Zane Grey and Me

Zane Grey and Me (2015) juxtaposes excerpts from the 1917 novel, Wildfire, with autobiographical responses, obliquely addressing the roles of both romance and romance novels in modern life. Printed damp in purple ink on eight colors of St. Armand paper, and bound in leather with exposed longstitch. The tops of the pages are cut into canyon and mesa outlines. Mr. Grey’s text is set in Farmers Old Style, via monotype composition from M & H Type; Ms. Rappoport’s text is handset Centaur. 8.25” x 10.75”; 32 pages. The edition is 47. Illustrated profusely with vintage dingbats, as well as a frontispiece drawing by Andrew Larkin. Anatomical heart drawn by Bobbe Besold. This book grew out of my childhood in New Jersey and my years working with horses in Europe and New Mexico. The underlying question is, how does reading romanticized versions of the American West affect an impressionable horse lover? The colors and sculpted shapes of the pages, along with the horizontal layout, evoke the horizons and landscape of the Southwest. The cowhide cover, with its silver concho closure, brings to mind journals kept by pioneers. The two columns of text on each page, one from Zane Grey’s novel and one from the author’s life, reveal the tension between fiction and reality, past and present.