Early in their fascinating, sometimes maddening cornucopia of erudition, The New Music Theater, Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi define their subject: “Music theater can be considered the confluence or adding up of language-like expressions: verbal or spoken language (the story; the libretto), physical movement or body language (gesture, dance), images or visual language (décor or design), and sound or musical language (pitch and rhythm; vocal and instrumental).” The book’s subtitle, Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body, aptly conveys the nature of this porous and flexible art form, in which disciplines mate in diverse and often obstreperous ways. The subject is

The first thing to know about Herbie Popnecker is that he’s a good-for-nothing—a fat layabout who doesn’t say much. The other thing to know is that he’s feared and respected the world over. Occasionally. He’s also basically a god. Or at least that’s how Richard Hughes (writing under the name Shane O’Shea) and Ogden Whitney depict him. Herbie first appeared in 1958 in issue 73 of Forbidden Worlds, an anthology title released by the second-tier publishing outfit American Comics Group. It was an otherwise throwaway story called “Herbie’s Quiet Saturday Afternoon,” one not much different from the whimsical fantasies ACG

At the end of Grégoire Bouillier’s new memoir, the author recalls passionately kissing his mother at the age of seventeen and expecting the sky to quite literally fall on his head. Seconds afterward, he laments, “Everything has remained in place. The world is the same, and I’m its prisoner. My intervention didn’t accomplish anything. Didn’t cause any upheaval. It’s always the same oppressive emptiness.” Report on Myself chronicles Bouillier’s attempts to transcend the quotidian and live an outsize life—one that approaches mythical proportions.

Like a chapbook or a treatise, the collected writings of Agnes Denes are sheathed between plain and precisely designed manila covers. Yet The Human Argument is no arch Conceptualist tract. If Denes is recognized as one of the earliest concept-based artists, since the late ’60s her practice has nevertheless reveled in voluminously detailed drawings that are as lush as they are rigorous and in carefully tended yet plush, shimmering fields of wheat captured in deep-focus photographs, many of which are reproduced here. Similarly, her interest in linguistic codes began bare-bones but quickly veered into the mystical, as her writings recount:

Liking the look of something is more than enough reason to use it.” This easy philosophy lies at the heart of the success of Hipgnosis, the graphic-design firm responsible for some of the most legendary album covers of the ’70s and early ’80s: Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, with its iconic prism and rainbow; Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, with its naked blond sprites ascending toward a glowing orange sky; Styx’s Pieces of Eight, an anomaly even today with its severe, sharp close-ups of glamorous middle-aged women.

On April 27, 1951, a few days before he died of cancer, Ludwig Wittgenstein completed one of his most important books, On Certainty. The previous day had been his sixty-second birthday. As Ray Monk tells it in his definitive biography,

When I was a boy, I prayed for straight hair. You have to understand, I grew up on heavy metal. Iron Maiden and Judas Priest to start. Then Anthrax and Exodus, Megadeth and Metallica. My friends and I gathered in living rooms and basements and empty lots and banged our heads to “Damage, Inc.” and “I Am the Law.” If you nearly snapped your neck, you were doing something right. We were a pretty wild mix: a Persian kid, a Korean, a couple of white guys, and me—the only one with a tight, curly Afro. The rest had straight hair,

In the course of a long career, I have read many books and reviewed a sizable number of them, but I have never encountered a title quite so felicitous as that of Jenny Davidson’s Breeding. Its subtitle, A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century, is equally ambiguous: The word breeding embraces the work of nature as well as that of nurture in the making of humans; partial is synonymous, on the one hand, with partisan or one-sided and, on the other, with imperfect or incomplete. These are the two double meanings Davidson explores, only to conclude that during the eighteenth

It seems fitting that Ronald Reagan’s ninety-eighth birthday, on February 6, coincided with the Senate Republican effort to stonewall President Obama’s economic-stimulus plan. Doomed to failure in a key cloture vote after a trio of moderates pledged support for a compromise plan, GOP senators nevertheless thronged to deliver droning denunciations of the package before the c-span cameras. Government spending couldn’t alleviate the downturn in the economy, they intoned, since, after all, the New Deal hadn’t alleviated the Great Depression; the nation’s mobilization for World War II had proved the real stimulus needed to put the Depression to rest.