We'll be the first to admit that we have, well, eccentric tastes. Perhaps most couples don't spend a few minutes each day searching for taxidermy on Craigslist, or perhaps they do. "Conversation piece" is also a great Craigslist search term - try it sometime, you'll see why - but we're getting off the point here. One of these fine mornings, while perusing what the locals had to offer, we came across a blurred and tiny photograph of a deer mount being sold by its owner in town for $25. Vintage taxidermy has long been an obsession of ours, but alas, most used mounts range from $300 to $1000. $25 seemed too good to be true, so we e-mailed, assuming it was a typo or a fake or some other error. The photo was small and blurry, like we said, maybe it was a truly terrible decaying beast. But for $25, why not at least find out?

Surpisingly, we got a response. Yes, $25 was the correct price, and yes, it was still available. That afternoon we hopped in our truck and drove to meet the fellow selling the mysterious mount of our dreams. As with any meeting of a stranger, you never know what you're getting yourself into, but we were excited by the prospect of finally putting a beautiful, albeit deceased, animal on our wall.

The gentleman - we'll call him John for the sake of this story - was your regular, all American man, middle aged, really nice, though he seemed more curious of us, than we of him. When he pulled him out of the house we gasped -- before us stood a huge, beautiful mount of a gorgeous Mule Deer, perhaps a little worse for wear with some chipping around his nose and mouth, but still so much better than we could have expected for 25$. We oooh'd and ahhh'd and Lau might have even squealed a tiny bit. We kindly asked John if he knew anything about the deer, where it'd been killed, when, the details, you know. The basic info was as follows:

It turns out that Fuzzy had shed his mortal coil in 1974, stalked and killed outside of Farmington, New Mexico by John's father. For the next 34 years Fuzzy resided in his father's car dealership until it his death in 2008 and had sat in his garage ever since. He also told us that as children they had given him the affectionate name of 'Fuzzy' because of the velvet covering his antlers - and thus, Fuzzy came into our lives.

One of the best parts of our intereaction, and part of why we've decided to recount the story of Fuzzy, who has come to be a mascot of sorts for Recspec, is a question John asked us. After explaining what he could to us about Fuzzy, and seeing our excitement, he looked at us in a funny way for a moment and then asked us a question:

He seemed truly perplexed by this young couple's interest in a 30+ year old stuffed deer that he wanted nothing to do with any more. We explained that we just appreciate taxidermy and all things that have character, a story to them, which made what little info he gave us about it even more interesting, and like him even more. And with that, we took our Craigslist score and left.

Being avid record diggers, thrift store sifters, and curious collectors, our love for the interesting and often discarded carries through both into our home and personal tastes, but also into Recspec and our design sensibilities. For this reason, we often use ancient illustrations whose copyright dates have long since passed, inspiration from packaging from the most overlooked and old spices in the grocery store, textures of dirt and grime and age. Even still, we like to meld the overlooked with modernity and minimalism, balancing the two worlds into work that is current, yet references and respects the past. You could say its our ethos, or at least something we like to try to inject into everything that we do.

Thanks for reading and visiting Recspec.org. Please feel free to learn more about us, view our design work, listen to some music we like, or browse our blog for more stories and things that inspire us.