SO I’VE BEEN READING THE PAGE PROOFS for An Army of Davids, and that’s been fun: No matter how many times you read a manuscript in process — and it’s always a lot — when you see it set in type and formatted as a book it looks fresh and different.
One thing that has struck me is how much of a debt I owe to Virginia Postrel. The book’s topic is different from hers, but themes and ideas from The Substance of Style, and The Future and Its Enemies (and references to them both, along with some of her New York Times columns) just keep cropping up. Virginia’s books have gotten a lot of attention, of course, but I think that in twenty years we’ll still look back and see them as underrated. If you haven’t read them, you should.
Jeff Jarvis and Nick Denton crop up a lot, too. Visionaries all!