Diagonal storage

When I was at Portugal's national printing museum, I saw lead type stored like this:

Some signage dregs

San Francisco

Sugarhouse, Salt Lake City

Uptown Minneapolis

Provo

Provo, at the Great Salt Lake Guitar Co

Bent to a Straight and Narrow at a Point of Passage

Lawrence Weiner piece at the UMFA

Cuts for printing Spanish playing cards / Planchas de imprenta (naipes)

These snapshots are from the Museu Frederic Marès in Barcelona. Marès was a Catalan sculptor. His statues speckle Barcelona. You've probably seen them at Montjuic and Pl. Catalunya. His home became a museum. The first floor houses his collection of Spanish figurative sculpture. The rest of it is one big cabinet of curiosities--comprised of anything and everything he could hoard.  

Marès graduated from the school I attended last year, and later in his life, ended up directing it. The story I heard was that his hoarding actually gave birth to the book arts program. He needed somebody to bind all of his paper ephemera and photographs into albums. 

Marès was, apparently, deeply quirky. He'd shuffle around his house/studio/museum, checking on his collections in his nightgown, well into his old age. 

Anyway, I loved seeing these cuts for printing Spanish playing cards there. 

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Hice estas dos fotos en el Museo Marès de Barcelona. La casa de Marès, escultor catalán, se convirtió en museo mientras él vivía, y sigue siéndolo. En la primera planta se expone su colección de escultura hispánica. Las demás plantas son un gran gabinete de curiosidades que contiene todo lo que coleccionaba. 

Marès estudió en La Llotja y llegó a dirigirla. Me contaron que, de la necesidad de encuadernar todos los recuerdos y fotos que guardaba, nació el Conservatorio de las Artes del Libro. 

Marès era no solo excéntrico, sino muy así, andando por la casa-museo en zapatillas de casa para vigilar las colecciones.  

Entre ellas hay unas pocas planchas de imprenta, incluso estas. Son para imprimir los naipes. 

What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, "an exploration of the deserted places of my memory," the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places ... in short, something like an "uprooting in one's origins?" (Heidegger).

~Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

Provo, Utah, 2014

Arches / arcos

Moab, Utah, 2014

Segovia, Spain, 2009

Dear Barcelona / Querida Barcelona,

Love, India / con cariño, India

These remind me of Candy Chang's sidewalk psychiatry. / Esto me recuerda de este proyecto de psiquiatría peatonal por Candy Chang.