Let me change to blue

“Let me change to blue,
Or throw a violet shadow when I will.”

—Dylan Thomas, “It’s light that makes the intervals”, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1971.

Studio Lettering

Flower Garden

The Etiquette of Exchanging Business Cards

the darkness blazed

“ ‘The most astonishing discovery of recent times—at any rate the one that has taught me the most—is the discovery of the photogenic apparatus of deep-sea creatures.’
    ‘Oh, tell us about it!’ cried Lilian, letting her cigarette go out and her ice melt on the plate.
    ‘You know, no doubt, that the light of day does not reach very far down in to the sea. Its depths are dark . . . huge gulfs, which for a long time were thought to be uninhabited; then people began dragging them, and quantities of strange animals were brought up from those infernal regions—animals that were blind, it was thought. What use would the sense of sight be in the dark? Evidently they had no eyes; they wouldn’t, they couldn’t have eyes. Nevertheless, on examination it was found to people’s amazement that some of them had eyes; that they almost all had eyes, and sometimes antennae of extraordinary sensibility into the bargain. Still people doubted and wondered: why eyes with no means of seeing? Eyes that are sensitive—but sensitive to what? . . . And at last it was discovered that each of these animals which people at first insisted were creatures of darkness, gives forth and projects before an around it its own light. Each of them shines, illuminates, irradiates. When they were brought up from the depths at night and turned out on to the ship’s deck, the darkness blazed. Moving, many-coloured fires, glowing, vibrating, changing—revolving beacon-lamps—sparkling of stars and jewels—a spectacle, say those who saw it, of unparalleled splendour.’
    Vincent stopped. No one spoke for a long time.”

Your business card

the counterfeit coin

“‘If I were writing The Counterfeiters I should begin by showing the counterfeit coin—the little ten-franc piece you were speaking of just now.’
    So saying, he pulled out of his pocket a small coin, which he flung on to the table.
    ‘Just hear how true it rings. Almost the same sound as the real one. One would swear it was gold. I was taken in by it this morning, just as the grocer who passed it on to me had been taken in himself, he told me. It isn’t quite the same weight, I think; but it has the brightness and the sound of a real piece; it is coated with gold, so that, all the same, it is worth a little more than two sous; but it’s made of glass. It’ll wear transparent. No; don’t rub it; you’ll spoil it. One can almost see through it, as it is.’”

For the Love of Vinyl

My thoughts are always the same colour as my clothes

“‘Don’t dress just yet. In the cupboard on the right hand side of the bath, you’ll find a collection of burnouses and haiks and pyjamas. Take anything you like.’
    Vincent appeared twenty minutes later dressed in a pistachio-coloured silk jellabah.
    ‘Oh, wait a minute—wait! Let me arrange you!’ cried Lillian in delight. She pulled out of an oriental chest two wide purple scarves; wound the darker of the two as a sash round Vincent’s waist, and the other as a turban round his head.
    ‘My thoughts are always the same colour as my clothes,’ she said. (She had put on crimson and silver lamé pyjamas.)”

He wonders whether he would have guessed merely by reading Laura’s letter that her hair was black

“Edouard dozes; insensibly his thoughts take another direction. He wonders whether he would have guessed merely by reading Laura’s letter that her hair was black. He says to himself that novelists, by a too exact description of their characters, hinder the reader’s imagination rather than help it, and that they ought to allow each individual to picture their personages to himself according to his own fancy. He thinks of the novel which he is planning and which is to be like nothing else he has ever written. He is not sure that The Counterfeiters is a good title. He was wrong to have announced it beforehand.”