Sometimes a change in plans or an unexpected event is all that’s needed to direct your attention to something you’ve never noticed before. For instance, the local government in my small community recently decided to freshen up the fire hydrants by painting them an eye-catching shade of yellow. Today on the way to the post office, I saw fire hydrants in places I would have sworn they didn’t exist. Yet they must have been there all along. All it took to get my attention was a new coat of brilliant yellow paint.
You can thank another bright yellow object — a New York City taxicab — for taking me on a winding path to reach the starting point for this column. A few days ago, I was in a cab trying to get to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. I was in town to attend Book Expo America, the major book buying and publishing event in the country. I thought I’d spend a few hours looking at the museum’s extensive collection of objects related to the graphic arts.
My plan was to follow the advice of creativepro.com editor in chief Terri Stone. In a recent column, she exhorted us to “try something fresh, something you don’t have time for during the rest of the year.” I really like museums, and the prospect of visiting one with a large graphic arts collection was irresistible. Plus, I intended to write about my museum experience for this column.
Alas, the unexpected event of my cab ride was the big summer festival taking place in Central Park. The police had closed every access road that runs through the Park — which meant the taxi and I got caught up in a huge swirl of traffic, and I never made it to the museum. Watching the fare on the meter climb while we alternately moved inches and sat motionless, I gave up and opted for a trip back to my hotel instead.
The change in plans gave me plenty of time to think about my experience at Book Expo and helped send my thoughts in a new direction. Kicking back a few hours in my hotel room, I reviewed my mental slide show of the event. In every aisle, books were showing their shining new faces from display racks and tabletops. Stacks of sample-copy books, free for the taking, teetered in booth after booth. Posters of forthcoming titles lined the walls of exhibit booths. Hundreds of authors and celebrities came to meet, greet, autograph copies, and promote their books, including such well-known folks as Umberto Eco and Billy Crystal.
Tens of thousands of people came to the show. Most of the attendees were book buyers from bookstores, schools, and libraries. On one of my trips through the show floor I met a few ladies who run a chain of day care centers looking for books to add to their collection for the kids. There were also thousands of exhibits — mostly book publishers from large and small houses. From the vantage point of the overlook in the pressroom high above the show floor, the scene reminded me of a bustling farmer’s market-that’s how colorful and busy it was.
Upon reflection, it occurred to me that although I wasn’t able to visit a graphic arts collection in a museum, I had spent the better part of two days doing something that was perhaps more important: I had seen graphic arts in action on a massive scale. Very few of the people walking along on the show floor gawking at posters and peering at sample copies have ever seen a printing press in operation. They’ve never sat in a production meeting or done a press check. They’ve never spent hours trying to match artwork and typefaces to create the compelling “shining face” for a cover. Yet, there they were — the end users, the consumers. And it occurred to me, too, that without people like us they wouldn’t be there at all.
So, Terri, I guess I did what you suggested after all. Seeking something to refresh my creative fuel, I ended up seeing something familiar in a new way. All it took was a frustrating ride in a bright yellow cab and a change in plans to change my perspective. Thanks to them, I had time to grasp something I would probably have been too busy to appreciate otherwise — graphic arts in action.
This article was last modified on January 3, 2023
This article was first published on June 9, 2005
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