The display windows of Anthropologie at 11th and Couch in the Pearl are filled with reading matter —that is, books considered as matter. Books that have been cut in half or thirds, very raggedly, with a band or crosscut saw, the pieces folded back against the spine and stapled or screwed together with bold black screws, and hung in the window displays in heavy swirling ribbons of pulp.

Fascinating.

The hangings look like the stylized curves and coils of waves and flecks of foam in Japanese prints, but I suspect they are meant to suggest the rough delicacy of lace, currently featured in a line of women’s clothing—lace that has been “coaxed into modern silhouettes.” (Check out “Enlightened Lace” under “Points of View.”)

These are old, mostly yellowed or browned paperbacks ready to be pulped in any event (one fragment is stamped “Discard from Dickey Prairie School”). I recognize a few titles: On Writing Well, Diet for a Small Planet, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, something by Peter Maas. Fragments send one spinning ironic metaphors: “Otherwise there can be big problems up high.”

Or, one can find—well, found poems:

Recipe for Black Bean Soup

Family Together
Modern Home
In waking insects
John Powell breaks his way
“These same Babysteps are what we all have to
selves to take . so many times in our quest to get”
Edit > Preferences > Default

I have no love for old books. The dust triggers my asthma. Looking through the windows at this odd display, I feel my lungs trickle and tighten. I remember the lace doilies that my grandmother laid across the arms of chairs and sofas, and that my mother hand-washed and ironed and folded and saved. And I remember, too, the blue-veined hands of the old ladies who pawed through this stuff when we sold it all at auction after my parents died.

A shudder of nausea on this smart, bright corner in the Pearl.

(Photos by Lynn Peterson.)