Everybody Wants a Few Good Dates

Well, of course the actual thing is much better-looking.

Even in these digital times, with everything synced and cross-referenced through all our devices and saturating the Cloud until it rains tears of data on our multitasking heads …

… even in these tech-forward times, sometimes we crave a beautiful paper calendar for our walls, maybe a little printed chart of days to carry with us wherever we go. And the new year is yet young, and we despise that 12-Adorable-Kittens-A-Year piece of crap our abuelita sent us, so we're still hoping to find some decent options.

Let us tell you about just two of them.

First, from right here in the ATX, the wall-poster calendar from Philip Niemeyer's Northern-Southern Gallery. It's a gorgeously designed single-sheet, the perfect adornment for a favored vertical surface, sure to appeal to those enamored of 1) chromatic beauty and 2) graphic minimalism. We picked ours up at the closing of the gallery's "Lucky" art show a couple weeks ago, but they're still available at Mockingbird Domestics on South Lamar for a limited time.

Second … well, surfing the fancy wares that are pimped on Cool Hunting is often an exercise in thwarted covetousness for those on a journo's budget. But every now and then we happen across something that even our spare simeoleons can afford – and it turns out to be the most elegant, practical thing around. Which is why we clicked over to the Inkello website and ordered a couple of Christine Schneider's letterpressed, matchbook-sized pocket calendars. These beauties are less than ten bucks each, and when they arrived and we'd taken in the excellence of their design and production, the finely textured micro-heft of them, the typographic finesse with which they showed us the days and nights to come … reader, we fairly swooned.

Which is why we're glad we bought an extra one as a gift.

What did those ancient Romans say? Lucius Annaeus Seneca, in particular? Carpe diem, Seneca said, so long before the notion was reheated in Robin Williams' Dead Poets Society mouth. But you don't have to grab just a single day, dear reader – you can encompass all 365 of them with one of these beautiful calendars. Or with both: One for home, and one to take on your travels.

Anyway, that's certainly our recommendation.