“My home office is a 10 x 11 room in the back of a third-story apartment in Philadelphia, which I share with my partner of ten years and two cats. Because a row of apartment buildings sits across the tiny street/alley behind me, at all hours of the day and night I hear: trash trucks, wood chippers that sound like insane elephants, building fire alarms which no one knows how to turn off, people yelling at ancient poodles to “hurry up and go pee,” drunk 17-year-old girls cackling and cursing, surly movers hacking up lungs, neighbors on cell phones making emergency calls to therapists on balconies two feet away from my face, homeless people singing Stylistics’ songs at the top of their lungs. (None of this is particularly annoying — except the cell phone guy — it’s just part of my work environment.) Over the ruckus, I blast Pakistani divas and patiently assemble A Journey Round My Skull. (The unfortunate blog name, taken from a Hungarian book, is explained in my rambling first post from Aug. 4, 2007.)

I love records and books equally, and have collected both with abandon since my teenage years. Luckily I never had a strong vinyl fetish so last year sold a bunch of records and now mainly listen to mp3s. I say luckily because I ran out of room for my books and records around 2003. Through doing the blog, I slowly discovered new worlds of objects to hoard: 60s German design magazines, Czech illustrated books, Japanese and Estonian and Iranian and Polish kids’ books, French medical books, fallout protection pamphlets, psychedelic science textbooks. This colorful cultural debris sits in stacks with my main collection of European fiction (circa E.T.A. Hoffmann to Thomas Bernhard) — i.e., the stuff I actually read. (Some day soon, I’ll get around to collecting pictorialist photography, Japanese baseball cards, Hungarian bookplates, and Rory Hayes comix.)

Objects in the photo of my desk, starting at the top left: creepy straw-lady box from a Rhode Island junk shop and photo of my favorite author Robert Walser; a few children’s books which are a bit too large for my scanner: The Twins Who Flew Around the World (1931, Holling C. Holling), Little Garden People (illus. Marion Bryson, 1938; I love anthropomorphic insects), first US edition of Buzzati’s Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, two Graham Lambkin originals guarded by nervous wooden pig; second row: litho by Peter Rufenacht, 18″ tall German book by Scapa, computer screen with medical illustration, print by Manfred Holzel (Rufenacht and Holzel images are from a 1973-74 issue ofSpektrum). Bottom row: laying on the cheap but trusty scanner: fold-out poster of “Footing” by Jochen Gerz, from Experiments in Prose (1969 Swallow Press); hardcover collection of a 70s Serbian illustrated kids’ magazine, opened to a spread most likely by Dušan Radovic (see a tiny detail of the image here).

Scanned ephemera/junk pile: a small selection of the hundreds of papers and post-its on my desk before I pushed them all off to take the photo. I use yellow post-its for everything, including notations about songs (illuminating commentary such as “nice cheap organ” and “fem vox – poppy” — this should make it clear why I don’t write criticism). In this photo you can also see a hilarious book postcard about gay Nazi spies, a Japanese stamp, a Peter  Sagal quote about Sarah Palin narrating her own acid trip, and a drawing by my friend Vick featuring Bengali heads and a Veloso lyric.

Window view: bars, tan cat, black cat, door sloppily painted shut, the Savoy, record boxes.”

Will Schofield was born in 1977 in Philadelphia, where he still lives and works. He’s procrastinating on a number of book projects related to his blog 50watts.