School started again, so I thought it appropriate to dig up this small pocket diary. Cloth-bound with 2 colour hotfoil: a handsome piece of work.

I guess some people find this blog often nostalgic. It might look that way, but what I show is not about nostalgia but about roots. My visual roots, the begining of my imagination, of my relationship with the world around me and the origins of my professional life.

I was born in 1963 in a middle class family. Try to imagine  a world with no screens except for a black and white television with 4 channels on: one flemish and one french speaking Belgian and – with some luck – two Dutch broadcasts. On school days we had one hour of children’s tv. For movies one had to go to the cinema. All other visual information we got came through printed material. Books and magazines were the main source of information about the world beyond our physical reach. Not too bad: they were fairly affordable, portable and durable.

The great thing about this particular school journal is that it is full of entertaining stuff: science, geography, history, but also games, puzzles and riddles. It has morning exercises. It shows art, from prehistoric cave paintings to modern sculpture. For a pupil in 1962 this was a treasure room. I would have killed for it. Can you imagine a school journal today to be the coolest thing around?

Most surprising are the colour pages: those are used to show state of the art design. Plastics! Ceramic tiles! Le Corbusier wallpaper! This is a book for kids from 12 to 18 in the year 1962. That is emancipation for you.