The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep

Deeply Game’s 9th book, The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep, is now available.  Andrew Rottner, of Super Classy Publishing, collaborated on this tribute to printing’s golden age.   The story is a misremembered parable, written by Christina Lauritsen.  It re-imagines H.C. Andersen’s classic tale of the same name as a story of revelation and madness.  The visual progression of the book mirrors the plot, pitting the beauty of the decorative arts against the intense and unpredictable messiness of human experience.   This book confronts the inevitability of loss as well as bows to intellectual freedom and its attendant risks.

The book is roughly 7″x9″, with images (drawn by Andrew Rottner) and text letterpressed on to rich giclée backgrounds.  The book features two 26″ wide foldouts and a cut-marbled-paper and brocade cover.

To order a copy: contact Sara or Andy.   There are 50 copies for sale.  $800/first ten copies.  $900/thereafter.

Sara Press: sarapress [at] gmail [dot] com

Deeply Game Productions (917) 523-4848

Andy Rottner: superclassypublishing [at] gmail [dot] com

They are Here.

For full description and image gallery of The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep, Deeply Game’s 9th book, please click here or, if you are on the main page, scroll up.

Defaced Princesses

Disintegrating children’s books with annotations:

Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, enhanced in crayon by my mother at age 6;

Once Upon a Time, traced in pencil by an unknown child artist, named Betty McCallum, sometime between the 1920′s and the 60′s; and

Greenleaf’s Common School Arithmetic, annotated by Amy Batchelder, also unknown to me, 1865.

While engaged in the daily struggle to protect my vintage book collection from the ravages of time and little hands, I began to notice that from a photographer’s viewpoint, the crayon-, pencil-, and other marks made in past decades have now matured into enhancements.  A consideration of looking vs. doing and the sanctity of the mint-condition object, this series has been particularly meaningful to me as a parent who hopes to guide my own daughter into approaching beauty as something that can be either found or made, and most importantly as something that she herself can define.

Photographs copyright Sara Press, 2012