Mocha cream cake from Maira Kalman’s mother’s bakery on Johnson Avenue in Riverdale, NY (see p.246-247), served at a celebration for the release of The Principles of Uncertainty at the NYPL.

Do you engage with pleasure, curiosity, fun and celebration (with time for naps) in the face of the tragedy of the day? Do you want to? This is the book for you.

Maira Kalman’s delightful new release, The Principles of Uncertainty, turns out to be a heavy book. Mostly physically. Kalman says it’s because the book is extensively inked: “all the colors are in there.” Even if you’ve been following this year-long illustrated journal at the New York Times, the high-resolution images of her gouache paintings are undeniably gorgeous in print. (Even more so in person at the Julie Saul Gallery through November 24, 2007.)

Aside from the inherent pleasures of the portable printed format, the book offers a few bonuses to those already familiar with the images:

• A pull out “Map of the United States” by Kalman’s beautiful mother, Sara Berman, with instructions to: “Either put it on the wall or put it back in the book. If you put it back in the book, it may one day fall out when someone browses through the book and it will become a thing that falls out of the book.”



• An appendix filled with “things that fall out of books” and a fabulous collection of numbers in the wild. (Kalman would love the Numbers fonts by Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)
• Luscious liner page images of mosses of Long Island.
• An index that’s amusing on its own, featuring laughter, love (as a guarantee of sanity), finding self, forgetting, forgiveness, hairdos, dreams (bad, fragment of, good, malaise after bad, no answer to), and even happiness. One thing you won’t find in the index is “inner peace” (p. 245-6), a phrase that seems to trigger its opposite for Kalman. (What is that about?)

Kalman celebrated the release of the book at the New York Public Library with a 37.5 minute conversation with Paul Holdengräber, followed with 3 songs composed by Nico Muhly, and cake instead of questions. Instead of questions from the audience, that is. All Maira’s works wrestle with the eternal existential dilemma: “We are here now, and we are not going to be here at a certain point, so what is that about?” and the natural corollary, “What would we do all day long, forever?”

I don’t know what we’ll do forever, but I highly recommend checking out how Kalman observes the world, “making sense and then nonsense” out of it with grace, gratitude and joie de vivre, today.

• The Principles of Uncertainty book on Amazon
• The Principles of Uncertainty blog on NYT
• NYT’s video highlights of the celebration at the NYPL