For decades I've collected late 20th c everyday travel and advertising postcards for their visual quirkiness and their under the radar revelations. In the 80s I tried to make some sense of a bunch, in an ordinary postcard album. At the time, a friend, artist Miles Forst, said, “Make a book!” Guilt-tripped since then for not finishing the project, I’m on it. Here’s a taste of a close-to-finished book of chrome

Snapshot from a room full of tables of editing work

postcards sequenced to tell a larger story about America than their modest cultural authority might suggest.

Step one was winnowing a few thousand cards down to about twice as many as the two hundred-ish I ended with. Step two was a couple of months of transforming the cards’ quirksand revelations into allusive narratives. Basic form is two page spreads. The rest is to nail the look. I like the idea of showing the cards in thesort of album designed for the average person to save postcards in- no structure other than more or less when cards were received. The pages with slits for the corners look appropriately homegrown, and suggest that on any day the cards can be moved around- although of course what’s here does the job I want, my structure suggests there could be many other possibilities.

A few completed two page spreads