Nothing defines postmodernism so well as its refusal of depth, its emphasis on appearance and spectacle, its tendency to collapse a three-dimensional world in which image and reality are distinct into a two-dimensional world in which they merge. The postmodern world, Taylor argues, is a world of surfaces, and the postmodern condition is one of profound superficiality.

For many cultural commentators, postmodernism's inescapable play of surfaces is cause for despair. Taylor, on the other hand, shows that the disappearance of depth in postmodern culture is actually a liberation replete with creative possibilities. Taylor introduces readers to a popular culture in which detectives -- the postmodern heroes of Paul Auster and Dennis Potter -- lift surfaces only to find more surfaces, and in which fashion advertising plays transparency against hiding. Taylor looks at the contemporary preoccupation with body piercing and tattooing, and asks whether these practices actually reveal or conceal. Phrenology and skin diseases, the "religious" architecture of Las Vegas, the limitless spread of computer networks -- all are brought within the scope of Taylor's brilliant analysis. Postmodernism, he shows, has given us a new sense ofthe superficial, one in which the issue is not the absence of meaning but its uncontrollable, ecstatic proliferation.

Embodying the very tendencies it analyzes, Hiding is unique. Conceived and developed with well-known designers Michael Rock and Susan Sellers, this work transgresses the boundary that customarily separates graphic design from the story within a text. The product of nearly three decades of reflection and writing, Hiding opens a window on contemporary culture. To follow the remarkable course Taylor charts is to see both our present and our past differently and to encounter a future as disorienting as it is alluring.

"Taylor takes it to the limit, pedal to the metal. His designers take the book-as-machine -- the ink on paper codex as a text-storage unit -- to its physical limit. He himself takes a set of two-hundred-year-old ideas to their intellectual limit and finds that they carry him to corners of our science-shaped culture that no other vehicle can reach. Sit back, reader -- no, buckle down: You're in for a wild ride". -- From The Foreword by Jack Miles, Author of God: a Biography