World Exhibition Excerpt! The Peru of the Mind
An illustrated escape from the 24/7 news cycle.
So: my new illustrated book World Exhibition is available to pre-order from Mist Castle Press. If you’re interested and pre-order, it helps me get it printed ASAP! Thanks to all who have already ordered.
The book is 162 pages softbound on eco-friendly, 100% PCW paper, and you can read a sample of the first 15 pages here.
The first story is featured below. It gives you a taster of what the book feels like: dreamy, mysterious, playful, and designed to be a warm read in bed. Or out in a field on a summer’s day. Or in your car on a lunch break. But all of it designed to whisk you away for a few moments.
THE PERU OF THE MIND
Sometime around 4th grade, I became really enamored with Peru — specifically the Incas, with their lost cities, their Quechuan tongue, their winding Urubamba. From library books I picked up a dimly evocative sensation of mists rising above the dark-green peaks of Machu Picchu, and the sense of a vast history behind those quiet stones.
The mental image of that faraway land was entwined for me with the medium through which I saw it: the dot-matrix printings in musty library books, the smell of the bindings, the sense of hiddenness to the 985 section of books standing line upon line in gunmetal-gray shelving, within this miniature midcentury Alexandria.
And now, thirty years later, I remember distinctly the sound of the bell ringing at 5:30PM, indicating the library was closing soon, time to gather up the books I wanted to check out with my mom and sister, and outside, amid the verdant, mysterious vegetation of the Altadena Library grounds, the dusk slowly falling upon a sleepy California town, the purple mountains silently humming in the growing darkness.
Later that night, having eaten supper at home, I would lay in bed, hands clasped over my bedsheets, staring up at red-cedar roof-beams in the darkness of my room, within a place in which everything was provided for, relishing the comfort of childhood without knowing the deprivation of adulthood, and slowly falling into sleep, held lovingly in unseen hands.
Also available in a bundle with the limited-edition risograph print ‘DINOSAUR LANE’ signed and numbered (see above).
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