Blu Dot Book Club: May.

Meet the monthly selection of themed books we're reading.

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May 30, 2026 12:26pm EDT

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If you opened this email, congrats, you're now an official member of the Blu Dot Book Club—a monthly selection of thematically-grouped titles from our shelves. You'll find old favorites, worthy new additions, and maybe a couple out-of-print gems. We hope you enjoy reading along and share your hot takes with [email protected].

Anything but mid.

Set within an adaptive reuse renovation of a former limousine garage not far from our HQ in Northeast Minneapolis, Midway Contemporary Art offers a unique haven for experimental, research-driven contemporary art. The nonprofit pairs rotating exhibitions and robust programming with a freely accessible library of 12,000 volumes on art, design, architecture, and theory. In honor of Midway’s 25th anniversary—and ahead of a new library annex designed by Berlin’s bplus.xyz, who also led the previous renovation—we invited founder and curator John Rasmussen to select this month’s books from Midway’s shelves. His picks center on the intersection of art and books, and the role collections and libraries (both as physical spaces and as containers of human experience) play in shaping and holding culture.

Architecture for Reading in Public

By Neil Levin
Yale University Press, 2025

This book focuses on a single building: the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, designed by Henri Labrouste and completed in 1851. Groundbreaking in both innovation and democratic ambition, the library featured the first exposed iron frame used in a monumental public building—an approach that was at once structurally elegant and highly functional. Its vast open reading room, illuminated by gaslight at night, was designed to serve the expanding reading public of the mid-nineteenth century.

Baskerville's Teardrop Explodes

By John Morgan

Ten Thousand Angels Press, 2026

Completed shortly before his death in September 2025, graphic designer John Morgan takes you through 31 books that influenced his highly influential practice. A collaborator to artists, architects, and cultural institutions alike, Morgan’s work was defined by precision, clarity and a deep curiosity around printed matter (as evidenced by his earlier book Uselessly, an exhaustive aesthetic exploration of the surviving first-edition copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses.) Morgan’s books, including his last, are some of the most treasured in our collection.

Ex Libris

by Emily Jacir

dOCUMENTA (13), 2012

Ex Libris documents Jacir’s installation project produced for the 2012 contemporary arts exhibition dOCUMENTA (13), a work that commemorated the approximately 30,000 books looted from Palestinian homes, libraries, and institutions by Israeli authorities during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Focusing on traces of previous ownership like inscriptions, stamps, marginalia, worn bindings, pressed flowers, and handwritten dedications, Jacir spent years photographing the surviving volumes—often secretly, using a cellphone. Here books no longer become texts, but as evidence of interrupted lives, intellectual networks, and erased histories.

Nothing Could Have Prepared Us - Everything Could Have Prepared Us

By Wolfgang Tilmans
Spector Books, 2026

In 2025, German artist Wolfgang Tillmans transformed the Centre Pompidou's public library into a 64,500 square foot exhibition space ahead of the institution’s five-year closure for renovation. The accompanying publication documents the project alongside texts and a survey of the artist’s work. Tillmans’s love of books and printed matter runs throughout the installation, with library tables repurposed as horizontal vitrines holding magazines, ephemera, and bibliographic materials.