Long ago, when the wold was young, all publishing was done in the most astonishing way. Pictures and type and everything were made up separately in darkrooms and expensive typesetters, then carefully pasted on boards with rubber cement and photographed. It took writers and fontographers and graphic designers and layout drones and darkroom technicians and the like to make a book:or a magazine.

Then, twenty years ago, all was made new. Jobs and Wozniak walked the earth, and the Mac was born, the power of the computer was laid before “the rest of us,” and nothing was the same again. The Mac beget MacWrite and MacPaint, and Pagemaker, and the Laserwriter (now do you remember?) and suddenly there was a print revolution called Desktop Publishing. Suddenly, all the technology of the publishing industry could sit on somebody's kitchen table.

The very first book ever published with these new tools was Zen & the Art of the Macintosh. It was 1985, and the author was an artist...and author...and graphic designer...and all those other things...named Michael Green. He was all those other things because now he could be all those other things. But it was a steep learning curve, so Zen & the Art broke lots of rules. Type and pictures kept intruding on each other, pages sometimes looked like magazine ads and then like comic books and then spay-painted grafitti. Fonts kept changing, and in general the book was all over the place, just to show what it looks like when “technology becomes an extension of our central nervous system.”

Traditional designers were disturbed.

Zen & the Art became an instant cult favorite of the new Mac community.

Playboy called Zen “A new bible, a digital rite of passage.” Apple and MacWorld awarded it the first “Desktop Publisher of the Year” award. And Byte Magazine declared, “The future of desktop publishing.”

Was it? Now all publishing is “desktop publishing.” On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Zen, Michael Green and Running Press (the original publisher of Zen) announce MIchael Green’s latest book

Like ZEN, ONE SONG shows what a one-man show can do, and like ZEN, ONE SONG uses the power of the silicon chip to give wings to the spirit. But a whole lot has happened in twenty years. ZEN was an ode to the brand-new black and white creative powers of MacPaint, while ONE SONG unrolls all the subtle elegance of full-color Photoshop. And ONE SONG joins the sonic world of i-Pod and Garageband with a music CD bundled inside.

All done–how else? on a Mac. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Press Release

Book and Music Celebrate

the Twentieth Anniversary of Macintosh’s Publishing Revolution

Media response to ZEN & the Art of the Macintosh

Michael Green takes command of the Macintosh as surely as a Zen painter handles a brush. The result is a revelatory approach to computing.

–Steve Levy, columnist for Newsweek

The breakthrough book of the Macintosh Age. The new medium has finally found its Leonardo.”

–Howard Rheingold, author & editor, Whole Earth Catalogue

“Zen and the Art of the Macintosh realizes what we all thought was possible when the Mac first came out. Picture and word combine to create a totally new language. This book is for everyone, not just the MacPartisan.”

–Jeffrey Young,

founding editor of MacWorld