A History of the World

The phenomenally creative musician and filmmaker David Byrne presents new artwork that explores daily life in surprising ways, with unique reflections on shared human experiences - a book for our time from a highly influential artist.

Through striking and humorous figurative drawings, the iconic artist and musician David Byrne depicts daily life in intriguing ways. His illustrations, created while under quarantine, expand on the dingbat, a typographic ornament used to illuminate or break up blocks of text, to explore the nuances of life under lockdown and evoke the complex, global systems the pandemic cast in bright light. Edited and designed by Alex Kalman in close collaboration with Byrne, this unique book reflects on shared experiences and presents history as a story that is continually undergoing revision.