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April 21, 2007
The Book that (Almost) Killed the Robbi
It has been a bleak stretch of days in the barn. As of 7:00 last night when we arrived at Artiste Locale in St. Michaels with 30 copies of the newly-finished The Town that (Somehow) Fooled the British, Robbi had slept for about 4 of the previous 72 hours. The good news is that the book did not destroy Robbi. Robbi prevailed, and the reading went well, and now we will send the files for the book off to Hong Kong where someone ELSE will have to make the next 2,500 copies. But it was a bit touch-and-go around here for a while.
We've known about this reading (and associated "book-must-be-done-by-then" deadline) for a while, but a bunch of other projects kept happening, and we found ourselves a week away with a lot of work to do. So Robbi started painting:
And painting:
And painting:
At a certain point we realized that the usual cycle of sleep and wakefulness would have to be put on hold for the time being, in favor of a disproportionate amount of the latter and mere sprinklings of the former.
Robbi slogged on and on while I brought her occasional food, drink, and encouragement. But one can only paint so fast.
The illustrations for this book are considerably more complex than, say, Volume 6, Richard Nixon. Those are a series of line drawings (albiet, nicely rendered). The Town that (Somehow) Fooled the British is full of really complex, detailed, handpainted paintings like this, a send-up of the sort of village-merriment tableau that opens Beauty and the Beast, among other tales:
And thickly-painted mood-setting shots like this (in which the British, full of misanthropic impulses, sneak toward the innocent town of St. Michaels):
The book also contains several illustrations of recognizable, yet unnamed, celebrities, which put the onus squarely on Robbi to make sure that the caricatures worked. You may remember the contest Robbi sponsored on Idiotsbox a few weeks back, in which you readers were supposed to identify the subjects of the caricatures she was working on. Here, then, is one of the finished illustrations.
Here is another, in which Douglass, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are enjoying a lazy afternoon in the pool (while everyone else in town frets about how to thwart the impending British invasion (not the Beatles).
I'm going out on a limb to be sure, but I'm guessing that there are no other renderings of Frederick Douglass doing a cannonball into Dick Cheney's pool.
I think Robbi she does a nice job of capturing his hair in the course of the downward plunge.
We arrived in St. Michaels with 30 freshly-printed books in tow around 6:45 last night. At 8:00 we did a reading, showing the illustrations on my computer monitor while I read the text. We met a lot of very nice people and sold some books.
The books:
The nice people:
After the reading we had some dessert with our friends Jill Jasuta and Jim Duffy from Cambridge, MD, not far down the road from St. Michaels.
You may remember them as the folks who don't both like to have their eyes open at the same time.
I'm giving Robbi one day off to sleep and recover. Tomorrow we must begin work on Volume 7.
As for The Town that (Somehow) Fooled the British, limited edition handmade versions (edition of 50) are available for $25 at Artiste Locale. Hardbound copies will be available at Artiste Locale or through the Idiots'Books site mid-summer.
Posted by bogenamp at April 21, 2007 11:48 AM