British-born illustrator David Macaulay is best-known for books like Castle and City, where he used his talent for detailed black and white pen and ink drawings to lay bare the mechanics and architecture of his subjects, revealing their inner workings.
In 1979, though, he turned his hand to something altogether different. Motel of the Mysteries, set hundreds of years after the vaguely-explained cataclysm that wiped out all life on the North American continent in 1985 (and which was seemingly due to an environmental chain reaction caused by the accidental lowering of postage rates for third- and fourth-class mail), purports to detail the discovery of a temple complex of the “ancient world” (the motel of the title) and its subsequent excavation and study.
