“I carry a blue book with me everywhere and speak of nothing else.  And I am not the only one – other people too beam with pleasure when they see it.  I have discovered that it has the same colours as a certain pretty Chinese porcelain:  its blue gaze is in the leather, its white in the paper and its green in the stitching.  Others compare it to shores from Turkistan.  I am sure there is nothing else of this kind as pretty in the whole of Paris, despite the fact that, for all its timelessness and unlocatedness, it is also quite modern and Parisian.”

(Walter Benjamin writing to Alfred Cohn, July 21, 1927)