Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Tree explores the forms, uses, and alliances of this living object's entanglement with humanity, from antiquity to the present. Trees tower over us and yet fade into background. Their lifespan outstrips ours, and yet their wisdom remains inscrutable, treasured up in the heartwood. They serve us in many ways-as keel, lodgepole, and execution site-and yet to become human, we had to come down from their limbs. In this book Matthew Battles follows the tree's branches across art, poetry, and landscape, marking the edges of imagination with wildness and shadow.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Matthew Battles is Associate Director of the metaLAB and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, USA. His previous publications include Library: an Unquiet History (2004), The Sovereignties of Invention (2012) and Library Beyond the Book (2014).

Part One: Feral Trees
The Tree of Heaven
In a Dappled World
A branching Heuristic
Part Two: Garden and Forest
In the Tree Museum
From Ailanthus to Apple
The Charter of the Forests
Part Three: A Dark Abundance
The Tree and/in History
With and Without Us
Notes
Index