Bildungsroman

B and I were planning on hitting up a local museum today, so I decided to have an extra-comfy, dressed down day, complete with this tee-shirt from Out of Print Clothing (“OoP”). I really love this company for two reasons. First, everything they sell is literary and I’m a huge bibliophile (I had a friend who once tried to index all of my books for me; when he last worked on this endeavor, at least four years ago, I had well over 600 texts). Second, for every product sold, OoP donates one book through Books for Africa to a community that doesn’t have access such things.

When OoP first started selling clothes, they used images of covers from out-of-print editions of various titles, and inevitably branched out to other literary ideas and themes, including “lit terms.” This last collection include fun, offbeat takes on common phrases: “doppelganger,” “plot,” “hyperbole,” and, my favorite, “bildungsroman.” I love how clever this shirt is; while the easiest, most basic definition is usually “German for coming of age story,” a bildungroman is much more a rich, complex tale of an individual as they grow internally — spiritually, intellectually, socially. This is such a great play on that — and a wonderful inside joke for the literarily obsessed.

We shot these photos twice because I didn’t like the way, upon reviewing, the shirt sat in the first set this morning. (Yeah, I’m that picky.) There’s a change of lighting as they day grew darker and rainier — but, per usual, I was goofy and acting up a bit for B. Here are a couple of “nice” pictures, plus some amusing outtakes, including with Lenka when she decided to walk through our mini-shoot.