Hamady at the Library

Any terrified "art snobs" that find themselves drawn like moths to the zapper to witness and be terrified by each and every one of the Herky on Parade statues will eventually find themselves at the home of the Dick Tracy Herky. Now, Dick Tracy has, I thought, been culturally dead after the movie came out, but I guess there is a semi-local celebrity connection -- Max Allan Collins scripted the strip between 1977 and 1993. And gee, now there's another Iowan running the strip.

But, if you wander into the building a bit further, you'll find an interesting show in the library's underplayed (and kind of hideous) exhibition space. Walter Hamady's books are very impressive-looking in person, even under the library's life-sapping fluorescent lights. If anything, it. The paper in the books is handmade "Shadwell", and the illustrations are mechanistic or natural. He'll use woodcarving, collage, embossment, rubber stamps to create the write environment for the writing of himself or his collaborators (including Denise Levertov).



At one time, I ran, with my future wife, the literary magazine at Evergreen. I'm proud of what I was able to do with the magazine, which was mostly resuscitate it, but, from a creative standpoint, I was mostly content to degrade the production process by transferring the layout to desktop publishing. We'd long given up embossment, though I did have fun reproducing a four-color block print artwork into one-color for a cover (with the approval of the artist). But that was a technical accomplishment.

I find myself looking at this blog. It's fun "publishing" like this, but it sure doesn't look like much. I've never been much for fancy web design, but let's see if we can spruce up the place a bit.

UPDATED: Added image, links, and modified a few sentences for tone.