Maria Popova has posted her list of “The 11 Best Art and Design Books of 2011.”  We checked this list out and discovered it is SUPER!

Who is Maria Popova?  She refers to herself as a “cultural curator and curious mind at large.”

Here is her link (the link takes you to “Brain Pickings,” which is described as a “LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces across art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, you-name-itology. Pieces that enrich your mental pool of resources and empower you to combine them into original concepts that are stronger, smarter, richer, deeper and more impactful — a modest, curiosity-driven exercise in vision- and mind-expansion.”  We’re recommending “Brain Pickings” as a site you might want to bookmark … and Ms. Popova’s list as a starting point for your Holiday Gift Shopping.

The #1 book on the list is Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout, by artist Lauren Redniss.   “To honor Curie’s spirit and legacy,” Ms. Popova writes, “Redniss rendered her poetic artwork in cyanotype, an early-20th-century image printing process called critical to the discovery of both X-rays and radioactivity itself — a cameraless photographic technique in which paper is coated with light-sensitive chemicals. Once exposed to the sun’s UV rays, this chemically-treated paper turns a deep shade of blue. The text in the book is a unique typeface Redniss designed using the title pages of 18th- and 19th-century manuscripts from the New York Public Library archive. She named it Eusapia LR, for the croquet-playing, sexually ravenous Italian Spiritualist medium whose séances the Curies used to attend. The book’s cover is printed in glow-in-the-dark ink.”