SPECK: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things (edit title)

Shelfari edited the description of SPECK: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things Friday, August 7 2009.

• In Speck, Peter Buchanan-Smith, Art Director of the New York Times Op-Ed page, asks artists, designers, lawyers, writers, collectors, and photographers to explore our obsessions with the small objects that loom large in our everyday lives. To wit: Maira Kalman empties people's pocketbooks; Nicholas Blechman and Jesse Gordon trace the history of the oldest piece of dust; David Horrowitz catalogs manhole covers; and Peter Buchanan-Smith unearths a 1966 high school yearbook and transcribes the inscriptions ("To a real sweet and cute guy with a great personality. Remember English III"). Speck also shows how "ordinary" people can fascinate as much as "ordinary" objects: an interview with shoe shiner Harry Kitt, Manhattan's last practitioner of the dry-shine, photographs taken by a blind man on a sight-seeing tour, and a barber's extensive collection of earth, water, and air from around the world ask us to re-think our assumptions about the commonplace.

Shelfari edited the contributors of SPECK: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things Thursday, July 23 2009.

• Added a contributor: Peter Gordon Buchanan-Smith: (Primary Author)

Shelfari edited the first sentence of SPECK: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things Friday, July 17 2009.

• Notes: On the dusk of August 14, 2000 one red helium balloon was released into the hazy Brooklyn sky.