Rating: 
Summary: Typographic Department Store
Review: A unique, highly orginal book! Quotes, illustrations and short stories combined in a visual splendor of typography.
This book is a perfect illustration of the fact 'the medium is the message'.
You just have to love the selection of quotes the author gathered for each section and the way of presenting them to you:
no two pages are the same!
Rating: 
Summary: Seductive...but I'm not sure what I was seduced into.
Review: Difficult to tell you what this book actually says, except that it's author is a genius. Or at least he quotes lots of other people who are.But whatever the author is saying, I agree with it. It's about expressing interesting thoughts in a visually interesting way in a conceptually interesting arrangement. I am a smarter, richer, wiser, person for having read it, but I can't say how. (This isn't going to earn me many helpful votes, is it?)
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: I came across this book in the local bookstore, randomly finding it while buying a gift certificate for christmas. If you're into artistic expression in any way, buy this book. It's full of delightfully random illustrations, quotes, and wisdom. If you're not the artistic type, I'd suspect you'll find this book a bit tedious or perhaps even pointless. If, however, you are a creatively minded person who enjoys some visual delights (some of the pictures are just amazing to experience) and some mental stimulation, go for it! This would make a great book to pick up and open to anywhere, then see what you find. I've paged through a lot of it, looking at things. I'm now attempting to start from the beginning and read through it. This book is incredible. Worth owning without a doubt.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: I came across this book in the local bookstore, randomly finding it while buying a gift certificate for christmas. If you're into artistic expression in any way, buy this book. It's full of delightfully random illustrations, quotes, and wisdom. If you're not the artistic type, I'd suspect you'll find this book a bit tedious or perhaps even pointless. If, however, you are a creatively minded person who enjoys some visual delights (some of the pictures are just amazing to experience) and some mental stimulation, go for it! This would make a great book to pick up and open to anywhere, then see what you find. I've paged through a lot of it, looking at things. I'm now attempting to start from the beginning and read through it. This book is incredible. Worth owning without a doubt.
Rating:
Summary: Fabulous good good stuff
Review: I can't recommend it enough. I don't know much about this Fletcher fellow but I'm beginning to feel quite a lot of appreciation for him. Contains a plethora of food for thought and recipes for opening your mind (images, quotes, anecdotes, poems, drawings, puzzles, etc.) Everyone should plow through this book and learn a thing or two about the importance of being able to change perspective on things-at will. The world would be a better place. P.S. It's lots of fun, you'll laugh and cry and vice versa.
Rating:
Summary: The moment I saw it, I had to possess it
Review: I found out about this book of all places while channel surfing one gloomy day. A TV show was doing a profile on the author, his creative process and his book. I was hooked. They showed some of its pages and I special ordered it the next day. That was 2 years ago and every time I've picked it up since, it never fails to awe and inspire. I love so many things about it: its simple yet highly styled layout, the hand drawn graphics, the author's graphical experiments, the quotations (there must be at least a thousand) and the combination of humour and thoughtfulness that permiates the pages. To describe it, I would say it's like a box you kept all your old concert stubs, matchbooks and photographs, keepsakes and anecdotes but that have been organized and displayed and "made sense of". And this is exactly what the author did in compliling this book. You can read it in the traditional front-to-back way, but my favourite way to approach the book is to just open it at random and start reading - then I usually end up flipping around because parts of the text refer to other parts of text in another section - like little hyperlinks that zoom you to some other connected place. The discovery is seemingly never-ending. So, to you I would say: Treat your brain. Pick up this book and learn what it means to look sideways!
Rating:
Summary: If you have a creative bone in your body, you need this.
Review: I had never heard of this book before I saw it and no introduction is better than just getting the huge, heavy thing on your lap and looking through it. As most reviewers of this book have said, it cannot be described, but they have tried. I too can only give you an idea about this book and giving ideas is what this book is about.
One day my friend Martine said that I must see this book and dropped it into my lap, I have not yet give it back. I sat there in my comfy chair and leafed through the many, many pages reading a little here, looking a little there. After a while I realised that this book was an amazing source of information and inspiration and so I started reading from the beginning, taking notes along the way.
Todd Dominey, a new media designer, wrote, "As a designer, I felt more inspired, more aware, more energized after just a handful of pages than I can remember feeling in years of buying design and art related books." As indicated by its title, this book is meant to open your mind, to get you seeing the things you never noticed before, to give you a fresh perspective and a new way of understanding.
On the first real page of the book a quote by Montaigne reads "I quote others only the better to express myself." This book has over a thousand quotes from writers, philosophers, artists and anyone who has ever said anything thoughtful. A quote starts each of the books 72 chapters, each having a loose theme such as 'Imagination', 'Noise', 'Wit' or 'Colour'.
But this is so much more than a book of smart remarks, it is a scrapbook of a lifetime of visual awareness. Decades must have whittled by as Fletcher was collecting all these fantastic stories, jotting down memories, cutting up newspapers, photocopying books, sketching fleeting visions and remembering good jokes.
Every double spread of the book is counted as one page, and each of these 532 'pages' are thoughtfully designed by Fletcher. Every anecdote, poem and thought is uniquely arranged with the typography, colour and layout carefully balancing the illustrations, doodles and photographs of which there are around 700. It is truly mindbending how much care and effort must have gone into this book, and it is this effort which makes it such a joy to read.
Through reading "Sideways" you also get to know a little about Alan Fletcher, to understand what kind of man it takes to complete such a generous and insightful offering of information. His brain must have been mightily relieved once it had poured out all this knowledge, and not a drop has been spilt. It is now up to us to absorb as much as we can, to learn from it and enjoy it. Those with even the smallest interest in the visual or the verbal will find it impossible to not appreciate and wonder at this book. Be careful carrying it home though.
Rating:
Summary: It is a must have.
Review: If you deal with creativity, visual perception and design... You have to read it.
Rating:
Summary: The Art of Looking at The Art of Looking Sideways
Review: It is probably easier to write nebulously about this volume than in very direct and objectively descriptive terms. It's the kind of book that could be said to bring out the poet in you. Maybe because of this, I had a hard time getting a handle on what it was, exactly, before I got a copy. I'd love to try and demystify this wonderful book just a bit. If you have seen the book "Everything Reverberates" from a few years ago, you have an idea of what this one is like. That book took mostly brief quotes about design and art, and synthesized them into layouts that made the quote a small work of typographic art. Visual puns and kidding visual references to past and present cultures abounded. It was a nice little book to have around and pick up for inspiration or entertainment at the odd down moment. The art of looking sideways takes the earlier book as a starting point and multiplies the sheer volume of content possibly 40 times over. The layout is elegant. There is lots of visual play (pictures, pictograms, sketches, illusions, calligraphy, etc.) and while there may not be quite as much "making quotes into small works of typographic art", it is still clearly a book given shape by a masterful graphic designer. Whereas the earlier book, because of it's physical dimensions, concentrated on brief quotes, the art of looking sideways is a bit more expansive, including long excerpts from books and articles that have impressed Alan Fletcher, along with pithy quotes (there are plenty of those). So in one sense, this is a book of quotes, and one of the greatest at that. (On the first page proper of the book, Montaigne says, opening the door for the author, "I quote others only the better to express myself.") But it is more than a book of quotes too. All in all, it is a book worth having around in a prominent place in your home or office, ready to flip open, like a great library dictionary, at any time.
Rating:
Summary: The Amazon review was right
Review: It's not so much a read as an experience. Beautifully put together, beyond exhaustive in scope and information. It'd be impossible to put down, except for the fact that it's so thick and, well, people need to sleep every now and again. Reading this book, I was continually amazed at the amount of knowledge packed into Alan Fletcher's brain.
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