Please be warned that this site is currently under construction. For the time being, I do not recommend that you actually try to use this site; it will likely only lead to frustration on your part. The site is incomplete and contains many partial pages.  Please check back in a few months for a better user experience. Thanks for your interest!

I love vintage design books. Love browsing through them, buying them and owning them. Anyone else who shares this passion probably understands how frustrating it can be to buy these books online, especially if they are out of print. If you don’t already know that a book exists and have a good idea of its contents, you’re going to have a tough time finding something worthy of purchasing. In most cases you’re practically forced to ignore the old cliche about judging a book by it’s cover, because you don’t have much else to go on. In a lot of cases you’re lucky if the bookseller even shows a photo of the cover!

Design book archive is intended to take some of the frustration out of purchasing out of print and even newer design books online by giving you an in-depth overview of what is actually between the covers of these books. You’re probably wondering about how many illustrations are in the book, whether they are in color, whether the book has an index, whether it is hopelessly out of date, and whether it actually contains the information you are interested in learning.

Topics covered on this site include fashion design, interior design, architecture, product design, textile design, industrial design, art, crafts, and others. While the vast majority of the books on this site are “art” or “design” books, I think that any book has the potential to be a design book. For example, I design a lot of floral textile print patterns. When looking for a design reference, I don’t usually turn to textile design books; I usually look at gardening books and magazines. I don’t think anybody would ever say that Organic Gardening qualifies as a design book, but I do use it as one. So, with that in mind, you could expect to find information on this site about magazines, DVDs or other media where appropriate to the topic you are trying to learn about.