A History of the World

The extraordinarily creative musician and filmmaker David Byrne presents new works of art that explore everyday life in surprising ways, with unique reflections on shared human experiences: a book for our time written by a highly influential artist.

Through surprising and humorous figurative drawings, iconic artist and musician David Byrne depicts everyday life in intriguing ways. Her illustrations, created during quarantine, expand on the dingbat, a typographic ornament used to illuminate or break up blocks of text, to explore the nuances of life during lockdown and evoke the complex global systems that the pandemic has exposed. Edited and designed by Alex Kalman in close collaboration with Byrne, this unique book reflects on shared experiences and presents the story as one continually under revision.