a refirgerator a mailbox a medicine cabinet, a cereal box, a backpack. and a desk, Busch illuminates the social and personal issues that shape our lives and the ownership of our things. Lovingly illustrated, always touching, sometimes nostalgic, and often hilarious, The Uncommon Life of Common objects, is a topical reader that is at once a personal manifesto, a look at how design influences and responds to our changing lives, and a study of society and its values and the infusion of meaning into inanimate objects. Each of the 12 chapters is accompanied by a four-color drawing. D.A.

P would like to extend a warm welcome to one of the world's newest publishing imprints, Metropolis Books. Specializing in timely and relevant books on architecture, design, graphic design, and related fields, Metropolis Books will also focus on contemporary issues in urbanism and the built and natural environment, sustainable architecture, innovative materials and technologies, designers' responses to human crisis, leading figures of the 20th and 21st centuries, and much more. Metropolis Books is a collaborative effort between Metropolis magazine and D.A.P/Distributed Art Publishers. Titles includeRobert Polidori's Metropolls; Akiko Busch, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects: Essays on Design and the Everyday; Looking at Los Angeles: and Natalia IIyin, Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Design in our Time. Look for excit.