David Macaulay wrote
The Ways Things Work which was a huge book for kids explaining the mechanical and physical workings of things. i was obsessed over that book when i was little. his human and mammoth drawings are very fun and his detailed architectural modeling is spectacular. sometimes it's a little overwhelming; i didn't realize what this was at first and it blew my mind until i figured out that it wasn't actually some enormous spiked upside-down hell fortress. (then i just appreciated it aesthetically.) look at those tiny human figures at the bottom, dwarfed by the colossus, at the mercy of a gargantuan concrete power they do not understand
another book i read too much: a sticker book about Cardcaptor Sakura with a sort of encyclopedia of the show/journal written in the style of the 10-year-old girl protagonist. we did not have TV and i have never seen more than one minute of the show. i was a 10-year-old boy and i vicariously experienced a magical girl show entirely through reading a girly fuckin sticker book. how queer is that
in fact i had some sort of sticker fetish in general when i was little. i had forgotten almost completely about it until i was cleaning out my house today. sheets and sheets of garish, holographic stickers. most of them still collected and unpeeled because i didn't want to mess them up and disperse them. *Sigh.....* my childhood was comprised of mechanical manuals, stickers, mysterious unlicensed toys that i found laying on the ground, rented anime, stupid flash animations, shareware trials, plastic jewelry, books about video games......! idolized licensed commodity and repurposed trash!! this bizarre mentality of artistic appreciation of and obsessive devotion to utterly insipid and artless things still dwells in my idiot brain!!! yes please gladly will i reread for the twentieth time a fucking CCG price catalog from 2001 for its reviews of games that i have never played!!! i want to live in a heap of plastic junk and stare at magazines with screenshots of tiny people glitching through walls forever!!!!!!!!!!!!!