Hello!

This is an excerpt from a recent message to my email list, known as the Society of the Double Dagger, currently 12,000 subscribers strong. I send these messages infrequently and I try to make each one feel like a note from a friend. I've never cross-posted one before, and I don't intend to start, so if this feels like the kind of thing you'd like to receive, I invite you sign up at my website.

I enjoy walking into a bookstore and finding what I'm looking for; let’s start with that. I also enjoy walking into a bookstore and finding something I didn't know I wanted. Naturally. But what I like best of all is walking into a bookstore and finding a book I could not have obtained anywhere else. (Immediately you are thinking of antiquarian showrooms, of priceless grimoires haggled over, but that's not what I mean, and in fact -- this might shock you -- I don't really like those places at all. Of course I like the idea of them, but in reality I find them off-putting, because they sacrifice one of the great principles of print and publishing, which is: access. Democracy!)

So, what I mean is that I like finding a normal book at a normal price that's either (a) way out of print, or (b) extremely regional, or (c) in some other respect somehow… shall we say site-specific? Specific to that day, that store, that shelf.

A tale, now, of my summer's two great bookstore finds.

For weeks, I'd been on an amorphous hunt, tracking down artifacts that fit a chimerical fusion of technology, era, and ~vibe~. The root of it was my memories of the early 90s desktop publishing aesthetic: the look and feel of magazines and Macintosh computers when I was in my early teens.

(This gets a little specific, and if at any point you find yourself fuzzing out, feel free to scroll down to the next thing, which I will mark far below with a subway cat.)

My hunt was interrupted by a two-week trip to Amsterdam and northern France. (About which, by the way: Amsterdam was one of those places I almost feared, because I suspected I'd like it so much. I was right to do so; I liked it a LOT. One morning, up before dawn, my body clock still hovering somewhere above Greenland, I made a ring around the city's central canals, everything quiet, shrouded in fog. I carried a Dunkin Donuts coffee obtained at the central train station and: it was one of the best city walks of my life. Even on that walk, though: I was thinking about 90s Macs.) So, when I discovered a huge, multistory bookstore in Amsterdam with an inventory split evenly between Dutch and English, I thought, well, why not investigate. I rode the escalator to the design section and poked around and found:



Now, this book isn't some limited-edition treasure; you can buy it online. But I guarantee you I would never have found it anywhere but this bookstore. It's one of those catalogs produced to accompany a museum exhibit. It's heavy, it's glossy, it's PHAIDON. Not, on the face of it, quite my thing. But when I cracked it open: ah! There was my chimerical quarry, all parts accounted for. Perfect.

There was the original WIRED aesthetic, the magazine's designers reveling in new capabilities, casting legibility gleefully aside:



There was Emigre, a magazine of design criticism that was new to me. I've since learned it was published (a) in Berkeley, probably less than two miles from where I live, and (b) by a group of Dutch expats, which made this encounter in Amsterdam feel poetic. Emigre was a platform for raucous debate about design's function and future, blazing with typographic experimentation:



The magazine was put together Macs, some of the first to be used for that purpose. Digital fonts were in short supply, so one of the magazine's founders, Zuzana Licko, began to craft them herself: bitmap fonts, WYSIWIG-ready, pixel-perfect. Soon, subscribers began to ask, where can I buy those fonts?, and a business model was born: a cult magazine supported by font sales!

In this book, bitmaps abounded.

There were Susan Kare's original Mac icon designs, drawn on graph paper:



What a dream.

It wasn't all digital; this book showcased the 1984 Olympics in LA, the (almost painfully) 80s clothing brand ESPRIT, and much, much more. It became a map, pointing the way to other books I ought to hunt down. I carried it home and started a stack.

And.

There's an artwork featured in California: Designing Freedom that's now shown up in several more volumes and I've become convinced it deserves a firmer spot -- a taller pedestal? -- in the history of art, design, computers, everything.

For an issue of Design Quarterly in 1986, April Greiman used a Mac to create a sprawling composition -- a massive, multi-fold poster more than six feet long and two feet tall. Its design and production tested the limits of her new tools.

It's called "Does It Make Sense?" and I strongly suspect reproductions don't do it justice, to say nothing of reproductions of reproductions, but that's the best we can do, so:



Here's some more background on the poster's production, from the AIGA's biography of Greiman:

The process of integrating digitized video images and bitmapped type was not unlike pulling teeth in the early days of Macintosh and MacDraw. The files were so large, and the equipment so slow that she would send the file to print when she left the studio in the evening and it would just be finished when she returned in the morning.

(The AIGA's biography describes many of the elaborate details hiding in "Does It Make Sense?" and provides a fuller description of Greiman's career; I recommend it.)

I'm floored that Greiman made this image at the time she did, with the spark of possibility just freshly struck, working without templates, without guidebooks, without any assurance it was even possible. And the result is so stunning! It's complex and confident and BIG. To my eye, "Does It Make Sense?" would fit neatly in an exhibition alongside one of Salvador Dalí's huge, dense canvases; maybe "The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus." (Did Dalí ever use a Mac? What a thought…)

So the sequence runs: from amorphous hunt, to lucky discovery, to further reading, to new entry in personal canon. That's what I'm talking about. That's what I want out of my bookstore finds!

‡

I am placing a subway cat here as a marker for the people who fuzzed out.



‡

There was a second great find in Amsterdam, this one in a tiny shop called Gallery Boekie Woekie that I spotted across the street and zipped over to investigate. The smell inside was thicker and mustier than any I've ever encountered in a bookstore, which is saying a lot; walking in, the cellulosic matter was just ALL UP in my nose, possibly tickling the base of my brain. The shop was heavy on zines, art books, limited editions, things like that. If it offered a book, it generally offered just one of that book, and it felt like that one had come a long way and passed through many hands to get there. THESE WERE NOT PRICELESS GRIMOIRES! Just… wanderers.

There at Boekie Woekie, on a low shelf, I found this book, published in Japan, called Sunday.



That's as much as I can discern using Google Translate, but it's not a problem, because the book is wordless. Using pictures alone, it presents, page by page, the drama of a young person… CLEANING THEIR ROOM!

Here's just a small sampling of the progression, and

can



you



even



handle



how cute it is??

Even more than the California design book, this, to me, is the exemplary bookstore find. Would I ever, ever have encountered this book had I not dashed across the street into Boekie Woekie and breathed its air? No way. That day, that store, that shelf. And who knows what it might now inspire?

‡

Two more. These aren't bookstore finds, but they’re the books currently on my mind, so I wanted to share them. Behold, my almost-done and my starting-next:




New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson imagines a future Manhattan partially drowned by rising sea levels, a kind of SuperVenice in which people still live in the buildings downtown, now connected by ferries that zip through the city's new canals. It's a vision of how we'll live with a changed climate, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, just rich and real -- and really quite fun! The novel is full of astonishingly-imagined details and perfectly-realized voices: the trader, the inspector, the diver, the airship captain. I'm a little more than halfway through, enjoying it hugely.

Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi begins with an irresistible premise: ghosts are real; so too is the underworld; and the year is 1938, so naturally, the British Empire in all its might is there among the dead, vying against the Soviet Union using a network of spies that spans both worlds.

I mean!!

What takes any book of Hannu's to the next level, though, is the way he matches imagination to rigor. In all his novels, there's an incredible combination of soaring, pirouetting vision and clockwork "how would that actually WORK?"-ness, and for me, it's utter catnip. You'll find no handwaving in the Hannu-verse, only the pleasure of puzzles followed to their conclusion.

I can't wait to start Summerland.

‡

That's all I have to tell you today, O dark and potent Society of the Double Dagger. Thanks, as always, for following along, and thanks even more for your feedback and support.

From Berkeley,

Robin