"Lavender and Garlic" and "Pins and Blue Paper" are two special books, difficult to include into a specific genre, as they have fiction, memoirs and cookbooks, all in one. They were written by architect and set designer Sergiu Singer. Born in 1928 in Ploiești, Singer, who died in 2018 in Bremen, Germany, left Romania in 1963, but remained connected to his native country which he frequently revisited and wrote about and where he had very good friends. Some of them often remember him, as does the architect Radu Comșa, a lecturer at the Bucharest University of Arts: "I met Sergiu before I knew him or I knew him before I met him due to an architectural dilemma. I was walking on Iancu de Hunedoara Boulevard in Bucharest and I was looking at a group of buildings that were somehow very strange, because the building on the right was the Soviet-type and quite ordinary while the one on the left was a bit exaggerated in terms decoration, a bit ostentatious, and, in any