Gewgaws of the Imagination

I travel to find things I can't find at home. I'm not very much like Dorothy thinking that after an adventure everything I need is in my own backyard. No, I'm probably wrong about that. Everything I need is probably in my own backyard. Not everything I want.

I love stumbling into oddly eclectic shops or specialty stores where the juxtaposition of things sets them off. Books, for instance. I buy books everywhere. Once, so many years ago, when 4th Street in Berkley was just beginning to become a merchant's haven, I found so many weird and crazy stores it no longer seems real. Indeed, it may not be. There was a shop that sold merchandise that should never be seen together, miniature circuses and photo books and expensive pens and oddly erotic things that I can barely describe. I could scarcely breathe. .

There was a shop that sold hardware goods from around the world. I bought big brass shears there from India. Some of you may have them, but they are difficult to find any more.

In Key West, there was for a long time a store that sold strange nautical gear and other things, as well. What was it's name? It is closed now, but it was a treasure trove. Perkins and Sons. That's it! After it closed, I found a fascinating little fishing store and bought "The Book of the Tarpon," a lovely hardback copy in limited edition. The book still gives me great pleasure, but that shop is gone as well.

My shelves are filled with books I've bought in fabric stores and clothing stores and decorator's shops.

This trip, I picked up a clothing guide at Brooks Brothers on Worth Avenue. It was free. I don't what there is about the thing, but I like it and will keep it. Go. Get one. You will see.

Loathe as I am to admit it, I look at books in the Anthropologie stores, too. I find things I've never seen anywhere else. And the selection is not the same in every city.

It is not just books, of course. I have a whale's tooth I bought in a flea market in London, along with an old, brass compass and a spy glass. I have old photos purchased in a market in Mexico City and more from Hong Kong.

I think it began when I was young and my father spent a month driving the family across the country with a giant old canvas army tent and a one-wheeled trailer. Twice. Before interstate highways. We would stop at roadside stores full of oddities and occasionally, I would get some gewgaw like a authentic cowboy marionette or an arrowhead. The images were profoundly and permanently imprinted. I am scarred.

I run my eyes and hands across these things as I sit this morning in the hours before work. Talismans and Totems. Ju-Ju for the imagination.