Flannery O’Connor

Seven Days

Former Vermonter Creates an American Literary Journey State of the Arts By Amy Lilly When you read poems or novels, you may wonder how much they reflect the authors’ own experiences — particularly when their work is strongly rooted in a sense of place. Think Willa Cather and the Nebraska plains, or Langston Hughes and the streets of Harlem. For ex-Vermonter and literature enthusiast Thomas R. Hummel, writers’ firsthand experiences of place are fascinating in themselves — and have become the subject of his beautifully produced coffee-table book A Journey Through Literary America. Now settled with a family in California, Hummel grew up in Burlington and earned his bachelor’s in English and German literature at Middlebury College in 1990. It was partly his fond memories of the Queen City that inspired him to look into how this country’s writers experienced the places they wrote about. For the book, Hummel wrote absorbing bios of 26 American writers, four of them poets, whom he chose from an original list of 50 authors “who wrote with a descriptive sense of place.” Photographer Tamra L. Dempsey drove 15,000 miles over the course of a year to shoot the houses, neighborhoods and skylines that helped [...] Read More »

July 31

July 31 Today we uploaded the files for the jacket and the endsheets. The only element that hasn’t been sent off to Toppan Printing is the layout for the foil stamping on the spine of the book. After two years and seven months of inspiration, travel, and toil, A JOURNEY THROUGH LITERARY AMERICA is on the verge of being fully realized. Only a slight sliver of foil remains. We have seen first and second proofs for the main part of the book. These are called “press proofs” or sometimes “wet proofs.” They are printed on the same paper that the book will eventually be printed on (Japanese Oji White A Matte), on proofing presses that aren’t as large as the behemoths that will print the book, but are still quite formidable pieces of equipment. So, what I am actually holding in my hand is about as good a facsimile of how the book will look when it is finally printed as one could get. Sadly, press proofs are on their way to becoming an obsolete technology, to be replaced by digital proofs. It still seems like magic to me how, using the bright inks of cyan, magenta and yellow—in shades [...] Read More »

Signed Editions Available

Please let us know in your PayPal order if you want your book signed by either Thomas, Tamra or both.

Search the Site