Category: General

I’ve been reading late into the night recently, which would be okay if I wasn’t having trouble keeping straight which line I’m on. I thought at first I didn’t have a strong enough light, but I’m pretty sure it’s time to admit that my eyes are the problem and I need to see an eye doctor about glasses (although my sister swears by her drug store reading glasses, so maybe I’ll try those first!) Or maybe I should try this pointing finger bookmark I saw first mentioned on swiss miss — unfortunately it comes from this website (25togo.com) which is mostly in Chinese, and I can’t quite figure out how to buy one!

And the winner is Shelly with “growth of daughter, self, business, life.” It was very great to see all the comments about making books in the new year! Oh and what I’m looking forward to this year is pack, unpack, paint, arrange, settle in.

This winter my husband & I are moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico. We’re in the process of selling our house in California and packing up — not just our clothes and furniture but in my case a studio full of paper and old heavy printing equipment, and for my husband boxes and boxes of car-related stuff. As I sift through all my belongings, I’ve looked anew at the myriad collections I’ve acquired over time. I’ve written about 2 of them — my artist’s books and perfume bottles — that were amassed with some forethought. But most of them are haphazard at best — a set of plastic chairs (started by a gift from my friend Cathy), pictures of chairs (mostly green), paper coasters (started in college and collected from bars, later expanded to include letterpress coasters from other printers), small plastic dinosaurs, all the patches I got from finishing organized bike rides…. well, you get the idea.
So as I ponder my stashes, I’ve been following Lisa Congdon’s new blog, A Collection a Day, where she “will photograph or draw (and occasionally paint) one collection” a day during 2010 (those are her erasers above). She says “Since I was a young girl, I have been obsessed both with collecting and with arranging, organizing and displaying my collections.” While mine are mostly organized, they are in (mostly forgotten) boxes, so I hope I use this move into a new studio and a new house to find places to display more of my own accumulated assortment of stuff!

Today, Jan 10, is Powers of 10 Day. As described on wikipedia:

Powers of Ten is a 1977 American documentary short film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten … [and] begins with a view of an man and woman picnicking in a park, which settles on an one-meter-square overhead image of the man reclining on a blanket. The viewpoint, accompanied by expository voiceover by Philip Morrison, then slowly zooms out to a view ten meters across (or 10¹ m in scientific notation). The zoom-out continues (at a rate of one power of ten per 10 seconds), to a view of 100 meters (10² m), then 1 kilometer (10³ m), and so on, increasing the perspective—the picnic is revealed to be taking place in Burnham Park, near Soldier Field on Chicago’s lakefront—and continuing to zoom out to a field of view of 10²⁴ meters, or the size of the observable universe. The camera then zooms back in at a rate of a power of ten per 2 seconds to the picnic, and then slows back down to its original rate into the man’s hand, to views of negative powers of ten—10^-1 m (10 centimeters), and so forth—until the camera comes to quarks in a proton of a carbon atom at 10⁻¹⁶ meter.

To celebrate powers of 10 and the new year, I’m giving away a copy of my artist’s book A Word on Statistics. It uses a 10×10 grid to illustrate Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, a playful look at numbers and human nature. To enter, tell me what you’re looking forward to this coming year, in exactly 6 words, in the comments below. Contest ends Wednesday January 13 at 7am (PT), when I’ll select a commenter at random.
In the meantime, you can see the movie, Powers of 10, here.

The lifehacker blog has a list of 16 “most popular DIY projects of 2009” — and 3 of them are book related (they don’t comment on why they selected these particular 16…)

From left to right:
Turn a Bookshelf into a Secret Passage
Invisible floating bookshelves
Make an inverted bookshelf

Books, Paper, Scissors posts pictures of books, book cases and paper art, like the one on the left, on her blog. To get a quick idea of what she posts, see her picture archive.