The Young Manhood of Dave Chamlee by Rebecca Chamlee

$625.00 - Please contact 23 Sandy for current availability.
The Young Manhood of Dave Chamlee is a coming-of-age story told by the subject's grandson, the book artist's late father, in a Humanities term paper written while attending Claremont Men's College in the 1950s. The narrative begins with ancestral background, his birth in 1867 and recounts the young man's journey west from the family homestead in eastern Tennessee to St. Louis where he worked as a stevedore on the Mississippi River, then his years as a working cowboy in Texas. Included are research notes added in 1998 taken from census reports, marriage licenses, and war records. With the text are reproductions of family photographs and a map tucked into a pocket inside the cover. The book speaks to the notion of memory; family stories passed down through the generations that become personal folklore. This is a unique way of presenting a family archive.

Artist Bio

To pursue her ambitions in book arts after graduating from Otis College of Art and Design, Rebecca acquired a Vandercook 4 hand-operated cylinder press in 1985 and began producing finely crafted, limited-edition, hand-bound letterpress printed books, broadsides and ephemera under the imprint of Pie In The Sky Press. Her work is exhibited widely and included in many private, major public and special collections worldwide. Books are Rebecca's artistic passion and medium, that explore the intersection of many disciplines such as writing, graphic design, typography, printing, paper craft, image making and the traditional craft of bookbinding. The medium integrates experimentation with technical, traditional and conceptual considerations. She is interested not just in the words - the verbal structure of a book - but also in the physical object; the sensation of smelling the ink, touching the paper and feeling the impression of the type; echoing the tone and content of text in accompanying images, the typography and the binding.