even*cleveland: birthday gifts some 43-year-olds might enjoy

birthday gifts some 43-year-olds might enjoy

A truly magical piece of furniture: Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel's Oak bench with virgin tiger moths and snails, 2021.

An intricately patterned shift dress from byTiMo.

A twisty Il Buco candle.

A vintage "philosophers" transferware bowl.

The golden thread of life: "An essential sewing kit comprised of a pair of 24 karat gold-plated scissors, a 24 karat gold-plated thimble, a spool of golden thread, and a golden-eyed needle."

A hand pin after Bronzino by Gabriella Kiss.

Every issue of Weird Walk: a zine "framed in the hinterland between bucolic and eerie" that's "abundant with vibes."

Stompy shoes by Naguisa for extra-long ambles.

A spot to organize the ever-growing to-be-read pile: Christine Espinal's Mesa Tres / Three Table.

A four-in-one Stalogy editor's pen for notes in the margins.

Republic playing cards by Uusi for prettier games of rummy.

A gift certificate by Set Editions, good for one escape.

And, of course, cake (plus the last Le Carré and an uninterrupted afternoon to read it). Happy birthday to me!

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

birthday gifts some 43-year-olds might enjoy

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