Dream Job

Last year I came across Chip Kidd's Book One at the Twin Falls Public Library. English major that I am, I'm always looking for books with pictures in them and his book is almost nothing but. Kidd, I found out, is the rock star of book design and Book One is a retrospective of the various publications he's designed over the last twenty years.

He's designed hundreds of books that, when you see them, you say, "He did that one too?!" As I flipped through his doorstop-hefty book, I found book after book that I'd seen in the store and picked up based solely on the way it looked. Yes, as Napoleon would say, the guy's got skills.

Later, my very generous mother bought me my own copy and since then I've spent many hours examining each cover, staring at the fonts, the images, how the spine was laid out, etc. Sometime during one of those pore-fests, a thought crystalized in my little, blonde head: being a book designer is my dream job.

A lot of my activities have danced around the edges of that job. I was an art major in college for a little while before switching to English, I've always been fascinated with image-making and image reproduction (I used to go to my dad's bank on Saturday afternoons to photocopy my favorite frames out of comics and art books from the library), I've been making my own books of one kind or another since junior high (beginning with unfortunate attempts at my own comics -- Tony even came up with a theme song for one of them), and I've actually stayed away from reading certain books simply because they were ugly. (Many people have told me to read Chaim Potok's stuff and I even have a copy of The Chosen but I can't even bring myself to pick it up because it's so dated and unattractive it looks like somebody bought it at Leif Garrett's yard sale.)

There's also the fact that, as an MFA student, I could barely wait to get five or six poems together before declaring them A Manuscript in order to justify turning them into a book. I spent as much time on font and image selection and placement as I did writing the poems themselves. A well-written individual poem was always nice but a book of them bound together with a cover and front matter and a colophon and alla that booky goodness was just deeply satisfying.

As it is, I teach English. I like what I do and I think I'm pretty good at it. I don't have the inclination or nature to throw over all my training and experience, abandon everything and go back to school to be a book designer. (It would be a bad idea on so many levels -- one of those levels being that Suzanne would beat me with a sack of oranges.) But the older I get, the more aware I become of things that actually make me happy. Doing my own little, amateur designs for myself and friends makes me happy. It doesn't have to be a career choice or a life altering passion. I just like it. I'd like to get better at it, of course, and get more tools with which to do it but it's okay if my "dream job" stays more or less just that, y'know?

Going along with that somewhat, it occurs to me, more and more, I'm done with seeing movies or reading books that I "should" read. I'm becoming more content with my weirdness and the quirky things that give me satisfaction. I don't feel the need to apologize or even explain my interest in Mormon film or the fact that I have a line of action figures lining a shelf in my office. I don't feel bad for liking to sew up chapbooks while watching episodes of the BBC's Two Thousand Acres of Sky. For various reasons, I grew up feeling that a lot of the things that interested me and were important were strange, lame, unacceptable, second-rate, and/or generally uncool. Happily, the older I get, the more genuinely content I become with the deck of weirdness I've been dealt in life.

Anyway, my original point brings me to a question: what is your dream job? If you could do something professionally that would just make you leap for joy to get out of bed in the morning so you could get to work at it, what would it be?