A visually dynamic homage to the paperback. In 1968, John Leonard, then editor of The New York Times Book Review , listed the many merits of mass-market paperbacks: "They can be stuffed in purses, left in buses, dropped in toilets, used as coasters, eaten and thrown away. Their covers can be ripped off! Their spines can be broken! To buy a paperback today is to buy the means of revenging oneself on Western culture." Fast-forward forty years. Leonard’s affectionately flippant assessment may need to be revised as the explosion of digital media threatens the livelihood of the printed word. More than an act of revenge on Western culture, to buy a paperback may be a means of preserving one of its more charismatic—and socially, politically, and aesthetically influential—species. Breathless Homicidal Slime Mutants celebrates the mass-market paperback and gives it its due. A vibrant tour that starts with books from the late nineteenth century up to today, examining the most popular genres—mystery, romance, Westerns, how-to, cooking, and diet, and highbrow literature packaged for the broader audience—it focuses on the history of the art and design of the format and how it is inseparable from the history of American literacy, tastes, and mores of the twentieth century.

An ambitious monograph on Neri Oxman, one of the most inventive minds of our time, whose interdisciplinary design work blends, transcends and redefines the practices of computer science, digital fabrication, material science and synthetic biology. Neri Oxman has forged a singular career across design, science and technology for over twenty years. Trained as both a medical doctor and an architect, she has brought an entirely new spirit of thinking and experimentation to all facets of design. Oxman defines her work at the MIT Media Lab, which approaches nature as processes and substances to be molded to design ends, as 'material ecology.' Using this method, products and buildings are designed as interactive entities that are environmentally informed, biologically augmented, computationally grown and digitally manufactured. The products of her ground-breaking methods are arresting and have major implications for all aspects and scales of design, where Oxman's work is at the edge of many interrelated - and unexpected - practices. From using silkworms' thread to generate a cocoon-like construction to a synthetic apiary, from a water-based fabrication platform that prints structures made out of biopolymers, to automated microrobots that can build their own structure, Oxman and her teams are producing an entirely new vocabulary for designers with far-reaching implications. Mediated Matter is the first comprehensive overview of Oxman's work. Six central chapters - Biopolymers, Cellular Solids, Fibers, Functional Pigments, Organic Comb and Symbiotic Microbes - present the thinking behind the key projects and the process of their creation as well as, crucially, their potential for use in the built environment, all shown in detail through diagrams, explanatory texts, process documents and breathtaking photographs. Through its scientific rigour, sheer imagination and design innovation, this novel publication, like its author, is a future-facing manifesto for a true symbiosis of nature and design.