In the original dust jacket. Green cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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The well kept book is fantastic and allures me from the initial pages. I scam through it by turning pages and looking at the quality of visuals. Paper quality and image quality are really good. Topics are well explained in connected language use.

Before we can talk about how to read landscapes, it’s helpful to understand what purpose this exercise serves, and what its limits are. A cultural landscape in its current form is always the product of a long series of overlapping choices made by people (collectively or individually), and mediated by the culture in which it exists. Careful reading can thus produce a wealth of information that extends from the present backwards in history.

It is also important to understand the difference between actively and passively reading the landscape. For many of us, the landscapes we see every day are so familiar that we have internalized their elements and hardly think about them. When navigating somewhere, we might actively seek a particular feature on the landscape (e.g., a specific building number, street sign, or landmark), but when we do so, we tend to disregard the rest. Some features, such as markings for lanes or parking spaces, or street signs, we use in a referential way, but their visual aspects are generally unremarkable unless something about them has changed (or unless we go to a place where the markings are stylistically different. This kind of engagement with the landscape is passive, and it is likely only to reveal the most obvious information. Actively reading the landscape is a process that requires both an attention to detail and the ability to understand the specific collection of features as a whole.