I spent 3 hours in the bookstore yesterday. Picked up some essays by David Mamet, letters by Ellbert Hubbard, Yoko Ono’s
Grapefruit and this exciting little book of cat graffiti by
Nasimoawesome!. Each plate is a postcard based on a letter of the alphabet.
The hard part is deciding what to do with the postcards. It always gets my ambivalence boiling when I come across postcards I really like…
It’s a postcard. It’s function should be fulfilled by being sent by post! No! It’s a miniature art reproduction. It should be framed and enjoyed everyday! No! It’s a carefully designed book, a collection meant to stay intact, otherwise they wouldn’t have bound them in a book! But the pages are perforated, in fact, the stiffness of the cards makes it difficult to even look at the cards without them breaking out. Fine, take them out and put them on the wall! And leave the empty husk of a book cover to do what? I don’t know, mount that to the wall as well! But what about the joy and surprise they could bring others if they were to be mailed? … (blink, blink) … … Mount them to the wall or use it to keep the dust off your book shelf, I must go, the cat needs feeding and grooming.
I’ll settle those three out later, after they’ve had their tea and calmed down.
Other observations of the day from the bookstore.
- Spending three hours of a Sunday afternoon browsing a good bookstore is always a rewarding and enlightening experience. Loafing through the internet for three hours on a Sunday afternoon seldom comes with such an inherent feeling of time well spent. Conclusion: Browsing bookstores is a guaranteed good time.
- I enjoyed seeing some graffiti kids dash in, making a quick, suspicious looking bee line for the street art books. There were three and they excitedly flipped through a stack and tumbled over each other in hurried and hushed conversation. The best part was that there was paint on their hands, not even dry! I saw one kid absentmindedly leave a smudge in one of the books. Unintentionally tagged.
- It’s much more satisfying to have the clerk comment on your selections and ask if you also like/read “so and so”, as compared to your Amazonian big sibling giving you a literary fortune telling but not being able to tell you what kind of jam she/he/it likes with her/his/its toast while reading Steinbeck.
