The Book of Everyday Things

Written February 28 2026

I had a dream a couple of weeks ago that strangely motivated me to do more creative stuff. I don’t remember the story leading up to it, but I was in a library—I think I was delivering a big concrete sphere or something, as one does—and as a reward they allowed me to take one book home out of their whole collection. I kept searching through one particular shelf, the books on which all had beautiful cover art.1

In the end I picked one called The Book of Everyday Things. The cover was white with just the title in these really big, swoopy letters that somehow reminded of Mort Garson’s Plantasia, although this text was what I can only describe as peach-flesh-yellow. The inside was page after page of just lists of ordinary, everyday things, sorted by category. One page read ‘Breakfast’ at the top and then listed ‘toast’, ‘orange juice’, ‘soft-boiled eggs’, ‘fried eggs’, ‘cucumber’, ‘muesli’ and so on, all in tiny warm yellow text, interspersed occasionally by little illustrations of some of these objects. This went on for maybe two hundred pages or so.

That book fascinated me. I keep thinking about it even now. I don’t know what one would use it for. As reference material maybe, but then again, the contents are all pretty basic. And for a coffee table book it’d be a bit too text heavy, I think, and also not all that exciting to actually leaf through. Still, I keep thinking about someday wanting to make this, to turn this into reality, even if it’s just for me.

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