Got great coffee table books?
Sometimes instead of scrolling the screen, we might want to just slouch on a comfortable couch, pop our feet up on a coffeetable and take one of these into our hands, physically turning a page. I love that tactile sensation of a piece of paper we move with our own fingers, maybe rubbing the edges a few times or sliding the the corners turning a page – that motion borne out of our unconscious mind to get onto the next page. So automatic but intentional.
Whatever we do to assure that we didn’t skip a page is such a quiet nothing-to-it motion, a ho-hum act. Before the bound manuscripsts and print pages in ancient Japan, the educated unrolled the scroll of rice paper thus, the writing moved from top to bottom, from right to left. Probably it all began as a letter, a message from one educated to another educated – those who can read and write were select elites.
Now most of us are literate and most of us are educated ? Educated? Or so we’d like to think and goodness gracious. Hopefully reading is no longer an ativity exclusively by the elites or the holy. For the most part, I like to believe knowledges is now shared democratically, to anyone who seeks it. I’d like to believe that it is not monopolized by the few powerful but an opportunity to learn and thrive is given to all.
That of course includes are access to the screens. Today we embrace the screens; but there’s something special about holding a physical book in your hands, having it on your lap … the sense of unfolding slowly taking place right in your own hands.
Don’t think it’s ever going to go out of style … but okay, maybe for the priviledged who can afford to give it the time and the single most precious and scarce resource of all – that being – our attention.
Coffee table books are as nightstand books are … intriguing, aren’t they?
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
The Big Book of Belonging by Thames & Hudson
Great Women Painters, Phaidon
Great Women Designers, Phaidon
My Tiny Atlas, Our World Through Your Eyes by Emily Nathan
The Monocle Book of Japan
How to Read the Wilderness by the Nature Study Guild
Atlas Obscura, An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders
by Joshua Foer, et al
Atlas of Improbable Places, A Journey to the World’s Most unusual Corners by Travis Elborough
Art – Facts Fasnicating Facts about Art, Artists, and the Art World
************ were the sampling offered here **********
Where am I?
A waiting room of sorts where waiting is no longer a pain thanks to this selection.
