The one-item gift guide

The weekly micro-decorating newsletter * Issue 9 of 13, A24 *
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Last November, we kicked off the holiday season by publishing a gift guide with only one thing in it – a very unusual cookbook. It was an attempt to cut through the recommendation clutter that makes this period feel so hectic. Fortunately, we've found another item so good it also deserves to stand alone.

I spotted this year's pick in the bookstore of Montreal's CCA – Canadian Centre for Architecture – and it froze me in my tracks. I had only seen it online for hundreds of dollars because it was long out of print. I couldn't believe I was seeing a stack of fresh new copies in front of me at an affordable price.

The book I'm talking about – and now happily own – is "Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement." You can get a sense of its contents from the contemplative mood of the cover:

It first came out over twenty years ago, the result of a collaboration between artist and writer Leonard Koren, and artist Nathalie Du Pasquier, a co-founder of the Memphis Group. Now, thanks to Apartamento Magazine, there's a new, generously formatted edition available, spreading the message more widely.

In a recent Apartamento article, Leonard and Nathalie reminisce about how they first met and how the book initially came to be:

The method was a kind of verbal and visual dialogue. Leonard mailed a short verbal prompt to Nathalie, occasionally accompanied by photographs. Nathalie responded by arranging items in her studio and painting the still life composition. Then, Leonard analyzed the result using an approach inspired by the classical art of rhetoric.

In the book, we see the painting and analysis side-by-side, although we're not privy to the verbal prompts or photos that sparked the process. There's a dream-like stylization to the images, and yet the objects are clearly unique and personal. The text relies on eight categories, such as "alignment" and "narrative," to assess what makes the arrangement compelling. Each two-page spread is a fascinating look at why a bunch of things on a surface can feel charged with significance:

The carefully structured text and the simplified forms of each painting play against one another. At one moment, the writing seems to capture an arrangement perfectly. The next moment, the colours and shapes wrestle free of any attempt to define them.

Most of the images are stripped of any background detail, encouraging you to fall into a reverie as you admire the mysterious setups:

This book would make a great gift for all sorts of people – an artistic friend, an avid decorator, a bibliophile, an architect, a daydreamer, a lover of riddles. With a format resembling an illustrated kids' book, it would also be suitable for a precocious child.

As for my own copy, it's not leaving home any time soon:

Thank you for reading.