August 13, 2005

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 13.

It's Day 13 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.)

You can see by the ticket stub collaged into the first side of the page that it's August 10, 1993. I go to see the movie "The Piano" and am confused by some things and pleased by others. On the second side of the page, I draw two signs for bookstores: Tweedehands Boekwinkels and Oom Wim. I'm delighted by these words, though I realize they must be perfectly ordinary in Dutch – surely "Tweedehands Boekwinkels" is just "secondhand booksellers" – but irresistibly cute and silly to American ears.

I go into a third store, a big comics shop called Lambiek. I'm utterly under the spell of "Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry," as these notebook pages attest, so I ask if he has any Bill Griffith books. He has "Yow!" and I buy it. I also buy "Verre d'Eau" (that is, "Weirdo," R. Crumb's comic), "Understanding Comics" (which had just come out), and two books by Mark Beyer, whom I adore. The two Mark Beyer books are "Amy and Jordan" and "Agony." I'd been searching for "Agony," which I'd read before, but not owned, and was happy enough to find a German-language copy of it. "Amy and Jordan" makes a huge impression on me for the rest of the trip and distinctively influences the drawing that you'll see on Page 22.

Amsterdam Notebook

Amsterdam Notebook

4 comments:

Robert Holmgren said...

I think you should re-design your blog to look like your Amsterdam Notebooks. Sketch every posting. They remind me of this.

Ann Althouse said...

Menlo Bob: It would be invisible to Google. Also slow: you have to scan the image and then upload it and code in the URL. But I would like to redraw the heading of this blog, so it's not the generic Minima.

Robert Holmgren said...

Sure it's a ridiculous idea. I'd just like to see it done. Perhaps the future will bring us sketch blogging. We'll draw and scan directly to the screen. The paperless artist.

Beth said...

Thanks for those titles; I think I'll buy "Agony" today if I can find it.