The Work Table

My Studio Worktable at work

I have been receiving items from a wonderful array of sea glass lovers to put to work for my next little book.  I went to visit Katie Carron in Walnut Creek on a foggy and mysterious day.  I arrived at her boyfriend's house and there, laid out on his dining room table, was her entire collection of seaglass -- two hundred pounds -- sorted by color.  It was spectacular. Much of it is from a beach in England below a long-shuttered glass factory.  Many of the shards are the discard from the "end-of-day glass" the workers were given to do whatever they wanted with.  I could not resist the yellow:

A New Book

I received two advanced copies of my new book yesterday afternoon. I happened to be home when the FedEx guy knocked at the door. I opened the yellow manila envelope and there was the book, a foreign object to me, the author who had slaved over each image, cut out cardboard to determine trim size and worked and reworked every aspect of the text, photographs and design of the book.

The book, a real book, is an amazing thing and until you hold it in your hands, you cannot really approximate what it will be like. It is a great and surprising moment.

My book, Beach: A Book of Treasure, is 7” high and 11” wide. Despite all my Indesign and Photoshop and pdf files, with their ever present rulers, I can only truly feel these dimensions now with the book in hand. The added length of the page (from my previous books) gives a delightful heft to the 144 pages as you flip through from front to back. The blue case color and the soft beige endpapers are cheery and soothing--something we could not be totally sure of despite the back and forths and changing and choosing of color chip--until the book is in hand.

So now the book and I are getting to know each other all over again (I feel like a Sesame Street character) but its true.

The best endorsement of the book to me so far is that Andrew (age 12) came home tired and hungry yesterday evening, but on seeing the book sitting on the entry table had to go through the entire thing, clearly captivated, before even coming to the dinner table. He then went through the entire book again after dinner. His favorite page is a spread late in the book of a mass of grey-ribbed scallops with a single, small, white clam shell for contrast.

What more could I want from a book?

Heart Stones - the book

The tiny book of love, Heart Stones, is officially launched for Valentine's Day 2008.  I exhibited a number of prints from the book--from quite large to lovely and small--at ArtHaus gallery in SOMA here in San Francisco and had a raucus book party to accompany the show.  Great food, great friends, plenty of champagne and lots of good vibes.

On thinking about the book for a talk I gave last night, I realized that the power of the book resides in a bit of word play.  Love Rocks, two words that can be construed three different ways to be: 1. about community (the sisterhood of folks that love rocks), 2. about love, that most human of emotions that really is the best, and 3. about these objects (not love beads but love rocks) that are talismans of all that binds us.  These three meanings co-mingle all the way through the book or perhaps chase each other round and round like the four hearts on the half-title page adding resonance with each go-round.

Happy Valentine's Day!