scale and antiquity

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Wandering around the library on my lunch break, I headed toward where I thought the art books were but instead is the home of countless bound foreign architectural journals from the late 60's and early 70's, detailing magnificent German collisions of planes, erected to house those in seek of great knowledge and greater productivity, Japanese poems in glass and concrete with lines shapes by the wind, Italian buildings that were, well, sexier than the rest. This is one of the reasons I love working on campus. To go engage in this pursuit with direct purpose would be ridiculous, but to land upon it like a leaf in the breeze is serendipitous and lovely.

Then I fell into where they keep the oversize books, gigantic atlases and tomes preposterously still bound in those delicious monchromatic central binding hardcovers with only a tiny title and call number embossed in white on the spine "The Gulf of Mexico" over a comparatively endless expanse of red for the cover. The most poetic thing in there was this:

The Pyramids of Gizeh, towering in dusty gold and black above all it surrounded. I wanted to pull it off the shelf and hopefully discover and acre of foldouts detailing the inner-workings of the pyramids from when they were explored by lantern