A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
Featured Authors
Santa Monica to Denver in Pictures
After Gibbs Smith, a quick trip into downtown Salt Lake City where I visited Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore. It is a real prize of an independent bookstore, with a thriving coffee shop, well-ordered stacks that are low enough that one can get the lay of the land, and a second floor catwalk around the entire perimeter of the bookstore that is filled with shelves upon shelves of books. A rare book room on the second floor invites people to stop on in and browse. It is as if one had died and gone to bookstore heaven. While I waited to speak with Catherine Weller, I chatted with the man at the register who had just finished a multi-volume biography of Ben Franklin. A young lady came up to the register and bought an independent literary magazine I had never heard of from a rack featuring an enviable collection of literary quarterlies and independent literary magazines. I left the store inspired, not least because I think they will take the book. From there a stiff climb up through the mountains, following the same trail that the Mormons took when they came to Salt Lake City. It was arduous [...] Read More »
Days 1 and 2
We finally left Santa Monica on the eastward journey (on the Christopher Columbus transcontinental highway) as the rain started falling on the windshield of the Dodge Grand Caravan. The storm was coming from the north and I expected we would pass through it by the time we reached the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles, which stretch on and on until they finally subside into barren desert. But instead, the rain stayed with us almost to Barstow. Near Barstow we passed the hotel in whose parking lot my friend Richard and I and my cat Xerox slept on my journey from the East Coast to the West Coast more than a decade ago. We had planned to stop in Las Vegas then, after a grueling trip from New Mexico. But the rodeo was in town and there was no room in Vegas. At least not any that we could, in our weariness and ignorance, find. This time, Rika and I were prepared, and had already booked a room at the Excalibur (going almost solely on price, not on the aesthetic appeal of its legoland like turrets and battlements). It was a good choice. Though the bed left something to be desired [...] Read More »
The Book Tour 2009
Happy Columbus Day! One day out of the year which would seem to be a harbinger of a successful journey (though perhaps not success in arriving at the destination you had thought you reached. If we took Columbus as our example we might end up in South Carolina and start asking the “Bostonians” there where we could get some tickets to Fenway Park). Today we got no further east than Sawtelle Boulevard, where we stopped for some sushi rolls for lunch after taking our son to the doctor. He developed a fever the day after his revels at the book launch party (so, apparently, did Tamra’s brother’s seven year old daughter, whom the eighteen-month old Felix developed a strong liking for). It only took the pediatrician about three seconds to determine he had the beginnings of ear infections in both ears. Given Felix’s usual ability to make a rapid recovery (he performed the same trick on the eve of a planned trip to Yosemite, which we subsequently cancelled) we have plans to light out for Vegas tomorrow. We picked up our white Dodge mini-van this morning without incident. Seems somehow appropriate that we will be driving a mini van manufactured [...] Read More »
book launch party and book signing
According to one of the attendees at the book launch party for A JOURNEY THROUGH LITERARY AMERICA, there are over 120 publishers in Santa Barbara. On 10/10/09, it was one Napa Valley publisher’s turn to shine in Santa Barbara as Tamra Dempsey and Thomas Hummel celebrated the launch of their book, published through Val de Grâce Books. Various luminaries from the Santa Barbara publishing world were in attendance, including the publisher of a well-known Santa Barbara calendar and coffee table book, many representatives from Serbin Communications, whose publications run the gamut from a photography magazine to inordinately high end, limited-edition books, to a former classmate of Raymond Carver’s turned private eye, to a legendary team of book designer and editor, to representatives of the world’s largest printing company, and members of the next generation of writers, photographers and publishers. Theil Shelton hosted a classy and intimate event where the conversation often turned to literature. Against an inspiring backdrop of gold foil-stamped leather-bound classics, how could it not? American literature has a proud tradition of passion, innovation, and respect for what has come before. A taste for all of those characteristics was in evidence [...] Read More »
Santa Barbara Independent
America’s Places in Literature It’s the Journey, and It Is the Destination Maybe it’s these “tough economic times” we keep hearing about, or Ken Burns’s latest documentary on our country’s greatest idea, or even the fervent debate on health-care reform: but it feels like everyone is eagerly trying to define America. Not the United States, or the U.S.A but America, in its glorious, romantic connotation. I’m not sure writer Thomas Hummel and photographer Tamra Dempsey attempted a definition in their new project titled A Journey Through Literary America, but they certainly succeeded in living, and capturing, one of America’s defining features: the journey itself. One dog named Sherpa, two years, and 20,000 miles after embarking upon the oldest of American traditions, they’ve created a beautiful coffee-table book that combines a stirring narrative of America’s literary heritage with fantastic, sweeping photographs of places that inspired American authors. “For the last 12 years, I’ve been thinking about a coffee-table book that hasn’t been done,” said Hummel, who came up with the idea for the book. “While I was reading American Pastoral, I realized Phillip Roth had some vivid descriptions of places in Newark, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do [...] Read More »
14 Days and counting
I have visited Salt Lake City several times. When you get on the Interstate near the airport and head East towards Salt Lake City, you see “Cheyenne, Wyoming” on large signs framed against the nearby mountains. I have always been tempted to disregard my immediate purposes and just keep on driving towards Cheyenne. Now I will get my chance. Wyoming is featured in A JOURNEY THROUGH LITERARY AMERICA through the stories of Annie Proulx, a former resident of Laramie, Wyoming, who has since moved on to other pastures. One thing I am looking forward to experiencing for myself are the long sightlines. As Proulx told Charlie Rose in an interview, “When you can stand at your kitchen sink and look out your window and see a hundred miles down the road…you’re ‘on the beam.’”[i] She says that Wyoming is her writing place: “You go into it and it’s almost as if you were trailing a little cord behind you, plugged into the side of the mountain.” Researching Proulx led me to Owen Wister as well. Wister, a sickly young man, fell in love with Wyoming on a trip out there and wrote one of the most popular cowboy novels [...] Read More »
15 days and counting
Herd to believe,but in 15 days the booksigning at Santa Barbara’s Chaucer’s Books will be behind us and we (my wife, my son, and I) will be taking to the open road on our way to the East Coast. Our first stop will be Las Vegas. Why? Because it’s there. Though it certainly does have a certain literary and cinematic allusiveness, to boot. I hope that, unlike Hunter S. Thompson, I won’t see giant bats flying at the windshield as we get close. The second stop will be Salt Lake City–city that Wallace Stegner came to consider home, and home to one of my major clients as a printer: Gibbs Smith, Publisher. We will definitely stop in at Gibbs Smith, Publisher, where I want to introduce my son to Marty Lee- Vice President of Production and a fine human being. Gibbs Smith, Publisher grew from very small publisher to one of the powerhouses of the Western United States. Below, some of their history (lifted from their website) The Beginning Gibbs M. Smith always wanted to be a history professor. But while in pursuit of his master’s degree, Smith wrote a dissertation on Joe Hill–American labor martyr, proletarian folk hero, and [...] Read More »
The Advance Copy (and Errata)
Yesterday I couldn’t write about what it felt like to hold the finished book in my hands. The experience was too fresh. Robert Frost said that he always wrote in after thought, after some mulling had taken place and some thoughts had accumulated. That’s how I feel too. But I must say that the spell of the new book was somewhat broken after I leaned the book against something else on the top of my car while I wrestled my son Felix out of the child seat. From where I was on the other side of the car I heard the thud as the book slid off the car and landed on the street. It survived remarkably well (french fold jackets should be required by the government on all books.) A Journey Through Literary America has a promising heft to it. But because of the rounded spine it fits well in the hand. It is a joy to see two years and nine months of work transformed into something so lovely to look at and so portable. I looked randomly at the book: back towards front, here and there. I read two of the entries that I had not read [...] Read More »
Thomas Wolfe: In Memoriam
Again a nod to Today in Literature: on this day, Thomas Wolfe passed away from tuberculosis that had been lurking in his body since he was a boy. He was just shy of 38 years old. The event that occasioned it was an exhausting grand tour of the national parks of the West. Wolfe was a writer for hire on the National Parks project. But no doubt the project appealed to the man who once wrote of his thinly-veiled autobiographical character, George Webber: His life had always seemed to shift between the poles of anchored loneliness and foot-loose voyagings–between wandering forever, and then the earth again–and now the old and restless urgings of “Where shall we go? And what shall we do?” again became insistent, would not down, and demanded of him a new answer. In his introduction to Look Homeward, Angel, Maxwell Perkins quoted a passage from War and Peace that Wolfe loved: “Prince Andrei looked up at the stars and sighed; everything was so different from what he thought it was going to be.” This was a theme for the young Thomas Wolfe, who came to earth trailing clouds of glory, who retained them in his mind but [...] Read More »
The Significance of September 14
If you have not visited Steve King’s Today in Literature, by all means you should. Just click on this link. http://www.todayinliterature.com/ Today happens to be: 1) the day John Gardner, poet, novelist and teacher died at the age of 49. He was the teacher of Raymond Carver, who is featured in A Journey Through Literary America. (As a side dish, King serves up a droll story about Jay McInerney taking Carver’s short story writing class.) 2) The day Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt was published in 1922. Sinclair Lewis is also featured in A Journey. 3) The day James Fenimore Cooper passed away in 1851. Cooper is part of the first entry in the book, entitled “Beginnings.” 4) The day on which I received the first advance copy of the book. It looks fabulous. Pardon me for looking a bit awestruck. Read More »
Subscribe
Subscribe to receive updates and promotions!