Southern Skies

Colophon:

This archival, hand-sewn journal/sketchbook is made from 100 gsm, antique white Hahnemühle Ingres mouldmade paper from Germany, sewn with Irish linen thread in the linked pattern that was developed by the ancient Copts. This stitch allows the book to lay open easily at any page.

 This book’s endbands are navy and gold silk, and its bookmark is goatskin.  Its boards are wrapped in a 1970 map of the Heavens, featuring the stars of the Southern Hemisphere, and its spine is covered in French goatskin that was processed at Rocky Mountain Leather Supply in Utah.

The talisman in this book is a 1969 souvenir of the Apollo 11 mission, when American astronauts were the first known humans to walk on the Earth’s Moon.  Try to share Walt Whitman’s persona’s response to “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” when that person, “wander’d off by myself,/In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,/Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” All the heavenly bodies are divine.