Pike Place Market in Seattle

Here are some photos from the environs of the Pike Place Market in Seattle, where my eyes were drawn to typefaces, and senses drawn to the bustle of early morning, with coffee and croissant at Le Panier. We're back home now, but the memory of that perfect coffee lingers.

I like the Piroshky sign for the art and the unusual use of punctuation. The Starbucks logo is from the original store, back when the mermaid was a bit more...complicated. There's a nice version of the mermaid on an umbrella at a more recent Starbucks. It's an example of how to use a logo as art, but you have to have a really good logo.

Left Bank Books – a classic bookshop, of a dying breed, going the way of the typewriter. But wait: it is collectively owned by its workers, and does have a website (and there are other, unrelated, Left Bank Books stores in other parts of the country).

The Sanitary Public Market was interesting, too, right across from a Showgirls porn shop. That's an observant mannequin on one of the balconies, checking out the patrons of Showgirls.

I like the simple Lois Lenski-style font on the Farmers Market sign, which Jack captured at night. The Meet the Producer sign is also wonderful, referring not to the Market Theater (the sign at the entrance to the subway) but to the theater of produce coming out of those early morning trucks.

"Mother Makes Christmas"

One of the first artists to make an impression on me as a child was Lois Lenski, illustrator of more than 100 children's books. Lenski created the art for the Betsy Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace – up until Betsy became a teenager, when the style of illustration changed completely, throwing me for a loop as a young girl.

Lenksi also wrote children's books, including Houseboat Girl and others in what she called her regional series. She used a distinctive style of hand lettering to write the titles of her books, and now I am wishing that typemaster Mark Simonson would create a Lenski font. (What would be involved, I wonder?)

Once on our winter trip to Minnesota we stopped in Bloomington, Illinois, to eat at the Central Station Café, one of the few restaurants downtown. There is a fabulous used bookshop across the street, where I found a copy of Mother Makes Christmas by Cornelia Meigs, with Lenski illustrations.

I can just see my friend Deb now, rolling her eyes and saying in a knowing way: "Ah yes indeed, Mother DOES make Christmas!" To all of you mothers out there in the Christmas aftermath, including my own, thank you for your efforts this year. Here are the endpapers of Mother Makes Christmas: look at all the help she has in that bustling kitchen!