This book is, most importantly, completely enjoyable, funny, and moving.

Secondly it is collaborative to a degree that is utopian. The book has innumerable authors, it was written by the taxi drivers of New York city. The person credited with authorship had a role more akin to that of senior editor. The design functions to bring a clarity and vividness to what could have been a forgettable list of aphorisms. Every scrap of taxi driver wisdom is set in all-caps on its own page, with a caption at the top (all lower case) that serves to provide a context and add an (often hilarious) spin. The pages are yellow, the text black: the book has the clarity of a MEN WORKING sign. The wisdom is set on the right (recto) accompanied by a photo on the left. The photographs are generally subtle and well-chosen. There are no photos of the taxi driver's faces, though we see the back of their heads and their hands on the steering wheel. It is difficult for me to emphasize enough the importance of the design, because, like good book design, it lubricates and delivers and foregrounds the intention of the book. Obviously the leatheresque cover with ribbon bookmark is a classy touch though.

The book adddresses the potentially awkward fact that the author is using and being credited with and (one hopes) receiving royalties for other people's words: "A PORTION OF THE PROCEEDS OF THIS BOOK WILL GO TOWARD REALLY BIG TIPS."

This book risks being an empty and condescending collection of quotes taken out of context, aimed, as it is, toward an audience of New York intellectuals who probably have no respect for cab drivers. However, I think it is respectful, scintillating, utopian. It is literature by people who don't write, in which the author served as facilitator, and the designer made it into art.

Not that the editor/author is, in the end, reverent toward the taxi drivers. The affectionate dig at the taxi drivers is not that they are not smart people: the author convices me that they are brilliant and sensitive thinkers, capable of anything except, perhaps, being good taxi drivers.

You might consider this volume a novelty - a coffee table book. Or you might ask what is literature?