found foundering

Chatting with Citizen Reader often leads to awesome reading suggestions.

She has an uncommon ability to recall intriguing and relevant book titles, no matter how offbeat the conversational subject. Talk about anything* and she will very likely suggest a great, related book.

Voila! Like magic. Bookish dexterity. CR just tugs terrific reads out of the top of her head with no scrambling to remember the title, no groping for the author's name. Then she verbally blurbs it, succinctly but ever so temptingly. I envy these talents, what formidable skills -- to read, to intelligently review and then to remember vast numbers of books.

Recently, I mentioned my some of my basement archeology discoveries (curiosities all originally from La Porte, Indiana, such as the badge of honor and a peculiar pre-Civil War notebook) to CR and damn but she did it again.

Recalled a book that is perfectly -- no, shockingly -- right.

The book, entitled La Porte, Indiana is an assemblage of 1950s - 60s photographic portraits of the residents of that city, all taken by Mr. Frank Pease and (much later) discovered and compiled by Jason Bitner, the founder of Found Magazine. Published by Princeton Architectural Press, great reproduction on fine-quality paper, it is a handsome, dense little brick of a book. Nicely sized, weighty in your hands yet small enough for curling up and perusing in bed. Here is the blurb (lifted from the publisher because I suck at describing books and can't remember even CR's enticing description):

FOUND magazine editor Jason Bitner has made it a habit of picking up after us, walking down the back alleys of our lives, and accumulating all that we've thrown away or mislaid. One afternoon not long ago, after lunch at a small Midwestern diner, he stumbled onto a forgotten archive. In the back of the restaurant were box upon box of studio portraits of the townspeople of LaPorte, Indiana–over 18,000 in total.

Bitner selected a satisfying grouping of complimentary images from the 18,000 portraits. He arranged them and pitched it and found a publisher. It is a delicious browse, kind of a look-and-wonder book. In the introduction, Bitner teases that he deliberately tried to exclude the oddities and weirder images from the photographs that he chose (so one is left the marvelous task of imagining what those stranger rejects might have looked like!). He also playfully mentions that the portraits are grouped into themes, although the reader might have to work a bit to figure them out.

Themes such as horn-rimmed glasses, couples that resemble one another, people wearing bow-ties, varieties of pearl necklaces? That didn't require too much mental exertion. Are there subtler messages that I have missed here? These photos are freakishly exactly like the small selection of family portraits my own household kept in a cupboard while I was growing up... but there were 18,000 images that Bitner sifted through (and counted). Achingly familiar yet entirely unknown people.

The one shown below right is one of my favorites from Bitner's album. It was especially striking as part of a grouping of paired images, showing the same subjects looking pensive and then smiling. So sorry, I have no scanner and could not find an online version of the mate to this image -- the girls were transformed by their smiles!

Mr. Bitner was wise to have recognized the value of the pictures and to have assembled such a wonderful, understated selection of them. It makes a fascinating book. However, he loses a whole lot of scavenger cred due to the cushy environment of these treasures.

The portraits were in tidy boxes, all one size, arranged in an unused room in a diner in La Porte. So his archival toiling involved sipping coffee and eating warm cinnamon rolls while flipping through the pictures in relative comfort. No grappling with mold, mildew, mouse mummies and raccoon mommies for him.

Sorting out the garbage from the salvage from the keepsakes has just about exhausted me.

Ah, but Mr. Bitner, please come see my finds! There have been a few bright, sparkling gems in among the debris and those have given me enough strength to persevere. Pretty sure that you could write a book about them and that Citizen Reader could persuade others to peruse it.

* pleasant recollection of an early conversation (about flint-knapping --many people have idle chit-chat on this topic -- Mary, are you out there?) and sure enough, CR just popped out a "hey, you might want to read..." suggestion and it was a fabulous novel: A Gift of Stones, an early work by Jim Crace. Never would have picked this up without her endorsement, but it is a terrific book. Don't miss it!