In my childhood I was mesmerized by magazines like that one. It's a whole world of its own, bold and unruffled in the confidence of its righteousness. Another r

In my childhood I was mesmerized by magazines like that one. It's a whole world of its own, bold and unruffled in the confidence of its righteousness. Another reason is that we didn't have stuff so clean and enticing, in that place and time. I rifled through catalogues of office stationery, admiring each photo of a binder or a stapler, straightforward and audacious. I still have in my possession a centerfold with a collage of newspapers where Czechoslovakia is a country, and on the rear is an ad for some IBM mainframe. From those PDFs I can almost sense the paper, heavy in its poise but its promise being light as air. I now realize that it's almost the same feel that kept me at my monitor for many nights, much later on.