the fillers

Assembling endpages, signing pages, fillers, etc…is one of my favorite parts of creating a book, but it’s also the least satisfying because they’re paid no attention in context of the finished product. So I figured I might as well post them on their own if only because I get to brag about my endpages, which are actual the endpages of The Flying Hockeystick, one of my favorite kids books by Jolly Roger Bradfield. I grew up reading this book over and over and, if the library card attached to the copy I own is any indication, I loved it so much I stole it from the school library. Oops, sorry! One of the stories in The Infinite Wait is about my hometown library so I thought that using The Flying Hockeystick endpages as my endpages would be a great fit. But contacting writers/artists who are, shall we say, in the twilight of their years, is notoriously difficult. But I got Jolly Roger Bradfield’s contact information from his website and was delighted when he wrote back right away with encouragement and  permission to use the pages. After a lifetime of obsessively reading his books and wishing I could live inside of them, to actual get a response from him was pretty much the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in a long time. I maybe, possibly, might have kinda freaked out just a little bit. But because the backstory of me getting these end pages is, um…actually not that interesting to anyone but me, I wanted to share it before the book comes out. Which is in September, incase you missed the number of times I’ve rambled on about it before. Okay, so, here are the end pages and two filler pages that I like just because I enjoy drawing stuff that I owned/own.

Below is the title/signing page with some toys and books I had as a kid. The song is The Beach Boy’s ‘Sloop John. B’ which my mom used to make me harmonize to on long car trips. I can’t even begin to describe how many feelings that song makes me have. It makes my brain cry. The books are The Boxcar Children, Encyclopedia Brown, Highlights magazine, There’s a Monster at the End of this Book and Kermit the Hermit by Bill Peet, who was/is another one of my top 5 favorite illustrators. If you haven’t read his autobiography, you really really should. It’s a great glimpse of what it was like working on early Disney movies and how different animation and illustration was back then. 

”The End’ page has the same record player (which is a cheap Fisher Price kids record player that actually still works because they used to make stuff to last more than a year back then) and a bunch of books that were important to me during different periods covered in The Infinite Wait. There’s a stack of comics from when I discovered comics at a public library in San Francisco when I was really sick with systemic lupus (hence the disease centric books) and some books about alcoholism and mental disorders BECAUSE I’M CRAZY. Kidding. I’m okay. It’s everyone else who’s totally off their nut. Anyways, these are pages I made. The end.

The Infinite Wait will be out in September. It’ll debut at SPX and then be available on this site and from Koyama Press.