About the Project

Helen Kendrick Johnson is undoubtedly a complicated figure in American history. Being a prominent anti-suffragist will do that to a lady. Part of this project will eventually be to engage with her as a figure, to provide some context for the book she put together, but for now, it is as much about celebrating the book itself, and simply re-broadcasting it.

I found Short Sayings of Famous Men during my junior year in college, buried among all the others in the pile that is 'The Book Barn' (a ubiquitous label, applied to many small bookstores, but so far in my experience, thematically and architecturally appropriate only there.) When I picked it up, it was entirely as a printed object—a century-old book with a beautiful green-and-goldleaf cover, sporting that classically refined typography and ancient mildew musk—and I gave no thought to its content. And it sat, exactly as that object—first on my overcrowded bookshelf at school, then sheltered in a box at my mom's, then displayed on my mantle in my first real-world room, among a sparse but slowly-growing collection of similar objects.

Then, one day, I got bored, and found myself filled with the spirit of procrastination that drives so many grad students towards so many nominally-productive (in the strict sense of 'producing a product') but altogether irrelevant projects and passions. And so I decided to rearrange my room. And in the process of doing so, I dusted off books I hadn't opened in a year, or two, or since acquiring them, and started leafing through. It so happened that this rearrange coincided not only with a petrifying amount of uninteresting schoolwork, but also with a recent engagement with InDesign (brought on, for what it's worth, by a need to lay out not-shitty-undergrad-looking reports and memos).

Basically, some sort of inspiration happened. Whatever it is that occurs in that moment has been the subject of countless contemplations and poetic waxings on, but remains in every way beyond my ken. So, suffice it to say, I came up with an idea! Why not take this easily divided book and divide it up, present each of its little bits on its own terms, so they can be picked out and separated and assimilated into the reader's own little space of identity (hence the Tumblr component, an institution with which I had been sure I was never going to engage). What better way to treat a collection of individual parts, what more fitting a method for re-visiting a traditionally printed object, re-evaluating its form and re-orienting its utility? Probably many. But I kinda like this one, and I've decided to run with it for a while.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of this project will be that there will be many of the author's inclusions that I will find in various combination to be silly, pedestrian, offensive, banal, or even just outright dumb. If I had an encyclopedic knowledge of famous combinations of words, I'm sure the same would be true for her exclusions; I honestly have not read any further in the book than the images I've prepared (roughly a dozen). In this medium, this will unfortunately translate to a number of days that will contain 'bad posts,' which I understand does not fall under Best Practices for running a blog and gaining an audience.

But the partiality of the whole exercise is part of what makes it so interesting—no two people will take the same components and experiences from such a book, and no two people will assimilate/re-tweet/re-blog the same images from this project. That notion is cool to me, and worth exploring. And I think that if I knew how to publicize things on the internet better, there's probably some number of people who would find it similarly interesting, or at the very least, would find a good-looking visualization of a quote they've always liked, or just discovered. So that's what I'll hope for, and if this day's work ends up gathering nothing but internet-dust and the pageviews of automated info-trawling bots, I'll at least have learned a bit about laying out text, and read a lot of famous words that are, I understand, infused with the infinite, cumulative knowledge of eons of humanity (or at least Western civilization). We shall see!