I purchased Reinventing the Wheel after flipping through the book at Elliot Bay Bookstore. I’m a sucker for these kinds of niche retro-design books, and this one offers a narrow slice of design history through the rotating wheel chart. Makes me want to create new wheels for everything — a color-coded wheel chart for all of my “outfits” (a la Geranimals), a kilograms-to-pounds converter (for that European bathroom scale), dot-com wheel-o-facts…

Even though the book is about the collection and you don’t even notice the written comments in your first eight flip-throughs of the book (at least from the graphic design point of view), author and collector Jessica Helfand does an excellent job of organizing and describing the pieces from their ancient astrological beginnings to 50’s pop kitch.