Edward Tufte is most likely the world’s only graphic designer with roadies.

... on the road, selling steadily, a few gigs a month, year after year ... six-and-a-half-hour presentations, the audience starts cheering when he hits the floor ... "500 people want to talk afterwards, and I’ve exhausted myself ... I have to go hide out. Otherwise it takes hours."

If you are making a presentation, you can probably say everything you need to on a single folded sheet of eleven-by-seventeen copy paper, and you ought to.

Beautiful Evidence is all that and more. Here's Business Week:

"Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence is a masterpiece from a pioneer in the field of data visualization. His book is brilliant. The Galileo of graphics has done it again. It's not often an iconoclast comes along, trashes the old ways, and replaces them with an irresistible new interpretation. By teasing out the sublime from the seemingly mundane world of charts, graphs, and tables, Tufte has proven to a generation of graphic designers that great thinking begets great presentation. In Beautiful Evidence, his fourth work on analytical design, Tufte digs more deeply into art and science to reveal very old connections between truth and beauty -- all the way from Galileo to Google."

"Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence is a masterpiece from a pioneer in the field of data visualization. His book is brilliant. The Galileo of graphics has done it again. It's not often an iconoclast comes along, trashes the old ways, and replaces them with an irresistible new interpretation. By teasing out the sublime from the seemingly mundane world of charts, graphs, and tables, Tufte has proven to a generation of graphic designers that great thinking begets great presentation. In Beautiful Evidence, his fourth work on analytical design, Tufte digs more deeply into art and science to reveal very old connections between truth and beauty -- all the way from Galileo to Google."

I have two of Tufte's books, and, yes, that Minard print hanging on my wall as well... the difference between a well designed information graphic and the garbage we're used to seeing is quite astounding. I suppose I shall have to add Beautiful Evidence to my purchace list...