Wednesday, April 13, 2011

READ THE REVIEW!

NY Journal of Books Review...



In 1970, a young boy rifled through a large trash container in Springfield, Missouri. He reached in his hand and pulled out a handmade album knit together with fabric and leather. Opening it, he saw drawings, 283 in all, that had been somewhat lovely sewn together into the old album, each hand numbered, and each drawn on ledger pages from the State Lunatic Asylum No. 3, located in Nevada, Missouri...
Most of what we know about the Electric Pencil is conjectural, gleaned from the content of the drawings themselves. From the style of the clothing and the furniture, the model year of the cars that are depicted and, most importantly, from the open date of 190_ on most of the ledger sheets (which made them obsolete in 1910), we can fairly assume that the drawings were created around the year 1910. We know that the album of drawings was rescued from a trash heap that was located off Seminole St. in the Brentwood section of Springfield, Missouri in 1970.