My Friend Leonard
Around 2008, I was going through the clearance section of Half Price Books in Austin and came across a chunky little thing with the clickbait-y title of 283 Useful Ideas from Japan. The subheading of the book is “For Entrepreneurs and Everyone Else” and while the typeface on the front looked bad, I decided to not judge a book by its cover.
The book was already 20 years old at this point and some of the ideas seemed incredibly novel, others odd and the rest hilarious. Inside—as promised—were 283 ideas, bizarrely, beautifully illustrated that looked like a cross between Pepe the Frog and Sam McPheeters’ artwork. “This is for business?” The text seemed to be equally winking: the writing was lovely and admirable in explaining complex things simply, but also strange. For instance, on page 52, the author highlighted benriya-san—or handyman agencies—that not only would “shop for you” but also “do detective work or shoot videos of you when you’re in bed.” Was this just an elaborate joke to get a book next to Good to Great and Malcom Gladwell titles? Maybe, but I was enchanted.
There were ideas for farmers to sell rights to their produce and delivery direct to city dwellers. That was just happening with CSAs. There was an idea to use modular curbs so that city workers can easily install city pipes or widen the road. Genius! Another idea talked about the trend of “fusion” businesses that would result in a pool hall-bookstore-bowling alley-video shop-film developer-noodle restaurant in Osaka. Okay, I’ll move to Osaka!
I thumbed for a long time and decided to invest my 99 cents. Ever since then, I’ve gone back to the book when I’ve wanted to be inspired, look at things differently or know what living in Japan was like in 1988.
After being so enchanted with the book, I looked up the author. I found out that prior to writing 283 Useful Ideas from Japan, Leonard Koren published WET, a magazine about—wait for it—“gourmet bathing.” This man was quickly becoming my hero.
The more I learned about WET, the more fascinated I became. WET was an art/punk/joke magazine from 1976–1981 that ended up (A) renown for its design and (B) sort of became serious about gourmet bathing. But only sort of. To quote from the intro of its 2012 monograph, “WET was a parody of all enthusiasms, or more accurately, a parody of all enthusiasms taken a bit too far. WET’s most endearing quality was its wholehearted embrace of the absurd.” The magazine featured interviews with Debbie Harry from Blondie, Marlon Brando, Richard Gere, Henry Miller, art from Gary Panter, cartoons from Matt Groening and much more. Going through old issues that are clearly put together on a limited budget an Xacto knife, you feel like Los Angeles, where it came from, was a little Paris.
All the more impressive, Leonard Koren did the design and a lot of the writing for WET.
After the magazine shut down, he moved to Japan and wrote about fashion and business trends in Japan, which culminated in 283 Useful Ideas from Japan. In the early 90s, he wrote a couple of more typical business-like books, Haggler’s Handbook and Success Stories. But then he started going a little more esoteric. It started with Noise Reduction: A Ten-Minute Meditation for Quieting the Mind. Seems easy.
His next book would mark a turning point: How to Rake Leaves.
To be truthful, I don’t own How to Rake Leaves, but I do own a book with an equally mundane title, Undesigning the Bath—a book ostensibly about natural baths that is really about much more—and I imagine they’re similar in certain respects. More peculiar titles would come: Arranging Things, Gardens of Gravel and Sand, The Flower Shop, et al. As someone who hasn’t opened these books, your thoughts might vacillate between “That sounds like the stupidest book ever.” and “That sounds like the most boring book ever.”
But somehow, they’re not. They’re peaceful in their own way; little meditations on ordinary things. Koren still designs and writes (and publishes) books by himself, so all the text and imagery work together in an atypical harmony. He doesn’t write too much; there’s lots of white space on the page and the typeface is fairly large. Because of the subject matter and the format, his books don’t feel like anyone else’s.
So not only do I go back to283 Useful Ideas from Japanfor when I need to brainstorm or look at things in new ways, but I go back to Leonard Koren’s career—purposefully out-of- step, unique and concerned with what interests him and not whatever is happening that very second—as a model: Successfully living a life by your own design is always a nice bit of inspiration.