Benjamin, Walter, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, New York, Schocken Books, 1968, pp. 217-51.

Benjamin investigates the cultural ramifications of
the ability to reproduce rare works of art thousands
of times. Such multiplication gains a work of art more
viewers but also questions the value of the original.
Benjamin wonders about the meaning of this development.

Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford University Press, 1990.

Burke crystallizes seventy-five years of writing on
the sublime with this treatise. He sums up the current
ideas on why stimuli, especially literary and
rhetorical, affect humans.

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, Basic Books, 1983.

Cowan was awarded the Dexter Prize from the Society
of the History of Technology for this...