‘Jonathan Safran Foer, deftly deploys sculptural means to craft a truly compelling story. In our world of screens, he welds narrative, materiality, and our reading experience into a book that remembers that it actually has a body.’ – Olafur Eliasson
Image courtesy of Visual Editions
Image courtesy of Visual Editions
I love Jonathan Safran Foer. To be accurate in my assertion, I should rather say that I love his words: The words he pulls together into sentences that strike my heart with their sincerity. (There are too many to reproduce here without infringing Foer’s copyright so you can read some here or here, and then, of course, you can buy his books.)
Now, it isn’t Foer’s words that astound me. Now, it’s the way he’s used someone else’s words to construct his own story. Foer has taken his favourite book The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, and literally carved it into a new book –Tree of Codes.
The strap line of Visual Editions, the publisher of Tree of Codes, is ‘Great looking stories’. And when Vanity Fair asked Foer what inspired the design for Tree of Codes, he responded with: ‘What if you pushed it to the extreme, and created something not old-fashioned or nostalgic but just beautiful? It helps you remember that life can surprise you.’ The result of this collaboration is an artefact that reminds us of the delight we can obtain from the physicality of books.
I have yet to hold a copy of the book, but it is quite evident from online pictures and videos that Visual Editions had their work cut out for them:
I don’t think I need to rattle off reasons for including it in my birthday list. In short, I think Tree of Codes looks magnificent and if it made it into my gift pile (I can only hope for a pile), I would be overjoyed.
We recently brought this beautiful Morris chair home.
I did a bit of Internet research on my new piece of furniture, and discovered that not only was it originally designed way back in the late 1800s, BUT some famous people have also sung about it. And, as we all know, a chair that makes it into a ditty is a chair to be cherished. In her cover of Irving Berlin’s ‘You'd Be Surprised’, Marilyn Monroe sings: ‘At a party/Or at a ball/I've got to admit/He's nothing at all/But in a Morris chair/You'd be surprised.’ Barbara Streisand’s version of ‘My Honey’s Lovin’ Arms’ goes: ‘A cozy Morris chair/What kind of chair is a Morris chair?’
So there you go. What I love most about it is not its cultural footing, though. I love:
1.that it is so very, very comfortable;
2.that its arms are wide enough to rest a cup of tea;
Today, it is five weeks to my birthday. Yesterday I was asked for my birthday list. Inevitably, my actual list will probably contain a lot of practical items (a set of decent pots – my R300 set is going to the, ahem, pot – and perhaps some winter clothing). But, as a medium of self-expression and self-indulgence, this blog seems the ideal place for a little extravagance. For the next few weeks, I will be posting gifts that I would buy myself if I were my own over-achieving, gift-buying friend.
This set is not actually available (yet), but the idea is for it to be available in the font of your choice or with an assorted font pack. I am a terribly indecisive, non-committal person when it comes to consumer goods (and Saturday night plans), so I would prefer the assorted pack.
