Hesitating to grab a book, I kept strolling through the library, my eyes scanning the shelves. In the back of my mind I knew that no matter what book I choose, it would be the most unappealing book in the library. That is my curse. The ability of picking out the worst looking book with the most tedious content between thousands of books, is something I was cursed with since I could read. Eventually my eyes laid on the spine of a book that had a black plastic binding, protected by another layer of see through plastic. Odd, I thought whilst hoping this spine would not be as disappointing as always. I grabbed the book and I immediately grasped for air. Having a eye for good taste, my eyes were burning when they saw the dirty undefinable brown-greyish colour of the book. The layout of the cover had was as if someone wanted to have a minimalistic design but used a free preset example from a website. The title, in ariel -the designer should apologise himself-, had kilometres of blank space in between the words which suggests a failed attempt of making it look graphically interesting.
‘’Designing and Building
a
Studio Glass Furnace’’
In the right corner an asymmetrical shape with seven corners. The librarian thought it was probably a shape with a function, because they put the sticker with the barcode inside of the shape. The back of the book is blank. It is for the best.
As soon as I browsed through the book, I immediately recognised the origin by its typeface. It was a thesis of a student at the Rietveld. One thing Rietveld students love, is courier new. It is alternative, it is cool, it is new wave. I felt bad for this student, that not only the outside of the book was boring but as so the inside and the outside… I thought.
Serious looking graphs and tables with numbers filled every second page, until they turned into dull series of real sepia photos, glued onto the pages, in which the was per step documented how to build a furnace. This part suited the whole book, but also gave it a sort of charm.
Whilst I was about to close the book and finish my writing, I found two more analog photos hidden in the back of the book. One of them was the missing photo seventeen in the book. But the second one was an image of people walking down the canals in Amsterdam. From across the street a lady in red was looking right into the camera. She was my saviour of this book.
