“Well maybe it does present more of a challenge this way, but I still think you should have let me wear my other hiking outfit.”

—Bill Ward, 1919-1998 (‘good girl’ cartoonist/illustrator)

Winnipeg, Canada

Best wishes to friends and colleagues worldwide… may you find hope, happiness, and fulfillment in the coming days and new year ahead.

Cheers, Rob

“The 2008 crash is probably the most serious economic crisis we have faced since the Great Depression. Stock markets from around the world fell as much as 20% in a single week, dozens of banks either failed or were rescued by government and private institutions, and companies started laying off employees as a consequence of the reduced demand. We know how we entered into the crisis, but we don’t know when or how we will be getting out of it. Considering that issue, we decided to do our little bit to help cheer everyone up by redoing the logos of some renowned companies …. after the crisis.”

(original source unknown—thanks, Guy)

…and they’re written on subway walls and tenement halls, all around the world. Here’s a selection of delightfully stenciled and graffiti’d truisms—from the U.K., the USA, Colombia, Argentina, and who knows where else… enjoy.

(thanks for the ‘car bad—bike good’ image Derek).

And another newsflash… Celibacy is not hereditary!

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google. Try a search, here. (thanks, Adrian)

Images: Mata Hari (1876-1917), Dutch dancer and spy for Germany during World War I; Mustachioed man wearing steel helmet w. built-on chain screen to protect soldiers’ eyes from fragments of shell, rock, etc. during WWI; Class in pole climbing in course for telephone electricians during vocational training at University of Michigan, also during WWI; architect Buckminster Fuller (one of my heroes) in 1970.

Germantown, Maryland

A year ago I posted about PostSecret, a remarkable ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. Since it started in 2004, people from around the world have had their most excruciating secrets appear anonymously on the popular website PostSecret.com.

PostSecret.com has won several awards, attracts many millions of visits per year, and has now gone international (German, French, Spanish, Korean). To date, its founder Frank Warren has received hundreds of thousands of secret-bearing postcards (joyful, poignant, sad, passive aggressive, you name it…) and has published four books featuring the cards. View an online selection of the cards here. Watch short videos by/about PostSecret here and here.

Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba

Here’s a cheerful shout out to friends and colleagues in the Northern Hemisphere as you celebrate the Winter solstice (or Midsummer festivities in the Southern Hemisphere). Fires will be kept burning through the night… (as has been the case since the advent of human history), and lively celebrations and cultural festivities will begin in every corner of our tilted planet. Best wishes to all…

Washington, D.C.

I was pleased today to stumble across this avant-garde collection of book covers in the Smitsonian Institution Libraries… from the accompanying essay: “During the period between the two World Wars, the Czechoslovak Republic was an important and prolific center for avant-garde book design. Signed, limited editions showcased experimental design techniques, high-quality materials, and specially commissioned graphics. Book design for the general public, although mass-produced and much more affordable, was similarly innovative and attentive to questions of design. Not recognized as an important focus for academic inquiry until the mid-1970s, Czech book design has recently been the subject of several exhibitions and publications, including The Czech avant-garde and Czech book design: the 1920s and 1930s at the Florham-Madison Campus Library, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey.”

“Avant-garde Czech book design sprang from the Devetsil Artistic Union, a highly influential group of avant-garde poets, writers, artists, and designers active from 1920 to 1931. ReD [1927-31], the most important of Devetsil’s journals, published work by leading names in the fields of writing, art, and architecture, among them poetry by Mallarmé and Apollinaire; prose by James Joyce; reproductions of art by Arp, Chagall, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Mondrian and El Lissitzky; and articles on the architecture of Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Czech designers were also in direct contact with a range of artistic activity in Europe, especially France and Russia, and collaborated on projects with several important journals, including Merz, the publication of German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters. The Devetsil group encompassed, if at times uncomfortably, Czech artists working in two major styles, Poetism and Constructivism. Czech avant-garde book design separates broadly into four major movements: Poetism, Constructivism, Surrealism, and Socialist Realism. Each approach developed and utilized its own unique philosophy and aesthetic vocabulary…”

Read the full essay here and view the entire collection of covers here.

Books shown: George Bernard Shaw’s Obráceni kapitána Brassbounda, cover design by Ladislav Sutnar; Ladislav Sutnar and Oldřich Stary’s (eds.) Nejmenší dům, cover design by Sutnar; Joseph Deltaile’s Cholera, cover design by Josef Šíma.