Saturday, October 31, 2015

A Lifetime of Secrets: A PostSecret Book by Frank Warren (2007)

My latest pick from the St. Denis bookshelf was A Lifetime of Secrets:  A PostSecret Book by Frank Warren (2007). This is the fourth published PostSecret book by Warren (there are now almost a dozen!), containing postcards with secrets (or "secrets") from contributors to his website / art project postsecret.com.

The book is a nicely produced, full-color hardcover that gives the secrets a heft and purpose that is missing from the website. Like the site, the book includes a wide variety of sad, angry, funny, vague, and intriguing cards. Also like the site, it all gets a little old after awhile, but just when you are ready to close the book for good, a unique card will pop out at you. Like many people, I imagine, I used to follow the PostSecret blog pretty regularly. It's been awhile, though. In fact, I was a little surprised to see that it is apparently still going strong. Obviously this kind of anonymous and artistic postal sharing is filling a need for both the submitters and the readers.


I can't say this was my favorite read ever, but it was relatively fun to flip through and brought me back to the early days of the blogosphere when this kind of thing seemed pretty special and subversive.

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