Today I drove down to Princeton, NJ which is about 30 minutes south of me. Among the good things about NJ is the proximity to NYC and Philadelphia. I am lucky to be about 40 minutes (1 hour via Train) from NYC and about 1 hour and 15 minutes to the old part of Philadelphia. My next weekend will be an attempt to pack the Wista M100 (a heavy monorail 4x5 that has full movements and generous at that) to lug it around town.

My visit to Princeton was primarily to visit a book store I have not really got a chance to fully explore. And today explore I did. I came to realize that my most favorite bookstores happen to be the chain ones. Particularly since Borders around this area has been bombarded with Barns and Noble locations I spend more time there. For one there are magazines which I debate to pick up for the train occasionally and the second reason is that the books the shops carry fuller range on the subject (in this case I am thinking of Photography books but even in Philosophy section there are plenty of fine books on a given author for example). The Princeton store had a lot of passers by. I tend to be a regular at the stores I visit. That’s the feeling I get from people there as well. The Princeton store seems to be a novelty shop so I couldn’t quite concentrate. But perhaps has I found a book I was looking for I would most likely loose myself there. But I didn’t or at least couldn’t concentrate. I found Borges’ Non-Fiction essays and couldn’t asses at that moment whether it is what I am looking. I found some great Emerson collection of Essays but with the atmosphere there I couldn’t focus toabsorb in it. There are days I absolutely can but that just was not the case today. I will give the store a second honest chance. I’ll wait till the post-thanksgiving in-town family members go home. I’ll wait till after Christmas so the city is much calmer from the boutique traffic. Then I’ll go and seek out all but photography books at that store because the ones I found today were depressing. There was a book on fire hydrants all over USA, there were photo books which were a mere collection of abstracts with every day themes. Think of how once could photograph fire hydrants and publish a book and there was 80% of the collection. Crap! There was a book by Bassari but I’ll look for that one on Amazon to see any related work.

The photograph is from a late commute back home somewhere towards the end of October. Of course this scene happens a lot. Lots of people read on the train and normally this might be me except the fact I chose to hold my camera at the moment. The lighting was bad. The camera was handheld. The motion blur is evident. But I like the photograph for the fact it represents books having a place everywhere. There is also a particular difference between a man who is reading and the one who is not. Social contrast perhaps would be the phrase.