We got a battery-operated, laser dreidel as a gag gift for Hanukkah. We can't tell if Cody loves it and thinks it's his toy, or hates it and just wants to make us stop using it. Either way, there's usually a running start, a chomp, and a mad-dash rush to take it back to his bed. Hilarious. 

I need to establish a few givens before I begin: I work in both print and web. I love form and function and objects you can touch and products you engage with. I believe strongly that you have to make a thing well in order to use it well. Proceed accordingly.

The Story

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed a stack of books on one of our designer's desks. Where I work being a web company, books aren't usually floating around everywhere, so I picked them up, as I am wont to do. The stack was 6 volumes of A Book Apart's web series. Something immediately caught my eye:

The text on the spines is totally broken. On every book. All broken. All broken differently. And they don't even add up to anything when you stack them together like other brilliant broken-text spine designs do. The one that immediately comes to mind pops up a little farther down this page. 

I tweeted (like I do...), wondering if it was just a printing issue. It surprised me that any publication coming from a group of high-level designers would let something like that slip. Especially not do it intentionally.

By the end of the day, I was still stuck on these books and the response I got on Twitter. I appreciate innovative design that breaks the mold, but not at the cost of function, legibility, or aesthetics. The notion of it being an intentional design decision just wasn't working for me. Nor was the excuse that the spines don't matter because the books aren't being sold in stores.

The Production Editor in Me

I've seen hundreds of books to press. There is a reason books have specifications. They are physical objects intended for hands-on use. They sit on shelves a certain way. People hold them a certain way. And we look for information on them in a certain way. Each part of the form has a function and a standard.

When you print a book, you have to know a few things, like how long the book is so you know how thick the spine needs to be. In some cases you have leeway. The spine will adjust accordingly. In other cases, you have set parameters across a series. For example, when I worked on mass-market paperback series, every book had to be exactly the same number of pages. Every time. No exceptions. This helped reduce printing time (there were no surprises), cost (we were printing LOTS of them), and the books all looked great next to each other on shelves.

Spines can be nitpicky and annoying, but they serve a crucial function: holding a title. A legible title. First and foremost, there's the consumer experience component. Most books don't get to be face-out in stores, so spines are how you find things. I know...A Book Apart doesn't sell them in stores. What about libraries though? A Book Apart went as far as to give their books ISBNs, so I assume they want them sitting somewhere, even if just the Library of Congress. Forget that though. What I really care about is the book's life at home. I can't name a single collector who doesn't love how a set of books in a series look next to each other on their shelves. Not just for legibility, but for overall aesthetic. 

Finally: Standards and Usability 

A List Apart, the parent of A Book Apart, prides itself on being the evangelists of web standards and usability. Where did those standards go here? I can't find them. I've been watching book publishers screw up websites for years because they don't understand the other medium's standards. Now I see web designers doing the same with books. 

Looking at the copies in my hand again, I can't help but feel that lack of homework (and maybe some cost cutting) is hiding behind an artificial mask of brave design. I just don't see who they're fooling. The books don't attempt to conform in length. And the design of the spine doesn't bother adapting to that variable. I find this especially ironic considering Book #3 is titled "Responsive Web Design." Book design has always been inherently responsive, except in this case, which is unfortunate.

From where I stand, it's just not good enough. Because at the end of the day, everyone I showed the books to, marketing people to designers alike, had the same reaction: "That looks fucked up."

High school isn't really known for being an ever-flowing fountain of fond memories. The ones you do have are probably about your friends, or boyfriends or prom, or...something. My high school had all those things (for the other kids, I think) but my happy memories are these: one special teacher and the beauty of the place itself.

I hated high school, but I loved the buildings. Twelve years later, it's the thing I remember most fondly about Cranbrook. I'll never go to a reunion, or send in my life updates to the quarterly alumni magazine. And there are few people I keep up with, aside from surface-level glances on Facebook. But on the rare occasions I go back to Detroit and have some time, I like to see the place. 

It turns out I was spoiled by the art and the architecture. The art on campus, the art in the design, the art in the classroom. It seems funny to waste such beauty on teenagers, especially when so many of us just think of high school as a prison. I know I didn't fully appreciate it at the time. But maybe the point is that it does sink in over time. Because sometimes I actually wish I'd been in a little less of a hurry to leave.

I took a trip out to New Jersey this weekend to visit some cute babies, but shot these two photos on the train out and back. One old train, one new. Credit goes to my new portrait lens that makes everything buttery soft and beautiful. But I really love how these photos came out, especially side by side. 

I may tout myself as this hardcore New Yorker (11 years in this city gives me the street cred), but I was born and raised in the suburbs of Detroit. So my 11 years here doesn't quite eclipse my 18 spent there. There are things I do that will always anchor my Michigan roots. Sometimes I nasal my As when speaking (even if I don't want to admit it). I secretly still call it pop and not soda (though New York has trained me to say the latter). I'm an excellent driver (I learned to drive in snow). 

I love the Red Wings and Michigan football. And cherries. And Vernors--the gingeriest pop in the whole wide world, putting all other ginger ales to shame. When I listen to Motown, I get to own a piece of it because my dad also grew up in the suburbs of Detroit when that music played on the radio for the first time. 

But I left Detroit for college and never went home again. I visit, mostly for holidays. But not even a single summer was spent back in my hometown. I was almost eager to shed that skin and never return. So I didn't. 

It's true what they say--you can never go home again. Maybe New York does that to a person. I know other friends who took to this great city like I did and just couldn't go back to their hometowns. I walk around here and think to myself daily, "How does anyone live anywhere else?" New York changes you--but I still didn't grow up here.

So of course, I got chills watching the Chrysler ad during the Super Bowl. Those amazing shots of my first city. I recognized everything. The statues, the artwork, the rubble. It's the city where my dad took me to Tigers baseball games, driving down Woodward Avenue to the real Tigers Stadium. And countless trips to the Fox Theater for concerts and movies on a BIG screen (Spartacus! Ben Hur!)--for me, the most notable was getting to see Frank Sinatra when I was 8. It was the city that's fallen apart over the years, failing to really rebuild, or innovate industrially. It tugged my heartstrings.

I may never leave Brooklyn, but I still have a Michigan drivers license. It's been impossible for me to give it up. (Not just because they make it so damn easy to renew in the state of car culture.) But because once that goes, I've made the final split. Intellectually, I'm ready. But I'm a creature of nostalgia and sentiment--soon enough I'll just bite the bullet. I pay taxes here. I should probably get around to voting here too. But getting to say I'm from Detroit gives those of us lucky to say so a sense of pride--it's gritty and tough. I'm not some California lightweight. It's hard to let go.

The transition is tough, maybe because my family is also abandoning Detroit one by one. It's not just me who has gotten up and left (though I was first)--it's everyone. My parents won't be too far behind, that is as soon as one of us gets around to giving them a grandkid. And when that era ends, I'll consider it one of life's semicolons, like my dad says.

Someday I want to take my children to Up North Michigan to have summers on the Great Lakes looking for Petoskey stones and walking around Mackinac Island, riding bikes and eating fudge. I want my kids to love hockey (only the Red Wings, of course) and call it pop not soda. I want them to drive cars in ways that would make their Michigan family proud. And maybe they'll get to lay a little claim on Detroit too, because it'll always be home to me, even if I can't go back. 

A friend of mine went to Israel recently. This isn't unusual for me. I have lots of friends who go to Israel. That's what Jews do, generally--we go to Israel. I've been 10 times. (I might be missing one or two in there, but that's my rough count.) As someone turning 30, that means I average a trip about every 2-3 years. Not bad.

But this friend isn't Jewish. Not even close. So a trip to Israel in this case was totally going to defy what I expect my friends to be doing there, or even how they approach the trip as a whole. I mostly think of it as a family affair--in the obligatory sense. My parents own an apartment in Jerusalem, and ultimately intend to partially retire to. My one sister lived there for a year after college. My youngest sister just made aliyah and is now in the Israeli Army.

For my friend who is entirely outside this context, the trip (for work, no less) could go in a myriad of ways. It's a tense place. A religiously conflicted, but modern place. A place full of more characters and idiosyncrasies than you expect. A place of obscene hypocrisy and contradictions. Possibly the place the war that ends the planet will start. So I didn't really anticipate him telling me that he was expecting/hoping for some kind of spiritual moment in the Old City of Jerusalem. 

"What does a spiritual moment looks like for an atheist?" I asked.

"I have no idea."

Atheism aside, this gets one thinking about whether you can even have a spiritual experience in a place over-hyped for that purpose. If approach a place knowing it's got that association, can you really be open to anything? Can you intellectually pre-empt your own spiritual moment?

I think yes.

There are two cities in the world that tug my heartstrings. I live in one of them. The other is Jerusalem, a city I will never live in. It's too complicated there. I don't fit in religiously. (Maybe I'm too blond.) But still, whenever I'm in Israel, I feel really weird being in any other part of the country. I can't quite put my finger on it. It's a pull. And one that I'm not entirely sure I like. 

But I don't know that I've had a truly spiritual experience there. The Kotel holds nothing for me. It's too rife with conflict and bad feelings. I don't particularly like praying in formal settings in Israel at all. In fact, I think the moments in my life where I've felt something other have been in places I least expected it.

Like Auschwitz. 

Talk about a place that is going to carry emotional weight. Yeah, you expect to be upset. You expect to cry. Do you expect to feel God? Not so much. God was decidedly not there when the place earned its reputation. But 12 years ago, walking out of Birkenau--the place both of my grandparents lost their entire families and pieces of themselves--I saw a rainbow. It was raining. The sky cleared. I believe in weather patterns just as well as anything else. So it was mostly just a fluke. But...there it was at exactly the moment I needed it. 

Since then, I don't try for the spiritual moments. If it comes, it comes. You can want it, but seeking it out can only be anticlimactic and self-defeating. Let the universe do what it's going to do. The best spiritual moment is the one that smacks you upside the head when you're least expecting it. That's how you know it's real.

**Post Script: I don't really consider myself that spiritual of a person. Nor do I really even know what that means most of the time. And I definitely don't want to confuse this with concepts of faith or religion, so we can kindly leave all that out of any comments that might appear below.

Whether I buy into a system of God judging us and writing us down for another year or not, I get weirdly pensive around Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It didn't happen as much when I was younger, but now that years feel like they're going by palpably faster, but still full of so much change, it's hard not to feel a little strange. You start remembering the big stuff and little stuff. Some of it's good. Some of it...not so much.

There's a little phrase from the central prayer we say on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, that I've always liked:

ותזכור כל הנשכחות

Loosely translate: "And He'll remember all the forgotten things."

We all know how selective memory is. I feel like I remember too many things I'd like to forget, and keep painful stuff at the forefront far too often. And then I wonder what other people remember about me as well. Do they remember something I've done wrong that I don't? That's a lot of the reason this holiday makes us apologize to the people in our lives, even for things we don't remember doing wrong. But isn't it horrible to think we can so easily forget our misdoings?

We Jews use the metaphor of God writing in books a lot this time of year. There's of course the Book of Life that we're all aiming to get written in, but there's also the Sefer Hazichronot, the Book of Chronicles, as a lot of people translate it, but I prefer the Book of Memories. We all keep things in a log in our heads, and who knows when those will resurface to change how we think about things. 

So this year I'm going to hope for new, good memories to be added to my book. And try to make sure memories of me are the good kind. (We'll see how that goes, but I'm crossing my fingers.)

שנה טובה

**Disclaimer: This post is going on my personal site for a reason. It's my personal site, so I get to say personal things. Sorry if it hits anyone the wrong way.** 

I have three jobs. I'm a literary agent, a teacher, and a web geek.

I have these three jobs for multiple reasons. The biggest right now is because of necessity. I live in New York City. Rent is horrible. And the job that I was treating as my primary job, that is literary agenting, takes many years to build up into an income you can live off of. So I need some hourly money for other tasks to make sure I can feed myself.

But I also have three jobs because I have a lot of things I'm interested in. The first is easy. I love books, and that's where my career started. Putting great books in the hands of kids is..well, pretty great. The second follows suit, because if I like creating content for kids, it's not such a stretch to think that hanging out with kids a few hours a week would be fun too. The third started as half-hobby, half-necessity. My agency needed a website, so I learned how to do them. And then I started to love that too, and now I help other people figure out how to use their websites. 

And doing lots of different things keeps me from getting bored. I can keep up my interests in design AND words AND infantile humor on a daily basis.

Yet, how these jobs all pay couldn't be more different. The first is commission, so in theory the harder I work, the more I get paid. (This turns out to be a big joke.) The other two are hourly, but the rates are so different, given the nature of the work.

More interesting though is how rewarding these jobs are couldn't be more different. Especially how my perception of that reward has changed in just the last few weeks. It's kind of easy to glorify the reward of the first two jobs. (Books! Children! Making dreams come true!) I mean, they always say that as long as what you're doing makes you happy, you're okay. You can get paid all the money in the world, but if the job sucks, it can make you miserable.

That's true. But you know what? It feels good to be paid for hours spent. I've been thinking a lot more about the agenting, and how that pays me. It turns out that the more hours I put in on the other jobs, earning actual money on an hourly basis, I realize that it's not always enough to love the books. Because it's not just books: you have to deal with people. And with people come emotions, behavior, and often quite a bit of nonsense. (This is not true of every author all the time, or even most of them most of the time. Usually it's just some of them, some of the time.) Nevertheless, the chance that I *might* make some money off that book in the long run can't always mitigate the irritation and pain people can cause you along the way. No matter how much you love their book. 

Sadly, I've started to get bitter lately at how many hours I put in for something I should love, that I've barely seen a dime on, when the people I'm doing it for can make it so difficult. I have felt more under-appreciated and exploited recently than at many other points in my life. Why am I doing this? Isn't it just better to get paid and go home? How far is that love supposed to take me?

Lord help me, I don't know. Disillusionment comes and disillusionment goes. Today my heart hurts as much as my wallet. I guess it will just have to shake out which job gives me the best of all those outcomes.

Let the best job win. And someone give me a cookie.