Meat Pie at the Landmark Café

On Saturday, Oliver and I had a lovely day in Central Queens, punctuated by lunch at the Landmark Café.

Between courses I was chatting to Olivier Sauvé about how Bryson Guptill had written a book about his walk of the Camino Francés, despite having no experience writing or publishing books. We agreed that this was a good thing, and that more people should publish books, especially now that the barriers to entry are so low. Olivier joked “Like you could make a book about this lunch.”

So, of course, I did.

The volume of maximum fun we had outstripped my ability to set and print the body of the book using traditional means, so I resorted to using word processor and laser printer means, albeit wrapped in a binding that allowed me to use my newfound bookbinding skills. Here’s what it looks like:

While the book is best-experienced in printed form, that it takes 30 minutes to print and bind every copy means that doesn’t scale to the size of the blog readership, so you’re also welcome to read it as a PDF.

If it was a book in need of an excerpt for the back cover, here’s what I’d use:

Oliver doesn’t like to leave things unfinished, and he gets stressed out by the transition from one activity to another, so shifting him into a mindset where he was ready to head to the farmers’ market was stressful for both of us: there was some yelling and swearing (by him) and some subterfuge (“well, I can just go to the market by myself, I guess”) by me. It was not the finest hour for either of us, but we came out the other end.

Olivier is right: more people should make more books about more things.

What’s yours?