Authors who'd kill for a publisher to even consider their works probably hate Doug Smith.
The Davenport native, a bio-medical equipment technician at Genesis Medical Center, is also a noted collector of local photographs, papers, and artifacts, and has written a regular feature column - "Doug's Q-C Collectibles" - for the Quad-City Times since February 2007.
Yet finding a company willing to publish his first book, says Smith, wasn't a struggle: "They actually found me."
When
you pick up a book or magazine, your conscious mind is almost
certainly looking at the cover and the text inside.
Iowa
roots musician Greg Brown gazes out from the sepia dust-jacket of
Sandra Dyas's Down to the
River: Portraits of Iowa Musicians
as if he were part of a modern-day American
Gothic, setting the tone
for a book filled with earthy photographs. This picture is found
inside in black and white, opposite a posed shot of Kevin Gordon in
front of a door haloed with postcards.
Kathleen
Lawless Cox's new book, Journal
of the Unconscious, is a
necessarily self-indulgent affair. The title is perfectly descriptive
rather than being arty, and the volume - less than 80 pages - is
a collection of recorded "visions" from 1973 and 1974.
Kathleen
Lawless Cox's novel Maeve
was written over 29 years. Her new book, the poetry collection
Citizen of the Earth,
has been four decades in the making.
