Atticus, New Haven

This is what happens when you want these things even when you dont need them. Photos after photos of simple, beautiful things I saw at Atticus, a book store-cum-coffee shop in New Haven, attached to the Yale British Art Center. 

I observed the messages, typographic appeal, artistic quality, paper quality, size, neatness, packaging, content of books, ideas behind presenting them, form o the books, postcards, cartoons, innovative cards -- so much. For a moment, it felt that I could make some too, but the more I absorb, the more I get stuck, since a strange feeling keeps paralyzing me. I keep thinking: "Wow, is this also done?"

Many of the seemingly witty messages on these cards/books are quite wise actually. They are pretty deep. There were interesting books that I would have bought. The drawing book, "712 More things to Draw" certainly. It is a blank book with a word and space for it to be expressed visually. I have often done that exercise for myself without such a book (or sometimes done it as exercises in my graphics representation classes back when I was teaching at AoA). But it was refreshing to actually see it into a book form. Another was a book that had no writing at all, rather icons through which you figure the message. I found it equivalent to the modern day heiroglyphs. And also, it connects to the numerous puzzles that are forwarded over applications like whatsapp where a string of icons are being asked to decipher different messages! Hasn't emoticons already begun to take a prominent place in our day to day messaging over electronic interfaces? I found it fascinating to have a whole book of merely "emoticons".

The two small postcards with cartoons are actually from The New Yorker. I clicked one for the form, and the other for its content. "The only thing we didn't plan for was Love" - that nearly killed me for it's message. I could write an essay on that image, for it brings business and emotion together, modernism and irrationality, objectivity and subjectivity on the same plane. The cartoon on 'Useful Degrees' is more of a cultural statement for the US, but applies everywhere, and well said too.

But then I decided, that even re-doing them by myself would be an interesting exercise. So I took pictures to remind myself to go ahead and get myself in action. There is still a lot to learn, if not to be done.

As one of the books spells: "Do one thing every day that scares you." (the book is a diary for the year to note down what scary thing you did each day, with interesting quotations all along).