Commerce

I've just purchased $300 worth of books (with the proceeds from my recent adventures in eBay), from a bookstore I've never used before: The Book Depository. What could possibly go wrong?

Prices — at least, the prices of the books I was looking at — seemed reasonably competitive with Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, but what made the difference for me was that I had a coupon for 10% off (and I knew I'd be placing an enormous order, so it would make a difference), and the fact that I could pay via PayPal (and avoid the trouble of having to transfer money into my Checking account to pay it out again).

Here's the part I don't understand, though: the free shipping. I just assumed that, although The Book Depository is a British retailer, they would have a fulfillment operation here in the US. But they don't — they're shipping everything by Air Mail. And if that weren't odd enough, they seem to be shipping each of the 18 or 19 books I ordered separately. (At least, I think they are — the first arrived this afternoon.) I suppose that might make sense, if various items were sent from different warehouse locations (we'll see how the other items arrive), but I can't help but wonder how they're making any money at this.

This all reminds me of the excitement of the pioneering days of Internet commerce, when retailers were willing to suffer enormous losses in a desperate attempt to grab mindshare. A friend of mine used to refer to the early days of Barnes and Noble's web site as "The Great Barnes and Noble Land Grab," because they were offering a discount coupon of $10 off any order more than $10, and virtually no restrictions on how often it could be used. (I bought so much stuff with so many transactions that my bank assumed my debit card had been stolen.)

Numbers

I used to have a head for numbers. No particular aptitude, mind you, but enough to get by in doing my own tax returns, and keeping my checkbook balanced, that sort of thing. I've run my own business, even done my own bookkeeping. And I'm good at following directions. That usually helps.

It was today, however, when faced with the task of filling out a new set of W-4 forms, that I began to wonder if all that had come to an unexpected end. (The "following directions" part, too.) I must have filled out that worksheet — you know, the one that's supposed to help you determine how many exemptions to claim? — I must have filled out that worksheet three or four times, and somehow I kept arriving at the conclusion that I ought to claim something like 24 or 25 exemptions.

I tried again, this time without itemizing deductions (even though we undoubtedly will be), with the hope that following the simple route might make more sense. It didn't — but at least this time I was only claiming six or seven exemptions.

In the end, I gave up and just went with one less than whatever we decided to go with the last time we had to fill these forms out. (We had a bad, bad year for taxes last year, and we're hoping to blunt the ill effects this year as much as possible.)

Drama

I enjoyed Degrassi so much more when it was about real kids — not this idealized fantasy of what teen years could be, should be, if you were living on your own, or playing in a band (or both), or somehow handed every opportunity you ever dreamed possible (an acting career, a modelling career, a recording contract, an internship in New York, two weeks in a lavish penthouse apartment in New York with your boyfrend, without parents).

It used to have something to say. That, and it used to be so much better written.

Apparently, the series will be trying something new this year — after having been shuffled off from broadcast television in Canada (where it's produced, and has aired for almost a decade) to a cable channel (due to a decline in ratings), the series will be adopting the popular form of the telenovela — or, as they used to be called in the days when I grew up watching them, the soap opera.

The thing about a soap opera I've always loved best is how a simple plot can very quickly go ridiculously, completely over the top, and how much fun that can be to watch. I am, in fact, as I write this, watching the first episode of the new season, and it's become increasingly obvious that this is the approach the series has now embraced. I'm not sure why it took three-quarters of the two-hour episode for the creepy rich siblings (introduced last year) to kiss, but there we are.

This may well be the only note the series has left to play. At this point, I think it's the only thing that might keep me watching with any real interest.

"Friend"

This week I received a "friend" request — I'm sorry, I am compelled to put that in quotes — from someone with whom I have exchanged a total of six email messages (between the two of us). Granted, this was somewhat more than just a superficial exchange (although we were strangers) — but it took place almost three years ago.

Wandering

I've been trying to gently acquaint my seven-year-old with the notion that it isn't always necessary to pay attention to the signs or stay on the straight path. I think that's an important lesson to learn, it's just the subtle questions of "when" and "how" that he's still too young to understand. (He's already pushing back against my authority.)

When Little Stony Point proved far too crowded for exploring on Sunday afternoon, we pulled off further up the road, at an unmarked path. No idea where it would lead. Well, no, that's not entirely true — we knew we were headed more or less in the diection of the river, but we had no idea how far away it was (a good, long walk), or what we would find along the way (lots of wild raspberries).

At the river's edge, we found what I would later discover to be the remains of a brick yard (one of many up and down the banks of the river). It's funny, the things you didn't know you didn't know — that people collect bricks, for example, and maintain web sites with a wealth of information about that trade. (That was how I found out where I was.)

We spent the afternoon at the edge of the river. It was so much more fun in that it was completely unexpected.

Little Rascals

My wife, if she could have seen me, would have been very irritated, and desperately envious.

I've gone out back on the deck to leave a bit more food for the family of raccoons before getting to bed. (Yes, she has a family now. Four little ones, who look exactly like her, come tumbling along behind in the evening, probably not too much larger than my feet under all that fur.) By now, I've become a familiar presence, so much so that Mother approaches with little apprehension (particularly when she sees the plastic container I'm holding, which invariably contains dry cat food), and the kids soon follow.

I'm standing near the door, slowly edging my way back toward it. I'd much rather stay and watch, though. Mother is nibbling from a pile of dry cat food, while the kids are nibbling along with her, or completely destroying a plastic foam toy my seven-year-old has left on the deck, or looking through the back door at the cat that's watching them, or trying to get up the courage to approach the plastic container I've left on the deck (I'm not sure what they thought it might be), or approaching me — which didn't require much courage at all.

One of the little ones, the most intrepid one — there's always a most intrepid one, in every litter — is wandering around my feet, sniffing at my shoes, then at my bare ankles, with a cold wet nose. That one is soon joined by another. I'm not the least bit concerned for my safety, really I'm not. Mother doesn't seem the least bit concerned, either, though she does take a sudden interest when I pick up the plastic container (I have to convince her it's empty, and that anything I have to offer is right in front of her).

I know raccoons are curious, but every year it seems I discover this all over again.

Comics

I spent most of the morning putting a set of books — actually, a half-dozen sets of books — up for sale on eBay. They're reprints of old comic books, most from the 1960s (the comics that were reprinted, not the books), and I'm selling them so I can replace them with — well, it's sort of difficult to explain. I'm selling them in order to replace them with new versions of the same material that have far better reproduction. And yes, it really does matter. (It’d take too long to explain why, but it really does matter.)

These are the comics I grew up reading (in books and in reprints, many years after the fact), and they left an indelible impression on me. I came to them at just the right time, at the age when you begin to choose your own pop culture. Everything is new (and even if it isn't, you don't know any better), you consume it relentlessly, and good or bad, it somehow stays with you forever. This, for me, is the stuff that forged a lifelong interest in comics, and there's never, ever been anything better.

My seven-year-old was instantly, almost magnetically attracted to these books when I took them down from the shelf to be dusted — that’s the way this stuff should work. (I’ve been trying to remember how old I was when I first discovered comics.) I’ve promised him we'll share this treasure soon.

Teased

I feel as though it's been just about to rain for weeks now. Not so much because of the heat, or even the humidity, but because the forecast keeps saying so. But apart from the odd drop here and there, the weather has failed to follow through.

The wild raspberries are beginning to appear, and I've promised my seven-year-old that as soon as it rains, they'll be everywhere.

Unexplained

A backscratcher, found hidden inside a fallen tree in the Pound Ridge Reservation.

Sketches: Vernon Dent: Stooge Heavy

I almost never have a chance to do anything lively and fun with the interiors of the books I design — most books don't readily lend themselves to it (this was the rare exception), so when the opportunity came up again, I had (what I thought was) a great idea. This was a book about a character actor, a second banana, little known now, probably known no better then, but one of the faces you've seen in hundreds of films, even if you never knew his name. In fact, that was to be part of the title of the book.

So I thought it might be fun to use a banana as a sort of subtle design element. Spent the entire morning looking for just the right one, too — I had something specific in mind (it would have to be recognizable at a small size), and you'd probably be surprised at how many there were to choose from. (Just a simple search for photographs with the term on iStockphoto yields an impressive 10,163 results. Now you know why it took the entire morning.) Having found one I thought I could use, I made a few modifications, most notably converting the image to greyscale, since there would be no option for color inside the book.


I wanted to use the bananas at the chapter breaks. You'd see them every so often, but (hopefully) not so much so that they'd wear out their welcome. (I could use them on the cover, as well, though I hadn't really thought ahead any further than that.) My first thought was to incorporate them with the chapter numbers, but once you obscure the shape of the object, it becomes difficult to make out what the object is. (It seemed to in this case, at least.) You can get around that by making the object bigger, but then you begin to lose the subtlety. So as a solution, I put a small photo on the bottom of the beginning of each chapter. (This had a super-secret added benefit, in that should the idea did not go over well with the Author, I could remove the banana but add space to the top of the page.)


Then came a moment of insecurity, and I began to wonder: if you remove the distinctive yellow color from a banana, is it still a banana? That's not a philosophical question, but one of perception: will the humor be lost if the object isn't immediately recognizable? My wife's objective opinion was that she knew what it was without a second thought, and that was enough reassurance for me.

About five minutes later, more or less, I remembered that the title of the book had changed — removing the "second banana" reference. (The Author, Editor and Publisher had been back and forth and back and forth on this, but once I got this idea in my head, I conveniently forgot the rest of the discussion.) There wasn't much of a punchline to the visual joke without that title, so the notes and sketches have been filed away, to await another book on another "second banana," another day.

The cover was still lots of fun, though. I had a fairly simple idea from the start, I just needed to choose the details as I went along. (That's a sort of rudimentary color study on the right.) It took an endless afternoon to get the letterspacing just so, particularly the a/v combination in "Heavy," because the letterforms don't fit together as well as all of the others. (Even now I'm fighting the compulsion to go back and make adjustments.)

I decided to use the discarded title after all, as a subtitle, because I felt that it was necessary on the cover, for both editorial and design reasons.