I have a lot of stuff in the garage. A lot. It’s taken over a corner of the garage and begun to spread like kudzu into the area designated for the lawn mower and stepladders, threatening to annex the hard-fought territories of the rooftop vacation carrier. Before my blossoming collection goes too far, I’ve started to trim it.

Working under the simple adage, ‘You can’t take it with you”, I’ve started to hone my collection down. I mean, it’s not even a collection, aside from the sense that I approached everything there with the thought that “I can use this someday in some art project that I haven’t even fathomed yet, but when I come up with it, boy howdy will I be glad that this thing is around!” Unfortunately, the raw materials for my ideas (whether they exist yet or not) seem to encompass the category of ‘noun’. If you can touch it, I probably have some of it in the garage.

A lot of this ‘collection’ is books. I work at a library, and we have to throw out a hundred or so books every day, on average. It’s just a necessity of smooth functionality, and even with that many going the way of the discard pile, our Biography and Reference rooms are starting to look like my little corner of the garage.

Here are five books that I found in the garage, and why I probably rescued them.

1. Nancy Drew Mystery Stories #14 : The Whispering Statue

It’s undeniable that cover art for most of the Nancy Drew series during the 1960s and 1970s was masterful. They’re expertly composed, striking and mysterious – always with a strange aura of suspense. Almost all of these can be credited to an artist named Rudy Nappi, who also happened to be one of the finest pulp cover painters of the era. So, while Nancy Drew dealt with 1940s era thrills and innocence, Nappi’s other covers for titles such as ‘Girl-Hungry’ and ‘Apprentice Virgin’ were nothing of the sort. His transition between the two themes was seamless, and maybe a little sinister, but always appropriately so.

I collected this book because I’d recently seen Nappi’s Nancy Drew covers transformed into handbags and blank journals at a craft fair. While I possess none of the necessary skills to make these things, I remain confident that I can do SOMETHING neat with Nappi’s beautiful artwork.

2. Duck Tales : Webby Saves the Day

Okay, I admit it : I used to run off of the school bus every day, push a blank tape into the VCR and record Duck Tales (and sometimes, the abysmal Super Mario Brothers Super Show). I don’t remember what about Duck Tales thrilled me, but I was a devotee. Perhaps these were the first inklings of my eventual love for comics, as the original Carl Barks comics about Scrooge McDuck’s Duckburg are regarded as some of the finest combination of art and storytelling in the history of comicdom.

Barks’ influence can be felt throughout everything that came after him, most notably, Star Wars. He’s had a street named after him, and even an asteroid. While I’m not sure how many original Barks elements made it into the cartoons, I’m aware that much of it was simplified for the afterschool audience. Instead of McDuck’s Money Vault being a bustling office building (which Barks drew out in detail, functions and all), the cartoon turned the Vault into a big swimming pool of coins. Still, Barks’ remained at the core of this, which is probably where my love came from.

It didn’t hurt that the NES Duck Tales video game was endlessly awesome. Piloting Scrooge McDuck through haunted castles, mines, outer space, the Amazon and snowy mountains with nothing but his cane for a weapon was stupendous. I’ll go back and visit anytime.

3. Demian by Herman Hesse

I have a collection of yellowing paperbacks which I keep for the express purpose of making me look smart.

Does it need to be more complex than that?

For some reason, I like to collect these intellectual titles in paperback form, and I much prefer it if they’re beat up and well-read looking – not so much to imply that I’ve been doing the well-reading, but there’s a certain casualness about a beat up paperback of Camus’ The Stranger, or Carson McCullers’ ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’. It says, “yeah, I read these sexily intelligent books – what’s the big deal?” No gilt edges and fabric binding perched high atop mahogany shelves – this is the down and dirty of literature. New books come with a sense of obligation, a command for you to break the binding and read the innards.

Old books have had their lives already, so anything I share with them is just a bonus. Despite the many similarities between my views of literature and romance, the previous sentence does not imply that I feel the same about my romantic conquests.

4. The History and Technique of Lettering by Alexander Nesbitt

I use lettering resources regularly – especially older ones. Since fonts seem to come in trends and waves, some really great and interesting letterings are lost to the ages and haven’t successfully made their way to a single reliable source on the internet for reference – at least not one that’s satisfied my need for letters.

As a comic artist, I letter my sound effects separately and Photoshop them in later, since drawing proportional letters is an exacting science. Of course, I use a lot of the bombastic, cartoonish cartoon letters to express my hilarious onomatopoeias, but sometimes a flowery, delicate ‘THWACK!’ imparts the scene a lot clearer. Even the completely unnecessary sound effect can be placed for a great deal of hilarity – the act of grabbing something isn’t usually an audible action, but adding the word ‘GRAB!’ to the scene can add a whole new layer of strange veracity to a scene.

If you’re a synaesthetic like me, sounds have shapes – so getting the lettering just right is essential. I pair leafing through these books with my semester of Typography studies and I get some pretty neat results. At least, I think so. Business logos from the 1920s through 1960s are a favorite inspiration of mine.

5. Max Headroom : 20 Minutes into the Future, a picture book of the film written by Steve Roberts

As opposed to the heightened intellect of Demian, the storybook novelization of a movie is the lowest possible form of literature. As far as I’m concerned, it serves no intelligent purpose, and there’s no art or skill behind the creation of one. It’s this angry bafflement, of course, that made me pick this one up. If you enjoyed the movie, watch it again. Don’t read a book where the same stuff happens, but with even more exposition. Did you not get it the first time?

What scares me most is that I recently came across a copy of the ‘Sex and the City Movie’ picture book novelization for adults, and now I’m sure that the universe is about to destroy itself in the worst possible way.

Independent from that disgust, Max Headroom was a mysterious character to me while I was growing up – a little creepy, but very emblematic of the 1980s, whether we knew it or not at the time, and he is a science fiction hero, after all.

The garage is a strange, deep place, but everything serves a purpose, and remains part of an interconnected web.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 2:00 am and is filed under flea market finds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.