This book served as the catalogue at the Grolier Club exhibition in New York but was published one year before the exhibition. The Sackner Archive lent two works to the exhibition.tSTEP inside design, March/April 2003 review: Lately I've been indulging in books of unusual visual richness, and for me the most exhilarating illustrated book of the season is Jessica Helfand's Reinventing the Wheel. Helfand is a designer, a scholar, and as the book shows in spades a passionate collector of ephemera. The ephemera in question here are those odd wheel charts widely used from the 1920s to 1960s for purposes as diverse as telling fortunes, managing diets, identifying birds, spotting aircraft, charting the stars, and learning French grammar (remember the Cuthbertson Verb Wheel?). Helfand's gorgeously designed book reproduces more than a hundred of these volvelles, as hey're technically known, traces their history back to early astronomy indeed to the properties of the circle itself as a "geometric vessel" and illuminates the formal complexity of these humble cardboard devices, which in surprising ways anticipate the functionality of the desktop computer. Alan G. Thomas, Editorial Director, University of Chicago Press, January 2003But rather than just being another book about an interesting collection, this book espouses to a higher calling. First, it is a history book. Second, it discusses how these imaginative and often complex constructions are a part of design today. And, finally, it addresses how spinning things are part of the larger language of artistic expression ... It is a book that can be appreciated by experts or dilettantes, pinheads or Elvis freaks, packrats or minimalists. What Drenttel and Helfand have done is reinvented the collectible book. Take this one for a spin. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.