finding the perfect swingset.

several years ago, my sister and i went to ragstock and found a crazy old prom dress for ten dollars.  we took it home and cut all the bows off.  i put it on with a pair of clunky black shoes and we went to our favorite park and spent the day taking pictures.  well, she took pictures.  this was when i was still afraid to take pictures (that’s another story.)

i don’t know that we had a specific idea in mind, it just sort of unfolded and we went along with it.  when the film was developed we spread out the contact sheets and scrutinized them for hours, picking out our favorites.  i think my sister did a lot of the developing herself in the basement, but i can’t remember for sure.  by the time it was all done, i was already in a different state.  maybe virginia.  maybe louisiana . . . i just don’t know.   at the time of the shoot i had just been passing through town for a month?  two months?  and was living in a volkswagen van.

but wherever i was, i received a black box full of the photos and i set to work typing out the words to go along with them on sheets of vellum, with an ancient typewriter.  (yes, i travelled with it.  of course!)   i had reached california before i finished, that much i remember.  i remember putting pages together in the basement studio of my east oakland apartment.  i still hadn’t finished by the time i moved to a loft in berkeley, but that’s where i finally put together several finished copies of the first edition of Perfect Swingset.  it was printed on matte photo paper with vellum overlay, the words typed on the vellum.  i still have random pages of the original drafts and ideas, held together with clothespins and stored in ziploc bags.  (well, i recently used a few of the original vellum sheets as diffusers on flashlights in a night photo shoot.)  we distributed them to friends and family and they disappeared pretty quickly.  i don’t even have my own first edition, i gave or sold them all away.

last month it occurred to me that Perfect Swingset needed to be brought back to life.  it was  one of the last writing projects i worked on when i used to think of myself as a writer.  it had started as a fun day with my sister and evolved organically into one of my favorite things i have ever made.

i wanted to bring it back in hardcover form, with a real binding, not the handmade-with-cardboard cover that i did originally, charming though it was.  we started reassembling it using blurb.com, and quickly discovered that our scans weren’t the right resolution.  so once again we spread the contact pages out over the table and studied and reconsidered our selections.  we swapped out 3 or 4 of the photos from the first edition and got the negatives digitized in high res.  but we didn’t change any of the text.  we kept it square,  it was always square.  it was originally an 8.5 x 8.5 and in this newest form, it is 7 x 7.  it is a black hardcover image wrap, which means the title and cover image are printed directly on the cover and wrapped around the edges.  (we have little patience for dust jackets.)  about an hour ago i ordered the proof copy, and as soon as it arrives – assuming it all looks good – we will make it available for sale alongside my other blurb book, NYC snapshots.  it has been a long time in the making, and i can’t wait to see the result.  so far, it seems to be aging well.