savethewords.org from Oxford Dictionaries

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language.

Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved, and unwanted.

If you love words as much as we do, find room for them again in conversation and written communication. Each time you use one of these words, you are keeping it alive in the English language.”

I like traboccant, murklins, and kalotypography so much I just adopted them. What words will you save today?

Today is Friday the 13th, a date that has come to be lucky for me. It’s the perfect day to shrug off superstitions and embrace a whole lot of color.

1. Santa Marta via Oh Joy!; 2. Rainbow umbrella via Victoria Pater
3. Daily drop cap by Jessica Hische; 4. Super epic cake by Hula Seventy
5. Impromptu rainbow via Swiss Miss; 6. Pantone calendar via Materialiste

I love bookshelves in all forms, even if the “shelves” are really just stacks of books next to my couch because there’s no actual shelf space left. I would much rather have a collection of books as the centerpiece of a room than a television. But given that the majority of my books are in boxes 3,000 miles away, I know just how much space plays a part in whether or not books are on display. When I stumbled across stacked paperback wallpaper earlier this week, I couldn’t help but daydream about how neat it would look in a small space. But the wallpaper lacks that handpicked quality that bookshelves have, and that is why I fell head over heels when I saw the Ideal Bookshelf paintings by artist Jane Mount.

I paint ‘ideal bookshelves’: people’s favorites of all time, within a genre or from a particular period in their lives.

As someone who does a lot of design work, I enjoy the process of turning graphics into ‘art’. And I love that a book is something created very personally and then mass-produced in order to affect many other people very personally. I group and paint them to turn them back into something very personal and intimate.”

Mount creates the paintings out of the reader’s choice of 10-20 books. It would be difficult to narrow down, but I know The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Bird by Bird, Interpreter of Maladies, and The Giving Tree would be a few of the ones on my list. What books would you choose?