Another small press

I've previously mentioned a few of my favorite publishing houses: Arcadia Publishing, Phaidon, and Oxford's Very Short Introductions imprint.

I've come across another: Princeton Architectural Press. It publishes intriguing titles like The Wayfinding Handbook: Information Design for Public Places. This helps to answer the important existential questions: Where am I? What can I do here? Where can I go from here? How do I get out of here?

I used one of my quirky little finds, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, as the creative template for my final project in an Old Testament class.

Princeton Architectural Press majors in "fine books on architecture, design, photography, landscape and visual culture."

Of frogs and crickets

I tell people I live in a farmhouse, partly because it sounds romantic and bucolic, partly because it’s true. As for the romantic, a chorus of frogs is undulating in the key of A-flat as I write this, and the crickets are singing an antiphon over the top of them. The neighbor says coyotes have made a den on the far side of the field. It’s too early in the season to know whether the 20 acres will be corn or soybeans this year. Neither I nor the landowner actually works the soil; it’s leased to a nearby farmer. The landowner lives in the main house. My abode is a former granary, painted red with a metal roof and an interior made of knotty barn wood.

I’m sitting inside at a table with a lamp, and an old shortwave radio across the room is playing NPR. There’s a loft upstairs with a bed. The kitchen has a table and running water. Actually, it’s not quite as sparse as all that sounds, but it feels that way. The lamplight is dim. There’s no distraction of cable television. (There is a DVD player, on which to watch old episodes of Northern Exposure.) The mail never brings bad news, only advertising flyers and the county recycling newsletter. There’s nothing to demand my attention here except whatever book I’ve brought along.

I live here only part-time now. It’s a place whose purpose – and appeal – has modulated through stages of the nomadic existence of my 40s: first as a transitional home-away-from-home, then as a permanent home, then as a place to stay while I’m attending school over in the city. It has been a getaway for Ann and me. It has been a place for Jack and me to call home, a ground of stability to counter the instability in which we have occasionally lived.

I’m nostalgic about it all because our microeconomic downturn – not the country’s, but our family’s, during my current state of underemployment – may jeopardize our squatting rights here for the next year. The plan was to stay til the spring of ’10, when Jack and I each are done with school. It would be a fine place to hold a combined high school and seminary graduation party.

Who knows which way the wind may blow in days to come? Until it becomes clear, I’ll savor each measure of the amphibian symphony, each pitch of the crickets’ fury, each long shadow stretching across tilled dirt as the sun sets beyond the barn, giving way to the languishing chill of a spring evening and a luminous fresco of stars.