The blind eye
Welcome to the second installment of my newsletter. This fortnight I've been digging into book collecting, design, and the plays of Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot.
Dan sharing his decades of book collection experience with our class.
This past Saturday I had the privilege of attending "book school" at my favorite local independent bookshop, the Printed Page. We gathered before the shop opened and were treated to a class on how to identify, preserve, care for, and collect both modern and antique books. Interestingly we learned about something called a Blindstamp, also colloquially known as the "blind eye", which is a small impression stamped into the cover that can indicate the difference between a regular hardcover or a book club edition of the hardcover. Book club editions are far less valuable than the original in almost all cases.
Another interesting tidbit, did you know that lighter fluid is frequently used to clean stickers off of the dust jacket of a book? Just check to make sure no one happens to be smoking around you whilst cleaning.
Why is there a level of "sameness" in design recently? If someone asked you to pick an example of something that looked too "same-y" in the realm of design, what would you pick? Cars? Housing? Café interiors? Turns out it's not just one thing that looks the same, it's all of them. Welcome to the age of average.
How then, does someone escape monotony in design? Two immediate causes spring to my mind. First, the internet as a source of inspiration tends to "demolish space", meaning that inspiration that may have been localized is now globalized. Second, designing objects is frequently a race-to-zero-cost experience where beauty is a welcome but not required byproduct; after all, why invest in a potentially expensive-but-beautiful design over one already vetted by a large community?
Perhaps a better source of inspiration isn't one tied to the internet, but instead one where the beauty of the design says or "discovers" something about the natural world and the telos of its inhabitants. What do you think?
Delilah and I have been very much enjoying this series of nine video classes (documentaries? lectures?) about Playing Shakespeare put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984. In the program John Barton works with many famous actors like Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, David Suchet, Judi Dench, Ben Kingsley, and many others to demonstrate the variety of different considerations when performing Shakespeare as an actor. Very highly recommended to anyone with an interest in The Bard.
It turns out that the the Pink Panther theme is a useful tool for teaching about not only English weak forms, but also the rhythm of Shakespeare's iambic pentameter.
Rhys Laverty's notes as he goes through "Shakespeare in a year" are wonderful to read, he picks out some of the more theological points of the plays and ties some of the larger themes together.
Speaking of plays, I enjoyed this breakdown of one of the major themes in T.S. Eliot's play The Cocktail Party. Eliot is my favorite poet, and this did inspire me to pick up a copy (okay, okay, a second copy) of his plays to dive in to this one in particular. Note that there are some minor spoilers for the play in the post, so be aware if you were planning on reading it yourself.