Items12The creator’s order
  1. 1The Way Things Work (1988)The Way Things Work (1988) 8.4/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1988The Way Things Work Now, the 2016 revision The benchmark the rest of this list is measured against. David Macaulay's drawings, with technical text by Neil Ardley, are organized by the science behind the machines, opening with the mechanics of movement, so a reader learns the principle once and…0
  2. 2Thing Explainer (2015)Thing Explainer (2015) 8.4/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2015Randall Munroe sets himself an absurd rule, using only the ten hundred most common English words, and the constraint turns out to be one of the best teaching tools on this list. With no jargon to hide behind, a microwave oven, an airplane engine or the Saturn V rocket (drawn from NASA's own…0
  3. 3Incredible Cross Sections (1992)Incredible Cross Sections (1992) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1992Stephen Biesty's Incredible Cross-Sections, 1992 Biesty slices a whole machine or building open like a loaf of bread, from a galleon to a 747 jumbo jet and a car factory, and fills it with tiny figures going about their work. That crowd is the point: instead of a static diagram you see the parts…0
  4. 4Cathedral (1973)Cathedral (1973) 6.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1973David Macaulay's first book, from 1973, and still the clearest account of how medieval builders raised a Gothic cathedral without modern machines. The pen-and-ink drawings follow one imagined thirteenth-century cathedral in the invented town of Chutreaux from planning to completion, so each stage…0
  5. 5Underground (1976)Underground (1976)Published Jan 1, 1976Macaulay's 1976 tour of what lies beneath an ordinary city intersection: the foundations, columns, cables, pipes and tunnels that keep the buildings standing and the water, power and sewage moving. It answers the question every child asks when the street is dug up, and plenty of adults never got an…0
  6. 6The Way We Work (2008)The Way We Work (2008)Published Jan 1, 2008Macaulay turns the same explaining instinct on the human body, and the result is the best single book here for understanding how the body's systems depend on each other. Across more than 300 pages it moves from cells and DNA through breathing and circulation, digestion, the nervous system,…0
  7. 7Incredible Body (1998)Incredible Body (1998)Published Jan 1, 1998Stephen Biesty's Incredible Body, 1998 Biesty applies his cross-section method to the human body: two tiny explorers travel through arteries, veins, bones and organs, meeting teams of body people who keep everything running. Where The Way We Work explains the systems in depth, this short book is…0
  8. 8How Things Work (2019)How Things Work (2019)Published Jan 1, 2019Theodore Gray, known for The Elements, swaps drawings for photographs here, and Nick Mann's pictures of real mechanisms on black backgrounds make the insides of machines look as handsome as jewelry. What saves it from being a coffee-table book is Gray's tinkerer's text, which walks through the…0
  9. 9Engineering in Plain Sight (2022)Engineering in Plain Sight (2022) 10.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2022Civil engineer Grady Hillhouse's 2022 field guide to the infrastructure most people walk past without seeing. Its eight chapters cover the power grid, communications, roads, bridges and tunnels, railways, dams and levees, water and wastewater, and construction, with each feature drawn clearly and…0
  10. 10The machinery of life (2009)The machinery of life (2009) 10.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2009The Machinery of Life, second edition, 2009 The book that shows the body's machinery at the scale where it actually happens. David Goodsell's paintings magnify a small piece of a living cell by about a million times, so proteins, membranes and DNA appear as crowded, recognizable shapes rather than…0