This is one of my favorite physical objects, and I thought y'all might like to see it. It's called The Universal Traveler, by Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall, and it has a revised publication date of 1974. I don't know when this copy was printed.
I found it in a used bookshop around a decade ago, probably Jackson Street Books in Athens, GA, which is gone now because the owner treated everybody like shit, didn't update his inventory, preferred to sell books online, and after years of open neglect and hostility had the sheer, jagged, cliff-face stones to blame "people not reading anymore" on the store closing. I enjoyed it while it lasted and made a lot of nice discoveries there between 2006 and 2016. Only as I type this do I fully realize the absence in my life without a good old-fashioned used bookshop nearby. Between losing Jackson Street, working in a new-books store for a few years (which was great but also oversaturated me with books and made it a lot harder to be excited about bringing yet another book into my life), the 2016 election (which made it physically uncomfortable for me to sit and just read very much for over a year), and the growing depressive sense that the accumulation of pleasurable knowledge in a collapsing fascist biosphere is a waste of time... the last few years have given me a very different relationship to reading than the one I possessed since I learned to read when I was three.
Despite all this and more, I've been trying to rehabilitate my reading mind. There are other parts of my brain that need help, including my creative capacity and big picture planning. So it is that I revisited my shelves in recent days, reorganized a bit, and rediscovered The Universal Traveler.
When I found this book all those years ago, it shook me like a blue bolt. I thought of myself as a creative person, really inhabited that as an identity more than I do now. Now, "being creative" is just something I do, whether I want to or not, and it feels like an affliction more often than it does something I want to identify with. But when this big, beautiful book slid off of the shelf and into my head, I resonated like a gong. "The Universal Traveler." What a great way to put it! That's something I'd like to be, I thought. I want to travel the universe! "a Soft-Systems guide to: creativity, problem-solving, And the process of reaching goals". Good lord! I'd like a guide to all those things! And just look at it; it had traveled decades to eventually meet me, from the fabled creative paradise of California, the place I was born, and the sand-gathered throne from which I was deposed.
It feels even rarer now than it did then to come across a book I've just never heard of, let alone one that I want to read immediately.
"DESIGN IS a process of MAKING DREAMS come TRUE", said the back of the book. Hot damn, 22-year-old me thought. I love dreams! I want to make them come true! I guess... whatever they mean by "DESIGN" might be a key ingredient in that Process. This was in like 2009, before the obnoxious tyranny of design as a daily talking point for everyone from software chumps to man-child billionaires had fully swept our burgeoning dark age. I was 22 god dang years old. I had slept with one person a few times, I was still years away from smoking or drinking any drugs, and I was depressed as hell but had yet to give up completely on the promise that what I made might save me from misery. Art felt possible. Design could still feel exciting. A book from the 70s could promise a kind of lost-art sensation from a bygone era of dream-design. The back cover said it was from "One First Street, Los Altos" for crying out loud. One First Street! If there was ever a mystical secret originary street hidden somewhere in this cursed and scoured land, there it was!
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There's much more to say about this, but that's all I have time for right now. One last thing I want to share about right now is that, in addition to the ancient text of book itself, there are a couple of ancient papers inside, too. And one thing that made it feel even more like the book was, itself, a Traveler is this old Delta boarding pass I found tucked partway inside:
Look at this thing! Printed, probably screen-printed en masse? Probably from the 80s, based on a couple of other clues in the book itself. Smoking section printed, but not marked. Does that mean it was after smoking sections had been eliminated, or that this flight didn't have those sections? A sticker for the seat number!
And on the back, all these lovely little brand logos, and an alcoholic drink list "AVAILABLE AT A NOMINAL CHARGE". I love it!
Between this printed boarding pass and the hand-assembled nature of the book itself (which gets more apparent in the next few pages, that this book made by designers to teach designers has a fabulously-handmade quality of now-neglected printing methods), you can really get the feeling that our clean and tidy digital world — for whatever benefits it may be alleged to have brought us — sure is a lot less fun to interact with. Intangibility grants ubiquity, but for some combination of reasons capitalist and corporate, the things that reach billions of hands are so often devoid of the sense that any human's hand was involved in getting it to us. Though I'm sure there are people who actually flew on a plane in the 1980s who would say these printed cards felt impersonal and disposable at the time, too. Would you?
As we can see from the introduction, these people were already enmeshed in this digital-physical tension.
This is one a small handful of books that I treasure as sacred objects. It made a big impression on me 10 years ago; I wonder now if it can be helpful, if I can re-learn its lessons, or take something new into the scorched fields of my imagination. It looks like it's been reprinted a few times (with an eventually-worse cover, of course), if you want to read it yourself. And if you know anything else about this book, its authors, or the boarding pass, email me! I'll try to share more bits as I read it in the coming weeks. Okay, thanks for reading about what I'm reading!
