Howtoons for David Macaulay!

I met one of my childhood heroes, David Macaulay, yesterday at his talk at MIT! Macaulay author of such wonderful works as Castle, City, Unbuilding, Cathedral, How Things Work and most recently Mosque and Ship among others. He gave a full-on hour-plus talk weaving together his studies at RISD, love of ruins and Rome, efforts to help others learn complex things more simply but still accurately, homages to Escher, his use of models and field research to get the details right, his attempts to understand the Body and Brain, and more!

At the end, I asked the first question What's Next? Two things in the short run: a book on Leonardo's sketching and a big project on The Earth. He said he knows very little about how the Earth works, but that's never stopped him before! Excellent & inspiring attitude! After the talk he was signing copies of his books which people had remembered to bring. MIT-Lemelson Invention Prize winner (and co-host of DesignSquad) Nate Ball brought his copy of How Things Work. I didn't have a book for him to sign but instead shook his hand and said Thanks, your work was one of the inspirations behind my colleagues and I creating and publishing our Howtoons book! I showed him a copy and he loved it, so I gave it to him. And he wanted it signed! Way cool guy.