Sketchy.

One of the great joys of my life in a life that, despite my lugubrious mien has many, is abebooks.com. Though abe sold itself to amazon back in 2008, and I despise amazon and its non-tax-paying owner, trillionaire jeff bezos, I still shop there. That’s the beauty of today’s monopolies. Standard Oil could sell their petroleum only once. Armor and Swift could sell their cows and hogs only once. Amazon can sell your data forever. Your pixelized corpus is their playground.

They hear cah-ching.

You get cah-ass-fucked.

For thirty years abebooks has aggregated the collections of hundreds or thousands of small independent book stores. Somehow those book stores have cataloged and priced every book they own. According to the latest information I could find, which is from 2006, abe claimed an inventory of over 80-million books, selling 25,000 books every day.

Most often you can find what you're looking for, at a stupidly-low-price, in nano-seconds. About a week after ordering it, that is, clicking a few buttons, it shows up on your doorstep. Maybe an especially enamored reader of my jottings will someday send me something special, you know, out of gratitude. Or not.

Last week, Brian Burch of LinkedIn acclaim, and I had a DM interaction. Brian mentioned a couple of books by Milton Glaser. I'm never one to turn down an excuse to buy another book, and thanks to Brian's recommendations, I bought half-a-dozen in two-shakes of an ICE-agent's taser.

BTW, here's what I mean about the splendors of abebooks.

I got this, in very good condition on nice thick paper, and beautifully-produced for $3.59. (Shipping cost $4.99.)

Last week I wrote a post about a collection of famous thinkers' notebooks. I showed pictures of Isaac Newton's college scribbles (in Latin). Albert Einstein's 1912 Theory of Relativity in German. And scribbles by Alan Turing on the Enigma code and Johnny von Neumann on designing ENIAC, in good old fashioned English.

Brian had written that Glaser's "Sketch & Finish" did a similar job in showing the "thought patterns" of Glaser. How he worked and adjusted and made changes along the way. The cover illustrations below show you something of that journey. But there are 165 pages of them in all. So you get eighty or so examples of starting "here" and getting "there."

I'll admit (though I don't get a vote) I like some of Glaser's sketches more than I like some of his finishes. But that's not really the point. The point is to never stop thinking. Another point is, if Glaser works hard at making things better, at improving his work, why aren't you. Or worse, why are you trusting AI to take over.

I also ordered this book by Glaser, "Drawing is Thinking." While the price was higher for this book, there was no shipping charge. The whole kit-n-kaboodle cost about what a tuna sal-sand would cost at Pret-a-Manger. Unlike a  tuna sal-sand at Pret-a-Manger, it ain't stale.

There are 204 drawings in the book. That means you can own the book for 7.33 cents/drawing. You won't have to tolerate my snapshots.

There was a time when if you worked at an agency, there would be people bringing in books like these. Or you'd see a special reel or portfolio. You'd get exposed to things that weren't algorithmically-fed. We're not that lucky today. 

As Dorothy Parker is said to have said about Katharine Hepburn’s acting, “She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.” With the pattern-matching suggestions of today’s web—we go down some very limited rabbit holes. 

Today we can potentially see everything that's ever been done in a virtual instant. However we don't bother to find something we haven't seen before or something that isn't winning awards right now. 

Somehow, 7¢ a drawing is more than we want to pay. 

We certainly couldn't expense it through the agency.

We lost something when we stopped sketching.

And working.

And starting over from scratch.

And starting over from scratch.

And starting over from scratch.

And thinking.