whyisthisinteresting

The Ugly, Essential Books Edition

It would be great if all the important books also looked the best, but like dogs or bartenders this is usually not the case. In our matrix, there is a category lurking in the lower right: long-term keeper books that are under-designed and sometimes a bit embarrassing to display, yet personally very important. The best are as ugly as they are essential.

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The Isle of the Dead: I am not against stupid painters

I only ever have a fairly small amount of looking in my system, I guess you could say, and I wanted, rather zealously and also somewhat self-protectively, I wanted to reserve all my looking-energy for the Friedrich paintings.