Also, you’d think there would be a word for this.

Also #25

Greetings from the near edge of the end of the semester where I am entrenched behind my desk with a vending machine’s worth of bottled water and enough vitamin C that even the citrus fruits are apeeling¹ to my better nature. I’m only at work today because it’s what I do. Work.

Not yet. But soon, my friends, soon.

I am a middle-aged dad. And just like every middle-aged dad you know, I have a very hard time figuring out what I’m supposed to do with myself when I’m not working. Thus my hobbies become side hustles, family time becomes a checkbox on a to do list, and ‘downtime’ remains something elusive and undefined that I can only pretend to understand.

But, if you don’t schedule time to shut down your tools, your tools will do it for you. In this case, my tool is my voice, and it has shut itself down via a nice little head cold that came out of nowhere and walloped me upside the head. And thus, I am growling at my students, my family, my dog, and that blessed idiot always drooling at me from the other side of the mirror.

So I have a ritual of sorts. Whenever I get the slightest bit sick, I drop everything that can be dropped and schedule some downtime. And yes, I know that, optimally, I would schedule this downtime before I get sick, but hey, it is what it is. And what it is right now, for this iteration of downtime, is reading. A lot.

I spent one summer of my childhood at my grandmother’s house in Oklahoma. While there, hanging out with my cousins and watching day time t.v., I read through her bookshelves, bouncing between Louis L’amor westerns and Lillian Jackson Braun mysteries like a pinball on a bonus run.

Of the two, I preferred the mysteries for one simple reason - they felt like a reality I could still step into. The westerns were the past. The wagon trains, the cattle drives, the Pony Express, all things of the past. But a newsman going from one beat to the next, getting to know colorful characters and solving mysteries? Sure, I could inhabit that world tomorrow!

Of course, by the time I was grown, that world, the world of the three-issues per day and supplement on weekends newspaper was already starting to disappear. In 1993, I made the wise decision to major in broadcasting rather than journalism because, surely, the technology behind radio and t.v. would be relevant for decades to come! Among the many dubious skills on my resume are the ability to manually slice reel-to-reel tape and use a chemical darkroom to process negatives and prints.

All of this is to say that most of my life, I’ve been optimistically looking forward while also pining for a past that I was never really a part of. I learned newspaper, radio, t.v., film, and even advertising techniques designed for a pre-digital world. And though I have tried to keep up, well, there’s a fool’s errand if ever there was one. So that drooling idiot in the mirror might decide to learn how to use his phone to do short video, but this guy ain’t.

You know what I’m not nostalgic for? Like, ever? Winter. Nah, take these sub-zero temperatures and make like a tree and…oh wait.

Back in the here and now, I recently started a re-read, my first in 30-something years, of The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, the first of those Lillian Jackson Braun books. This book was first published in 1966, almost a decade before I was born and yet, it sounds like a lovely time. Our man Qwilleran, Qwill to his friends, gets assigned the art beat in a mid-sized city in the midwest. Mysterious shenanigans ensue. Cats are introduced and become the lynchpin of the entire 29 book series. If you’ve never read it, I can wholeheartedly recommend it with the caveat that it’ll make you nostalgic in the worst way.

Also, it turns out there is a word for this feeling: anemoia. This is a word coined and defined (I believe) by the always relevant minds at The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows²: a feeling of nostalgia for a time you never experienced.

Or, to put it another way, via the incomparable Grandpa Simpson:

You know, you remind of a poem I can’t remember, and a song that may never have existed, and a place I’m not sure I’ve ever been to.

Man I would love Qwill’s life. Go to the newspaper building, see your buddies, buy someone lunch on the paper’s dime in pursuit of a story, file your copy, have dinner at the reporter’s club across the street, go home, read the evening paper while smoking a pipe, and go to bed. Hell, I’d even put up with a Siamese cat if it came with that lifestyle.

The thing about anemoia is that it is the most rose-tinted of lenses through which you can look. Sure, the lifestyle described above is absurdly engaging. But, Qwill isn’t married, doesn’t have kids, can’t stay in one place too long, and will probably drop dead in his early 60s because of smoke and a red meat diet³.

And that’s not even talking about the fact that the mid-60s had all kinds of social injustices, political assassinations, wars in foreign lands, a rapidly changing world economy, and generational changes in media and culture we still have not quite recovered from.

What this means then, is that, as readers, we have to expect and welcome those feelings of anemoia when they arise so that we can examine them for the truths under the surface. In this case, when I read about Qwill and his 60s newspaper man lifestyle, what I’m actually ‘missing’ is a slower pace of life where information came in discrete waves with downtime forced on you by the delivery mechanisms. Of a media diet defined by a rhythm of reporting-interpreting-commenting at slow, regular intervals rather than a firehose we are unable or unwilling to turn off. And sure, this might be a bit Ok-Boomer or, for an even older reference, Pollyanna-ish but broken clocks, you know?

So, that’s what I get to do now. I get to take my vitamin C, my antihystamines, my bottles of water, and turn the world off for a bit. I’m sure it’ll still be here when I’m back on my feet. Even if it’s not, my grading sure as hell will be. Be well, turn off the news, go to bed.

1. Don’t you run. You stand there and take your pun-ishment like the wretch you are.

2. The Dictionary is a great way to decide who you want to be friends with. Use a word from it and when someone tells you that that isn’t a word, use the book to beat them about the head and shoulders until they understand that they are not your kind of people.

3. I know, you’re saying, “There are worse ways to go!” and you’re not wrong, but you’ve still got those rose-colored glasses on.

Also, Happy New Year and Stuff II

Also #24

Greetings from the long, meandering but tidy queue of people waiting their turn to throw money into the shrine and thereby increase their apportioned dollop of luck for the coming year. I’m not religious. I’m not spiritual. I’m not even that superstitious, and yet, here we are. My muffler is wound tight, my beanie is pulled low and a coin is tucked into my fingers just waiting for my turn to bow-bow-clap-clap-bow¹.

Standing out in the cold this morning, trying to get this shot, I accidentally stepped in a large pile of dog poop. 2026, you’re off to a banger of a beginning.

While this isn’t the first time January 1st has had the ill grace to land on a scheduled Learned publishing day, it is only the third time it’s happened since I started writing this newsletter in 2018. It feels like it ought to be of more import than it is. But, nah, just another Thursday.

That wasn’t the case two years ago when we were in the aftermath of a large earthquake, our senses on high alert due to the frantic hectoring of a reporter on the t.v. urging everyone along the coasts to head for high ground right now, right now, right now! My wife and I both noted at the time that we were not worried until we saw the reporter, a Japanese woman usually the definition of poise and composure, absolutely losing her shit in her desperation to convey how utterly serious she was about the tsunami risk.

In a weird, almost blasphemous way, it reminded me of the scene in the movie Signs where Joaquin Phoenix’s character is hiding in the closet after seeing the aliens on t.v. It wasn’t the image of the aliens that freaked me out but Phoenix’s reaction to them that stirred my own fight-or-flight response.

The other time Learned has been published on January 1st was back in 2021. Remember that time? We had all of us just been through the first pandemic in living memory. The desire for a return to normalcy was so great that I refused to do much to note the change of the year save for a single line in the issue of Learned².

And so this year. So far, it has been utterly, blissfully, dull. I started the year with a walk and a photo before getting online to participate in a workshop led by Natasha. A couple of hours later, freshly caffeinated and bundled up, my daughter and I drove out to our local shrine to participate in the aforementioned bow-bow-clap-clap-bow³.

All I could think during the entire 30-minute wait was, man I hope this year is boring. I have things I want to do with my time. I’ve got projects to finish and new ones to start. I’ve got friends to visit and family to share with. I’ve got work and writing and parenting, oh my. I do not want drama, not tsunamis, not pandemics, not even the idlest of gossip. I just want the world to be boring and mundane.

But.

The world, for all its ineffable, stubborn beauty, is rarely dull. And if I’m telling the truth, we would never want it to be, right? We need novelty and stimulation and a sense of purpose. Or, at least I do.

This might just be the derpiest horse I’ve ever seen. Somehow I feel that is both appropriate and foreboding.

2026 is being celebrated as the year of the horse⁴. In mythologies the world over, horses are messengers for gods and spirits, avatars of fertility, strength, stamina, speed, and sometimes even prosperity. It’s associated with the sea, with medicine, and even with good, old-fashioned, transportation and travel.

Not as loyal as a dog, nor as imperious as a cat, horses are nevertheless animals humankind has bound to themselves and, in doing so, created an extension of our physical limitations. In domesticating horses, we expanded our horizons, our strength, and our speed. We grew beyond ourselves and into something grander. And that is my hope for you, and for myself, for the coming year.

Expand. Become something bigger than the limitations you were born into. May your troubles be dull, may your triumphs be transcendent, and may your horizons always be boundless. Happy new year, again.

1. The way this works is, you step up to the fence in front of the altar, throw your coin into the altar, bow twice out of respect for the resident kami, clap twice to get their attention, silently say your prayer, bow again, and skedaddle. Preferably over to the nearby booths to buy talismans and protective charms, fortunes, and snacks. Oh so many snacks.

2. Technically, it was an issue of the Glossary, a bi-weekly supplement to Learned that ran for 26 issues in 2020 and 2021) before moving on to the word of the week (slate for those curious).

3. My collection of talismans is growing so I’m well protected from everything except English because, c’mon, why is the plural not talismen? Stupid English.

4. There’s a conflict of calendars here. Japan takes New Year’s Day as a cue to give everyone a few days off. People go to shrines to take part in hatsumode, the first visit of the new year. So, even though the Lunar Year of the Horse doesn’t start until February, all the shrines get out all their horse merchandise because crowds won’t wait and sales won’t last.

Also, even Santa Claus believes in you

Also #23

Hello from my armchair where I am steadfastly guarding the treasures that Santa Claus has dumped on my lap. It’s a big job, but I feel mostly qualified. After all, I’m not getting up anytime soon¹.

The very sweet cafe owner gave me a little Christmas present to go along with my coffee. I don’t know how this fits into the Christmas story yet but it will. Oh, it will.

Tim Minchin set out to write a holiday song and came up with the equal parts funny and poignant White Wine in the Sun. It’s a fantastic song. It’s a song I can’t even listen to, much less sing without tearing up. A fact only slightly mitigated by the fact that neither can Tim Minchin².

On the one hand, Christmas is a commercial holiday created by and for perverting the teachings of a man who’s been dead for 2,000 years. On the other, as Tim says, “I really like Christmas…some of the songs they sing have nice chords.”

I’m not much of a musician. The chords in any given Christmas carol don’t do much for me. But the lore? I’m here for that.

I’ve taught more Christmas lessons than I care to remember. To small kids, big kids, bored kids, hyperactive kids, their parents, their teachers, their sedate classmates, and, on one unfortunately memorable occasion, the entire school board. And the problem with teaching that many Christmas lessons is that you have no idea what the kids have already heard or learned about the mythology of Christmas.

Where does Santa live? If you’re American, you know he lives in the North Pole. If you’re Japanese, you’re sure he lives in Finland. If you’re Australian, who cares, you just know he’s down in Oz for a surf during the antipode summer Christmas.

How does Santa get into houses? Through the chimney of course. But what if there’s not chimney? Well…

And this is what I love about Christmas: the lore is both global and ever-expanding. As a teacher, as a parent, as a “grown-up”³, adding to the lore for an audience of the people most willing to believe is, in itself, a Christmas tradition. And if your personal contribution ends up becoming global, well, that’s damn near a Christmas miracle.

Here’s what I mean; let’s start with some basics of the Christmas lore:

Santa began as a real person, a Turkish bishop who gave a man enough coins that he was able to avoid selling his daughters into prostitution. And thus the tradition of presents at Christmas was established.

The lore⁴ doesn’t change much for a few centuries. St. Nicholas becomes conflated with other Winter solstice traditions and eventually arrives in 19th century Europe as Father Christmas, the incarnation of winter celebrations. But 19th century Europe is literate. People read aloud and to each other quite often; people try their hand at writing their own stories and poems and suddenly, St. Nick has a sleigh and eight flying reindeer. They even have names.

Fast forward a century or so and now we’re in the age of electronic media and someone decides to record a song or three. The lore expands. Santa has nine reindeer, led by a younger one with a bright red nose. A living snowman hangs around sometimes. Elves make the toys at Santa’s factory in the North Pole. It all gets added to the lore.

And that’s where we come back in. Kids know all this but kids are amazing at believing a dozen contradictory things all at once. It’s why we miss being kids. We miss the innocence we held before reasoning bared its ugly fangs.

Of course my house’s Santavatar is made of LEGO. Did you forget who you’re dealing with here?

For my part, over the years, I’ve contributed the following bits⁵:

• Back when Santa lived in Turkey, he had a donkey to carry all his presents. Her name is Sara Beth⁶ and she now hangs out in Santa’s village in the North Pole training the reindeer how to manage Santa’s sleigh.

• Santa gives coal to bad kids because it stains your hand. No matter how many times you wash your hand, everyone in your life will know you’ve been a bad kid. A little grim, but you should see the looks on kids faces. And, in this case, when I say kids, I mean university students.

• The secret to how Santa gets around the entire world in one night is the league of Also-Santas. He divvies up responsibility for present delivery among himself, Father Christmas, Papa Noel, even moonlighting deities from other pantheons like Japan’s Hoteoishi.

• Krampus is his best frenemy.

• Even with assistance from the League, Santa has a hard time making it to everywhere in North America. Fortunately, he is a master of time travel. What are mere seconds to us are minutes and hours to him.

• Santa’s staff at the North Pole counts exactly 101 members⁷. This counts all the elves, reindeer, snowmen, and whomever else may come around. It does not, however, include Mrs. Mary Claus who only barely tolerates Santa’s off-season nonsense.

• Speaking of, Santa routinely takes the entire crew to Hawaii for the month of January to recover and rest before starting the toy production factory back up to prep for the next year.

• Finally, and, saints help me, this might be my lasting legacy: Santa has a magic key that opens any kitchen door. No chimney, no problem.

Lest this sound self-congratulatory, understand that, yeah, I’m quite pleased with myself, thanks. And, more importantly, I never set down to create any of this. Every little bit of mythology I could come up with was on the spot in response to some child’s question. Because, like a good magician, storyteller, or con-man, “I don’t know” is the second worst answer available. The single worst answer is, of course, the truth.

Every once in a while I get someone who feels it’s important to tell children the way of the world. Those people are usually hiding a deep and abiding pain. But you know this. You’ve seen the movies. You know the plot - every adult who doesn’t believe in Santa is nursing a deeply wounded inner child whose belief was betrayed in some way.

That, too, is part of the lore. As is every movie about Christmas, every new storybook, every new song, every new tidbit created on the spur of the moment by a grown-up placed in the spotlight of a small child’s unmitigated attention. Because, really, Christmas is about stewardship. It’s about holding belief available until a child is old enough to claim it for themselves.

It’s a hell of a responsibility. Be good.

1. There’s no good place to put this note so I’ll put it here. The title is pulled straight from one of the greatest songs ever written: Can You Picture That by Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. IFYKYK.

2. There is a special hell known to writers of all stripes wherein we are the ones who know exactly how to reach deep into our psyches and stomp all over our own hearts. It makes for equal parts egotism and catharsis. After all, if we’re going to be triggered, it might as well be by us.

3. I.e. someone older than the kids on the receiving end of the lore-cycle whether older means days, months, years, or decades

4. I feel like at some point the lore becomes The Lore but not yet. Not. Yet.

5. Another note without a good place to mark it - Santavatar. Yup. I coined it. Yup. I’m incredibly pleased with myself. Again.

6. No idea. I was riffing and it worked.

7. What? We’re all influenced by Disney whether we like it or not.

Also, learning was never meant to be hands-off.

Also #22

Greetings from here inside my home office where I have just put the finishing touches on yet another card game. Well. I say finishing touches and what I mean is that I have drafted what I think is a good, playable, well-crafted set of rules that will be thoroughly deconstructed, revised, considered, hyped up, and destroyed all over again over the course of the next few weeks.

LEGO may be the Platonic ideal of learning through our fingers. And, also, I know the images in this piece ought to be flipped for thematic consistency but they just didn’t look as good that way, you know?

Because I’m a good little capitalist pig, I’ve been working to monetize all my hobbies, including that of making card games. Well. I say monetizing but the truth is, I decided to develop a hobby with the idea of it becoming a career pivot of sorts from the very beginning after a lesson with a pair of young learners who were as bored as I was. I threw the lesson out, got out a deck of playing cards and invented a game on the spot.

The game was not great. In fact, if I’m being honest, it sucked. But the kids got into it and what had been a dry struggle through vocabulary drills that was only marginally less painful for them than it was for me turned into a creative group think session where we tried to make the game better by playing through variations and iterations over the remainder of the class time.

In the end, the kids got more practice with English than they would have with the book, and they had a hell of a lot more fun. And, for myself, a new pathway through the world opened up.

Ten years later, I’m still making card games; I’m still figuring out how to turn them into something real and tactile in the world.¹

The question has been asked of me, more than once, why card games? The answer is both simple and incomplete: card games require focus in a way that other tools do not. Aside from visual and aural cues², they stimulate your brain through your fingertips, a pathway that is only barely beginning to be understood by medical and psychological sciences; we know that engaging with any kind of learning materials through our fingers, say by using a pencil and paper instead of a keyboard, increases retention and comprehension almost across the board. As to why, well, we’re working on it.

Over the past few years, I’ve become thoroughly enamored by the Theory 11 playing card company. Their products are elegant, refined, a pleasure to look at. More importantly, they’re satisfying as hell to hold. I’m not the sort of collector who leaves things untouched in their little cellophane coffins. Because being able to touch and marvel at the details unlocked therein is the point.

I mean, I don’t need another deck of playing cards. I’ve got, like, five within arms reach already. But Theory 11’s (and their competitors) decks are more than simple playing cards. They’re objects designed to be felt as much as seen and that creates a sense memory distinct from a card deck that is simply colors and shapes.

Which is why there are only seven different ones on my Santa please list.

---

Recently I was asked how I would kit out a brand new kids classroom. Asking me that is a bit like throwing chum at a shark - you’ve done the dirty work, now just sit back and try not to get bit.

Because, look, there’s a special joy in setting up a new classroom for (very) young learners. Most of us middle-aged adults are burned all the way out by the drawn and haggard souls we see in the mirror, the ones that have been carrying lots of weights in lots of context for lots of years. And kids, man, kids are the pure antithesis of that whole thing.³

But, specious joys of middle-aged life aside, what got me going in that moment, what led me to spout off for twenty minutes in exacting detail about just what this new classroom would need is one single consideration: kids learn by using their hands.

For a little kids classroom you need three things: a bunch of handkerchiefs, a big box of buttons, and a handful of cushions that they can sit on. Between those three tools, you can get kids to use any language you care to give them.

Handkerchiefs are colors, numbers, grouping and sorting. Buttons are more of the same but with comparisons and adjectives. Cushions are directions, preferences, tenses, and register. They all allow kids to move, to interact, and to experience with their fingers and hands. This is so vitally important and so easy to forget.

---

Learning is a beautiful act. It’s beneficial to us in so many ways beyond the obvious. It invites us to re-examine everything we think we know within a new context and decide what’s worth keeping and what’s worth incorporating into our newly expanded sphere of knowledge. The bigger that sphere gets the easier insights are generated and new ideas are flushed to the fore.

Yet we only do so by watching. Listening. Reading. Writing, maybe. Where are your hands?

Think back to the last time you learned how to do something with your hands. I’m guessing it was an instrument, a tool, or an art form of some kind. You learned the piano, how to build a birdhouse, or mix paints into something you called abstract expressionism because even you didn’t know what the hell you were trying to paint. Been there, brothers and sisters. Been there.

When was the last time you used your hands to help you read a book?

The Spring 2025 Tokyo Game Market was the best kind of chaos - thousands of people gathered together to commiserate about why no one is buying their game. How I long to join them.

What we call close reading is really just the grown up version of sliding your finger along the line you’ve been reading like you did when you were a kid. We use our hands to read all the time. We mark pages with a finger, we dog-ear the corners⁴, we literally thumb through books just to see if we want to keep reading them. We read with our hands.

Natasha’s book club is gearing up for a momentous 2026. The booklist starts and ends with how we think with stops at all manner of points of interest along the way. I’m looking forward to it. I want to close read as much as I can.

I’m getting my fingers ready: ready to cover words I don’t know, repeating them in my head until I can remember their form and shape. Ready to trace lines (maybe with a pencil, possibly just blood) from one paragraph to another until I understand the through line that connects them. Ready to physically unearth every loose nugget of contextual information until my fingers are shriveled and my hands are numb. Too much? Good. Reading - learning - ought to be a sensory overload that leaves us spent and changed in all the best ways.

Your hands can make that happen. You just have to use them.

---

Look, if I have a point, it’s this - modern adult education, in all its forms, has removed from us one of our most powerful senses. We do not engage our tactile faculties in learning much past the age of ten and that’s a goddamned shame. Our sense of touch is profound. We are able to employ our fingers in ways our nearest primate cousins can only fantasize about. We are able to be, in turns, dextrous or monstrous depending on which grip we use.

For myself, the solution to so much of this is a deck of cards. When the fingers are engaged in their unspoken, near-unconscious examining of how the cards feel in the hands, the weight of the cardstock, the lamination of the paper, the sheen of the finish, the intensity of the hue, they instill a sense memory that helps the brain retain whatever I’m trying to cram into it.

What I’m saying is, buy someone a deck of cards for Christmas. Then let ‘em learn something.

1. There are a thousand reasons why none of my games are for sale to the masses yet. Some are legit production and logistics issues. Some are me being an overly-anxious, perfectionist, creative type who cannot get the fuck out of my own way for love nor money.

2. Tell me the sound of a fresh deck being bridged, shuffled, and cut is not the sexiest thing you’ve ever heard.

3. Little kids do not have the id or the ego to care about any of your bullshit. They just want to have fun in a safe space with adults they trust. If you’re that adult, well done, you’re one step closer to self-actualization. Maslow would be proud.

4. Well, some of you heathens do. The rest of us revere our books just a little too much for that sort of entropic loving.

Also, your bookshelves deserve better

Also #21

Hello from the easternmost room in my house where I’m contemplating the books I’m getting people for Christmas and longingly pining for the books I wish they’d get me.

The Jimbocho book fair is my idea of heaven - shop after shop full of books, magazines, maps, more books and all the people who love them.

Books are old friends for me. They’ve got broken spines and yellowed pages but, hey, who among us has not fallen victim to at least a little entropy? Standing at my bookshelves now, though, I can see the timelines running strata-like through my collection. Here are the gaudy, flashy paperbacks with their heroes and spaceships. Here are the larger trade paperbacks with their bright colors and bold typefaces. And over here are the stalwart, somber hardcovers with their promises to still exist long after everything else on the shelf has fallen to dust.

And then, down here on the bottom shelves, sturdy and capable of supporting the entirety of all the fictional worlds contained therein, are the art books. These books both contain art and are, themselves, a kind of art. Heavy paper, glossy photos, threaded bindings, cloth covers - these books are made to be held and leafed through. They are made to be enjoyed for their mere presence as much as their contents.

Several years ago, just over a decade now, I decided to try my hand at freelance writing. I got a few gigs here and there and made, well, not much but enough to keep me in book money for a while. And then I got a gig actually writing about books. Aw, yiss.

Wink Books is, sadly, now defunct, but for a couple of years I was able to indulge my love of big, glossy, coffee-table art books by pretending that I was buying them just so I could review them for the site. Everybody from my editor to my wife to, presumably, the booksellers knew this was the most transparent of lies but book lovers are a special breed. We can delude ourselves into almost anything if it means we get to buy more books.

I grew up reading in a house of readers. Much like swimming or walking or breathing, I don’t remember learning how to do it but so many of my core memories revolve around doing it that it is impossible to imagine a self where I couldn’t. If that makes sense.

Books were never an indulgence. They were never something to be earned but they were also never a treat. They were just part of the atmosphere of the house. Trips to the library and the bookstore were part of the every day fabric of life. When friends used to tease me about reading too much I kind of pitied them. They had no idea what wonders I found inside the pages of my paperbacks.

Bandanna Books sat (and still sits) at one end of Yuma’s historic downtown. The streets there have been through so many waves of revitalization that it’s hard to tell what was built when save that all of it is varying degrees of old. Because it’s Yuma, everything bakes all year long, but never more so than in the summer when the temperatures reach heights that make the inside of your oven look like a warm breeze.

But during winter, things calm down enough, weather-wise, that we get an influx of visitors from harsher climates, many of whom spend six to nine months lumbering around Yuma County in thirty-foot long RVs they can barely drive. As a young adult, I used to rant about how Yuma’s economy was designed around people who didn’t even live there all the time, sacrificing the city’s resources on snowbirds.

But I did like a few of them. Like the elderly couple who came to Yuma as snowbirds and stayed to open Bandanna Books. Unfortunately, time has stolen the memory of their names out of my head, but I still remember them both and the way they would move through the rickety, haphazard shelves with the gingerly grace of the elderly as they moved books from one stack to another and occasionally paused to show a precocious twelve-year old something he might like.

I like to think that it was in these stacks that my love for books as physical objects was born.

Not Bandanna Books, but the next best thing - Bookman’s in Flagstaff, Arizona. I had just decided to do my minor in photography. You can tell, can’t you. Yeah, you can tell.

My clearest, earliest memories from inside Bandanna Books are the shelf of comic-strip books hidden on the lowest shelf of the humor section. If you grew up in the States in the 80s you know these books - the elongated Garfield books that always hung out over the shelves, the Peanuts collections that had odd titles and collected dozens of strips under odd themes, the Hagar the Horrible, Wizard of Id, Beetle Bailey, and, holiest of holies, Bloom County trade paperbacks.

These books took the strips I already knew from the funny pages and collated them into digestible little chunks that I just devoured. And once I had gone through all the strips I knew, I started to find these odd little gems from people I didn’t know and the contents of which didn’t quite belong in the humor or comic strip categories but didn’t not belong there either: Charles Addams, Edward Gorey, R. Crumb, and so many more.

These books, much more than the comic-strip books became something different. They weren’t just books, they were objects d’art. Everything from the binding to the fonts to the layouts screamed out that this was something more than just a collection of odd drawings and odder jokes.

Over time I began finding more and more books that my hands found to be more art than artistic. Books full of odd maps and rabbit holes, books full of illustrations of places that could never exist and the people who inhabited them. Books of fairies and dwarves and elves and dragons.

Back in the here and now, my book collection has expanded or contracted based on where and how I was living. Some books I regret losing, others I am glad I have given away, most fall somewhere in between. But, proudly displayed on the new shelves of my little library room are some true treasures that came from Bandanna Books all those decades ago.

Next to them are newer treasures, ones brought on by the growing realizations from book lovers that while digital books may be convenient, they don’t feel the same. They don’t look the same. And they sure as hell don’t fill up a shelf the same.

Fortunately, the past two decades have seen the formation and growth of a small army of specialty publishers who exist only to put together beautiful editions of books. Places like the Folio Society and Subterranean Press take books and make them into art pieces. Taschen has been making books into art for decades.

And now a whole host of specialty publishers are bringing out magazines and mooks¹ and zines just because books are art and deserve to be produced, sold, and treasured as such.

So now, a thousand words later, here’s my point: the next time you want to read something, buy the most beautiful, most expensive version of it you can. Your hands will thank you.

1. Mook is word coined by the Japanese by combining the English words magazine and book. That it was already an English work with a radically different definition bothered absolutely no one. And they say English is impossible to learn. Pshaw.