New Book of Art (Again)

Once again I’ve filled up (mostly) a small blank journal, called “The Book of Art,” with drawings of characters, fantasy maps, geometric sketches, event tickets and flyers, dreams, story drafts, Tarot readings, and words that don’t make it to an electronic format. Not that there are too many deep dark secrets (or any dirty pictures) lurking in the margins as I believe if you truly want something to be a secret the last thing you should do is write it down; but writing (and drawing) for an audience of one is an antidote for self-censorship.

The journals used to get beat up quite a bit—so much so that sometimes sections of pages pulled loose or the end boards tore away from the spine—until I was gifted with a leather book cover, with a leather tie, to protect them. The leather cover is embossed with a reproduction of the Flammarion woodcut: an old design of celestial phenomena over a landscape while a robed sage in the corner pushes through the curtain of heaven and gazes at the spoked wheels of the empyrean hidden therein. The cover’s sleeves also make handy storage for small rulers and shape templates.

I opened the old journal extra wide, slipped it out of the leather cover’s sleeves, and slipped in a brand new journal. It was the Autumnal Equinox, which felt portentous given that the older Book of Art had begun on the Autumnal Equinox five years prior. However, I closed the new Book of Art and secured the leather tie of the cover without intonations, bells, candles, or frankincense and myrrh—much to the relief of Mark.

When I added the old, filled book to the stack of older journals, their blank black spines prompted me to finally use a silver gel pen to write date ranges down so I could more easily go back and find a particular era. This was harder than I thought it might be, as back in the early 2000s I tended to not date entries or use the year. It was interesting to see which journals spanned two years and which ones (like this last one) spanned five.

I typically start a new journal off with a front page with an artistic “The Book of Art.” Since this new book started on the Autumnal Equinox, I have a halved circle in a square with alternating dark and light regions as the background. Other times I’ve just written “The Book of Art” in large or fancy letters. One time I attempted an Art Nouveau look with branching trees and an awkward self-portrait.

I’m currently working on a geometric zodiac on the next page, and I want to reproduce a Tree of Life design that I did in the old Book of Art next. And a geometric construction of a pentagon using Euclid’s method afterward, maybe with a comparison against the method involving a circle, dividing its diameter into five parts, and a chord through the second point on the diameter.

I should more regularly go through the retired Book of Art pile. While I would be thrilled if archeologists or graduate students pored through them for detailed analysis supporting literary critique or Insights into the Culture of the Quizzical, North American, Gay, Cisgender, Pagan Man of the Early Twenty-First Century (Quick! Find David Macaulay’s *Motel of the Mysteries*!), the boxes of my dead relatives’ writings gathering dust are an indicator that I’m the person most interested in my own writing. Somehow, I doubt that anyone is going to host a retrospective of my art or read passages from various Books of Art unless it’s my funeral.

Hmm, I suppose I’ll have to rebrand The Book of Art as Hot Sex and Free Parking Spots.