Boxes and Boxes of Books…

Today’s image is about old brush pens.

The page says everything I want to say about that. 

I’m distracted.

What I’ve been doing is unpacking boxes of books. I am finding it takes a different muscle set. The constant bending, the twisting, the lifting always a little more than you really can handle. It has been cutting edge excitement. “Will Roz fall again? Nope she’s adjusted, she’s balanced herself…”

Opening the boxes is like saying “hi” to old friends. Mostly it’s happy memories, but sometimes it’s bittersweet thoughts—a birds in art book inscribed by an art friend who passed away during the Covid lockdown; a book of nursery rhymes signed to me, for a birthday of mine during graduate school, by my mom, who passed away during the same time period. Both saw me. That’s always a good thought.

Plans of having the books, even winnowed down as they are now, all organized on shelves is all a bust. I’ll have several large art books about one artist and then two or three more books about the artist that are small, “novel” size books. If I put the latter on the tall shelf I use up space for other tall books. SIGH.

Last week I sat in the basement surrounded by a mountain of boxes and said, “Just get it done.” That’s what I did. Almost. I have about 6 boxes left to unpack. 

I’ll worry about making a listing or index later.

It’s already a bit of a problem though. I was so happy to find Peter Steinhart’s “Undressed Art: Why We Draw” that I pulled it off the shelf I’d placed it upon with great consideration and some internal sense of organization, so I could read some quotes from it in my recent Patreon webinar. Then I put it back after the live stream. And then when I was posting the tape of the webinar I wanted to write the quotations in the text and I couldn’t find the book again! 

I laughed when I found it, right where I thought I’d put it originally—it had been so long since I’d looked at it before the unboxing that I’d forgotten what the spine looked like.

Right now I do feel a little scattered all over the place. I’ll get this literally sorted. It’s a non-problem to have. And once the books are situated I’ll feel the happiness of being able to take them down and read them. I’m sure I’ll introduce you to some of them too.