“If I don’t know I know, I think I don’t know” R.D.Laing

This book is fantastic. I have always loved catalogues, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and this book with over 500 pages of ideas, quotes and drawings has the non-linearity of an encyclopedia. Not that you could not read it from cover to cover reading all the 533 pages, but I guess that is not how it was intended. Fletcher: “this book is no thesis…has no beginning, middle or end. It’s a journey without a destination”

And what a journey, the book is organized around the 72 chapters and is an amazing mix of art, mathematics, economics, philosophy, anecdotes, drift wood. In music there is a term for this: plunderphonics. Even though the book itself is structured around chapters, the texts are all organized on a single page or sometimes the graphics spill over to the other side. There is a page that explains about collage, montage, frottage and other painterly techniques used in the art of chance. Another page in the chapter on Skill has quotes from John Wayne, Lee Trevino, Vivienne Westwood and George Burns next to a drawing on how to tie an bow tie. There is a page on the Turin Shroud, another on Fractals, one on dowsers, on Feng-Shui and one on an abstract Botswana pattern called “urine trail of the bull”.

Favourite quote: “If your mind is too open people can throw all sort of rubbish into.”