Dear friends,
Call it fate, call it karma…
…but we have acquired a magnificent collection of Folio Society and nature books. If you were to painstakingly design a collection of books tailored to our taste in designed book objects, you could hardly do better. Sure, there are other subjects and other collections that might equal one comprised of Folio and nature books (as our top-shelf tastes are admittedly a mile-wide), but this library is surely one of the prettiest we’ve seen. It came to us via Rubbermaid bins, lidded tubs packed with back-breaking, slip-cased wonders, ready for the taking. Going through them is half the fun, though. Tallying the damage they affected on our buying budget was a Sadeian pleasure of pain. Those colourful illustrated buckram covers! Books on seeds! THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY IN FOLIO EDITION! Our zeal for this pile of gorgeously designed text is downright perverted. Perverted by beauty. Perverted by the simple, carnal, and bibliophilic delights of conspicuous book consumption.
Look, we rarely get our backs arched by objects. We’re conceptional nerds. We like ideas. We like jokes. But put them all together in a lovely leather-bound package, and you’ve got our distracted attention. This one was a beaut. All of our lefty posturing flew out of the window. OBJECTS HAVE VALUE! ALL HAIL THE MARKETPLACE! After calming ourselves down and reminding ourselves that we blessedly run a reuse-it store and hold a slightly smaller carbon footprint than the average coal-guzzling bear, we got to work. Just the sound of those books sliding out of that slipcase…mmmmm…it’s heavenly. It’s feels morally bankrupt, it’s so good. Like, how conspicuous can our consumption be?
They have pretty pictures of flowers in them.
You might think we are being snarky but we are not. We love these books. We apologize to no one. It’s like that night a dedicated communist showed up to Jason’s old apartment and guilted him for having a cat: “It’s so bourgeois of you to keep an animal as a possession.” He was not invited back.
Look, we really do think resources should be affordable and available to everyone, but we love our pets. We love our cups of tea. We love our garden, and we love our garden books. We love our slip-cased edition of Euclid’s Elements (although we don’t understand a word of it). All of these loves and ideals can live side-by-side in our minds, devoted and determined, like a dysfunctional family crammed into a small, awkward house, just trying to make it through the year. Want to find a place in your mind where there is space and silence and loveliness?
Much love,
Jason & Vanessa
