My name is Randall Ross and I make my living by infecting others with my passionate belief in the healing powers of design.
One of my earliest vivid memories is the transcendental feeling I got from staring at the wonderful one-sheet movie poster for Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange in the lobby of the Palace Theatre in Lamesa Texas in 1972. A lifetime of the southern High Plains sensory deprivation was washed away by the stark Op-Art airbrushed stare of Malcolm MacDowell slashing his knife straight at me. This image filled me with youthful curiosity: What exactly was a clockwork orange? What was that eyeball doing on his sleeve? Why was the design enclosed in an A-shaped triangle?
A few months later, my mother displayed an amazing lapse in judgement on one of our semi-annual pilgrimages to Lubbock's South Plains Mall, which housed the closest bookstore to Lamesa--a mere sixty miles away.
On this particular trip, my mother bought me the book version of Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange. For those unfamiliar with this book, Kubrick supervised a frame-by frame reconstruction of his film, with scripted dialogue printed beside cut-by-cut black and white images. This book answered all of my questions about this film, which I would not see for another eight years--remember, this was before the VCR.
This book filled me with an unquenchable curiosity about what existed over the flat, limitless horizons of West Texas. Kubrick's dysfunctional vision of the future helped me develop the urge to travel and see the rest of the world --especially England. The Clockwork Orange volume also sparked my interest in books, which up to that point had primarily been confined to stodgy stuff uncovered on library shelves.
These two interests -- books and travel -- have come to define me and my reason for being here: to find the books that truly inspire and enlighten me and to share them with you. Enjoy my website.
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