Chattenigma

For some reason this book jacket stuck in my memory and has haunted me since I was a kid in the Eighties and saw it in a cardboard display stand at Waldenbooks. I'm asking my design-oriented friends about the typeface... I'm fixated on it. It screams "Eighties" to me. Maybe it's associational. The Eighties were a time of following my Mommy from one store to another under a snowy Chattanooga sky. Bare trees lining the grey city streets, Christmas lights twinkling in the branches. Everything seemed charged with totemic mystery. Every drab department store seemed dusty and enigmatic.

There was a restaurant called the Brass Register which had, as part of its arch decor, a bathtub with a life sized soft knitted female rag doll taking a smiling bath. It weirded me out, embarrassed me, but amused my Mom into commenting on it. I was afraid to pass it on the way to the bathroom... it held the promise of danger, the same danger I sensed when grown women kissed my little-boy face.

I'd love to see it again, but I suspect it's long gone.