> Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book.
Agreed, its absolutely excellent. Thanks to Y Combinator for listing it in the book list.
> Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information...
Not agreed. In my opinion you might have missed what I felt was a main point of that book: Always learn the appropriate statistics required to understand the data, choose a correct visualization method to communicate those statistics effectively, and once you've understood it fully, confirmed the results, and removed all the cruft, then publish it.