For Writers Only: Introducing The Thomas Fuller line

I met with Thomas Fuller yesterday to discuss promotion for his new book, The Classical World, a Novel of Ideas, buying him lunch at Spruce, that pleasantly strange conundrum of a restaurant on Sacramento Street.

It turns out Fuller isn't the least bit interested in promoting the book, thinking it a waste, having spent time and money in the past on publicist's, e-mail campaigns, book launch parties, readings and so on. I wasn't completely surprised, Fuller's expressed disdain for the promotional process before and his ever increasing inability to participate in it.

What did surprise me was an idea Fuller put forward: developing a line of clothing for writers and marketing it as such.

Fuller talks fast, and mumbles, but the energy and obvious delight he took in describing the possibilities of this "business opportunity" were infectious. He's come to believe that apparel is fundamental to the act of writing; that just as a policeman wears a uniform or a banker a suit and tie, the writer needs dependable clothing to perform certain writerly duties. I'm glad now I took these notes:

Fuller's writing sweater is blue and has so little shape left to it that he can't tell front from back. He always enters it headfirst, but often into one of the two sleeves instead of the larger intended hole at the top.

Feedback is immediate; the sweater itself tells Fuller he's erred. And so he recalibrates, finding the proper hole and screwing his head into it.

The blue sweater is put over a t-shirt Fuller's already wearing. Fuller possesses an impressive collection of t-shirts, an army of them, in so many styles and colorful slogans that chosing just one is difficult if not impossible. Fuller no longer chooses, he simply takes hold of the shirt closest to him (first thought, best thought) and wears that shirt.

Fuller's writing jeans have a hole in the left knee. He hadn't paid for the hole, Fuller wants to be clear on that point, the hole was a natural consequence of working on his knees while installing tile in a duplex in Utah, and of years of repeated machine washings. The hole has grown larger and larger, so that he sometimes steps into it while putting on his pants.

His writing shoes are an old pair of buff-colored Uggs adorned with yellow oil paint and high-intensity polyurethane drippings, incurred when Fuller was installing his homage to David Ireland in the staircase of his new home in The Richmond.

I told Fuller that what he was describing to me was as much a process as it was anything else. He didn't disagree, nor did he lose enthusiasm for the project he described. He simply said that he couldn't imagine writing without wearing his writing clothes.

Writers, he said, aren't very creative people, they need someone to choose their attire for them, or at the very least to have some model to imitate. In the rare case of the truly creative writer, pre-selected clothing would allow him or her to devote that much more time and energy to their writing, time now taken away by the clothing selection process.

There could be, Fuller said, different outfits for different kinds of writers. A writer of romance might look one way, the journalist another. Poets would be the most fun. This could be an entire line, covering every literary genre, even best-sellers, with a catalog both in a print edition and on-line...