Ed Rubin's New "Vermont" Book

I got to meet Mr. Rubin (here's a link to his website and here's one to his photo FB site) a while back when he stopped by the shop to investigate our antiques-y weirdness. We got to talking and he started snapping shots. He told me at the time about how he was putting a photo-book on Vermont together and I was taken aback at how in-depth he was getting about it. He passed back through today while on a speaking-tour about the book and he handed me a copy (thanks!) and we had a good chat again -- catching up where the conversation left off years ago.

I wanted to give a shout-out about this book because his project has finally been printed (in Verona, Italy, by the way -- at a press that does work for the Met) after 2+ years of daily work. It's also turned out awesome and can be ordered from Fine Arts Press.

What's wonderful to me is that while discovering Vermont and its people, Ed's also taken on-board the "Vermont thing" himself: his obsessive deliberation and quality-control over getting the stories matched to the photos and matched to the personalities and places is directly comparable to the way so many Vermont artists, artisans, workshops, builders, people of all stripes... go through their lives every day. It's about getting things right and also a strange sort of community-based self-sacrificial thing which I can't quite explain. We want to do right by our neighbors... and we know our neighbors! 

It's funny to flip through his pages and find that I've met or personally know at least several of the people pictured. I reskinned a banjo-uke for one of them! This is also a Vermont thing: we're so tiny up here that we're all mixed-up in one another's affairs (in a good way).

I'm in the book, too -- hah! -- with recent packing boxes creeping out of what used to be the closet.

And did I mention that the shots themselves are simply gorgeous?

My art-attuned illustrator wife was psyched to check the book out. I just love the melding of story to image in the book. He's captured and compressed a lot of "something" into a small amount of space... which is entirely difficult to do!