This was to be used for the cover for Thimble the Fairy’s Good Morning, Day Dream! Definitely the illustration I’m best pleased with. There might be one or two illustrations I’ve missed, but I think I got all the important ones. :) 

A couple more from the unpublished second Thimble book, Good Morning, Daydream.

Here we have Dmitri once again. Yeah, I think he’s my favorite. Looking over these images again it occurs to me that all were meant to be spreads, which was exciting. The first book was printed in hardcover at 4′’x5′’ inches. Perfect for little hands, and I think these drawings would have looked great at a 5′’x8′’ spread. Seems more immersive to me - a format in which it’s a little easier to step into the world of the illustrations.

Superhero pose!

Originally for Good Morning, Day Dream! Thimble the Fairy Book 2.

I’ll post more tomorrow…

The first three illustrations for Good Morning, Day Dream! which was to be Thimble the Fairy Book 2.

This is Dmitri, the postal crow. A preliminary sketch.

Thimble The Fairy’s Acorns & Tea was only supposed to be the first book in a series. The second book was completed… up until production. The costs of properly self-publishing and printing a book, and then putting forth the time and effort to make it financially successful enough to fund further books is difficult, to say the least. And so it never went to print.

But I still have the illustrations on file! And now that several years have passed, I think I can safely share them with you. Hadn’t even occurred to me until yesterday that I could! I’ll leave the story up to your imagination, except to say the working title was Good Morning, Day Dream!

Stay tuned for more.

Another very hypothetical dream bookstore logo. The “Reinhart’s” and “Books” are done in my very own FriedrichWilhelm font. “Rare” and “Antiquarian” use the font Prophet, and the ampersand is Goudy Bookletter 1911… for all of you typophiles. I was going to use Goudy Bookletter 1911 for that entire line, but the q’s damn descender messed with the underlines too much. I didn’t even have to touch the q in the Prophet font - it just has a peculiarly nubby descender.

I’d have to earn the right to call myself a “Rare & Antiquarian” bookstore. I have no official qualifications to call myself that other than almost three years in the weird world of general online bookselling. I have sold rare and antiquarian books, and I have been able to do the research to determine the authenticity of those books. I’ve learned a ton through experience, but there comes a point where you just need more official sources you can refer to, and know people to contact to find specialized information. Or have those sources so that when something particular comes your way, you know who might be interested…. rather than posting the book on eBay and hoping those three people in the world who have an interest will actually find it.

It is a very real possibility that I could open my own tiny little online used book store, and run it in my spare time. One thing I’ve learned is that it is not difficult acquiring an inventory… the only difficulty is acquiring an inventory of books that are of any value or even of any interest. Acquiring rare and antiquarian books would be a step beyond, and again the difficulty would be in finding the books that still have interest, are of value, and are not falling apart.

One thing I’m not about to do is get a scanner and go to library book sales and thrift stores scanning everything in sight with an eye to sell on Amazon (talk about mind-numbing!). I’d keep my store small and selective. And since I would be running it on my own time at very little cost, I think I’d bypass both Amazon and eBay and sell exclusively on my website. Make it small and as personal as an online store can be.

So if I do start my own little online store I’ll let you know about it, but it won’t be called “Reinhart’s Rare & Antiquarian Books”, more’s the pity.

Now I can’t claim to be the poet in the family–my brother fulfills that quota quite nicely–but sometimes I do like to jot down a few lines, a phrasing or two, a bit of imagery…

Dottie

her soft lion paws
press against her heart
of thinnest tinfoil
ready to burst
ready to boil
ready to be cut & buttered
stolen by princes
& devoured by witches

Something to do on the train in the morning, you know?

Atmospheric Fauna

the day i decided to fish
for sheep from a shallow cloud
was the day it rained
maine coons and shar peis.
figures.

…those two and more, here.

I haven’t submitted much to micropoetry.com, but the concept behind the site is pretty great. Sort of a filtered twitter for the poetry crowd. But unlike twitter, you have 160 characters to work your magic with. Twenty whole extra characters to cram in, if you need ‘em. Of course character-cramming isn’t the point, although I always enjoy using exactly 140 characters in my neat, grammatically correct, tweets. Note to novelists: that’s 140 characters as in individual letters and pieces of punctuation. Nobody’s asking you to include 140-160 different characters in your book. Yeah, I’m looking at you, NaNoWriMoers! (Anybody writing a novel this November?)

Go on and sign up. Submit some thing or three, or three hundred. But not all at once - they do vet everything, so when you submit a single poem it still might take a day or so before it goes up.

Things might be a little weird around here for a while.

I told this story to my father when I was six, going on seven years old, and he transcribed it for me. About time I started telling more… 

Once upon a time there were three gnomes who lived deep in a forest and they worked hard in a mine. One day they happened to find a crystal. This was a magic and very special crystal. They went to the king and he said that it was his. So the gnomes left the magic crystal with the king and returned to their house. They went back to work in their mine for many years. They did not hear anything more from the king for a long time until one day they decided to go back to the king and ask what was happening. The king was happy to see the gnomes but he told them that he had lost the magic crystal and he hoped that they would help him find it. The gnomes started to leave to go back to the forest when the king came running after them. The king told them where he had lost the crystal in a river. He told them where the river was and where he had been sitting along its banks when it happened. He said that he had been playing a game when the magic crystal had fallen out of his pocket. He had tried to catch it but he had seen it sink down into the water. The gnomes told the king that they had also accidentally lost crystals, and they would help him find his.

So the gnomes went back to the forest. They found the river and began looking for the crystal. But they did not find the crystal in the river. They found it in an enormous shell. They went back to the king and showed him the crystal. And the gnomes told him that they had found it in an enormous shell. He was so happy that he had it again that he told the gnomes that he would give them more than half of all his jewels. So he rewarded the gnomes and they returned to their home in the forest.

The end. 

mrpatch:

From the book A St Nicholas Story, or The Fiercest Little Animal In The Forest, which was published November 2009. This drawing was used for the cover.

That time of year when I tout my book. It may be five years old, but so far this year more books have sold online than any other! and it’s only the first week in December! Not too bad for a self-published picture book. BUY IT HERE.

It’s a very simple story, and though it is about St Nicholas, it has no religious overtones. My mother was a kindergarten teacher for 18 years, and in that time had to tell hundreds of stories, many of which she made up to suit the mood or occasion. This is one of those. The character of the pine marten is inspired by the traditional companion of St Nicholas throughout Europe - alternately named Black Pete (Zwarte Piet), Knecht Ruprecht, Schmutzli, …and Krampus. St Nick keeps strange company!

Happy holidays.

(egad! zounds! good grief and bewilderment. Too long since I posted last, too long since I’ve been drawing. Must change. But my day job as a bookseller has kept me busy. I designed the website, keep up the blog, the twitter and facebook, design bookmarks and whatever else needs designing, in addition to actually selling books….Tom the Book Guy. Check us out.)

Working for a small-time online bookstore, I often start dreaming about opening my own little brick-and-mortar niche bookstore. I recently read about the old sci-fi/fantasy bookstore A Change of Hobbit, and oh my god does it sound like it was amazing.

Folk: The Bookstore From Beyond The Fields We Know is the bookstore I want to operate (and above is the logo I’d have hanging above the door). "Beyond the fields we know" is the Lord Dunsany way of saying of "fairyland".

BUT NOT JUST ANY BOOKSTORE! No, if I’m dreaming, I’d want it to be a community hub - not an uncommon aspiration - but a hub for oral storytelling, for children and adults, with of course an emphasis on the folk, or fairy, or fantastic tale (I’ve been reading Ruth Sawyer’s stupendous “The Way of the Storyteller”). A hub for writers of fantasy, book clubs, and such. A small stage for readings (open-mic for tales, poetry, music and puppetry performances), an area for children to play with simple puppets and other things to “make believe” with, a full selection of classic folk and fairy tales from around the world, as well as newer, more adult interpretations, literary/folklore studies, etc. So not just a children’s bookstore.

Easier said than done, I know.

In addition, I can picture some of the layout, I know the sort of things I’d put on the walls (fantasy maps in particular - I just picked up the extraordinarily brilliant book “An Atlas of Fantasy” by J.B. Post), and I know what sort of front door I’d have…

I would make the front door look smaller, maybe an appropriate size (and shape?) for a hobbit, but it would be normal size - the top third or so would just be made to blend in with the building. Maybe I could do something inside with a wardrobe?

Gandalf-size-pipe dreams; for when I write that best seller, become richer than Rowling and am able to satisfy every one of my wildest whims and fancies…

oh yeah, and I’d run my own wee printing press/publishing business onsite, as well.

ANAMNESIA, an ambigram (rotate it 180° and it looks the same). Whaddaya think as a micro-publishing business name/logo? I’m thinking it would look stupendous on the bottom of the spine. The lower version uses an illustration by Gordon Grant from the book Penrod and Sam (1916) by Booth Tarkington.

In the near future I’d like to start a micro/hobby-publishing biz. I’d like to find some under-appreciated or forgotten works in the public domain and do ‘em up proper. None of this facsimile crap, none of this cheapo reprinting/POD that many companies are doing these days. I aim to design layouts, get high quality scans of the original book illustrations, and hand bind the books. In small quantities.

I have two possible names in mind for my wee company: MARKHOR, for the Middle Eastern wild goat, or ANAMNESIS, the platonic concept that all knowledge is simply remembered from past lives.

ANAMNESIS has a more solid grounding, but it doesn’t conjure the visuals like MARKHOR. The silhouette in the logo mock-up is Jane Austen, but could potentially be anybody.

I put together a multilingual epub with the original French of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A Rebours from 1884, an 1897 German translation by M. Capsius, Gegen den Strich, and the anonymously translated English translation, Against the Grain, from 1926. I could have included John Howard’s 1922 translation, but he deleted an entire chapter, for cryin’ out loud! I kept the format relatively simple.

One of my favorite books, though the newer, not-public domain translations are better (see Margaret Mauldon and Brendan King, who both used the title Against Nature for their respective translations).

Download the epub here.

BFWK - Beyond The Fields We Know, a reference to Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter. I just put this together and posted it for sale on my Zazzle. Technically, to be a proper parody of the European country code oval stickers, there should only be three letters or fewer. But I like it this way. I need one for my scooter now.

The 6th Doctor. I used a still from Vengeance on Varos for reference. Yes, he is wearing sensible, tasteful clothes. Not a great scan.

The Pug Who Roared.

Buster Keaton caricature and rainy-day variant. Itchingly close to finishing this, not sure I’ll ever be 100% happy with it.

George, the ogre… coming to life right off the page!!! Available now as a print.

A bout of fisticuffs. I’d forgotten about this sketch!

Official notice about my society6 store. Check it out and support a harving startist! an arvist stingar! an arvingstay artistay! a striving artast! a starvin’ gartist!!!

The Bee Man Of Orn by Frank R Stockton (30:12) and read to you by me. This was one of my first recordings for Librivox and as such not my favorite in terms of narration or audio quality. The story itself however is one of my all time favorites. It’s fantastic. Listen to a handful of other stories I’ve read for Librivox.

An imposing forest beastie with big ears.

An antlered creature of Faerie. My process in reverse.