Fear not, gentle reader

Thanks to improvements in layout software, as Colin Berry reports here, a new breed of specialty publishers is producing an array of compact, affordable art books-portable galleries, really-that bring emerging artists to a wider audience and add a new form to the field of urban-art collectibles. [...]the exploding genre of chick-lit novels, ridiculed of late for their copycat story lines (and one exposed plagiarist), have a hilariously limited visual vocabulary as well: writer Jami Attenberg and design team Giampictro+Smith literally connect the dots in "The Girls' Guide to Writing and Publishing." [...]while these pristine new releases flow unceasingly to bookstores and newsstands, a tenacious group of archivists toil to protect print's past from history's dustbin, from Nicholson Baker salvaging early American newspapers to Michael Patrick Hearn rescuing a forgotten chapter of children's books produced during the Soviet Union's early years ("Agitprop Primers"). At "Radical Craft," held this spring at Art Center College of Design, poets and lexicographers were given center stage and received the rousing ovations associated with rock stars.