Friday Fun-Time.

There was a time when agencies and even some creative people bought books.

I mean real, actual books. Things you could stub your toe on. Not just ones and zeroes.

I still do.

At the bottom of it all, I'm afraid like most decent creative people, of having an assignment, project, pitch or major undertaking and coming up like an empty fishhook, having caught nothing.

Not even a skein of ratty seaweed or a Coney Island whitefish.

If you'd like to come up to my office in Connecticut, you're welcome, assuming you don't stay too long and you have good manners and don't dirty the guest towels.

You can visit my books.

My office is also my library. Most important my restorative niche. Where, like Wordsworth, I go when the "World is to much with us."  Which is practically always.

My "surround-sound" bookshelves are still only half occupied, I haven't fully transported my things from my city apartment. But in Connecticut, I still have a thousand good books. Many of them picture books. 

I like picture books. Particularly those published by Taschen, like the one I took pages from below. I spend a lot on books. But if I get one smile per book, or one idea per one-hundred books, they've more than paid for themselves.

We live in a world of "in-flight announcements." Where you're ordered about with little kindness often at the top of some petty bureaucrat's voice. Books give me something more.

Joy.

I know I am lugubrious by nature. And in my posts I can lay on the sturm und drang in such a way as to make Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung look like "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies. 

Consider today's post an apologia. 

I don't mean to be a dour son a bitch. I was born this way. And I'm doing pretty good for a poor boy who had thirty stitches in his his face by the time he was four. 

Self-portrait in pixels.

And btw, don't be a stranger. Tell me in the comments which album cover below is your favorite. You can be deep-dish about it and analyze it like a graphic designer, or you can just say, "I like the colors." Both are good.

For me, it's "Anatomy of a Murder." The design is Saul Bass, the music is Ellington. And the Otto Preminger movie has Lee Remick in tight pants. As they say, PC or not, hubba hubba.

BTW, if you give a damn, you can buy the book below for $18.34 plus $3.99 for shipping if you click here. By my calculations, that's half of a week's worth of Starbucks, half your weekly subway fare and probably less than five-percent of your monthly cable bill.

Boo shop be bop.