Harare Review of Books

304 pages.

Expected publication date: March 14, 2024 (Frances Lincoln Publishing)

Non-fiction.

Analogue: A Field Guide is an amazing journey through the history of analogue devices in sound, vision, communication and information. I spent all of my time while reading it zooming in to see the details of old machines and marvelling at how things have changed, and—also—how much they’ve stayed the same: new tech builds on old tech, as tracing the (visual) history of machines makes clear.

This book is also a complete delight for anyone who is interested in engineering and design, which I most assuredly am. The history of machines is also, of course, the history of industrial design, with cross-fertilisation between different disciplines: architects designing phones, car designers designing cameras, and so on.

I’m not the typical reader, perhaps—this was for me like a kid in a candy shop, as they say, and I was nerding out quite severely—but anyone will enjoy poring over the images in this book. Would be a great coffee table book or addition to any library.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Quarto/Frances Lincoln Publishing for early access.