PUTTING THE FINISHING touches on Picture Catahoula, a hardcover collection of vintage photographs of Catahoula, three years in the making.
I never imagined I’d have the opportunity to use that phrase —The End — quite literally at the end of a book, but after watching a lot of movies from the 1940s lately, with their elegant cursives in the credits, and having designed the book as a kind of picture show, alternating images with handwritten elements, old-Hollywood-style, I decided that’s exactly what I needed. So I had the designer handwrite a “The End” for the book. Feels great to have The End in sight.
Of course, it’s not actually the end. Just like Catahoula Lake, known in legend to be bottomless, just when I think I’ve gotten to the bottom of Catahoula, I find there’s still more buried down there. Just last weekend I watched old 8mm movies of Catahoula and photographed old blueprints of a proposed wilderness center. Patsy has some old movies of the Mardi Gras carnival in the 1960s that I’ve heard of but haven’t seen. In other words, there’s so much more out there, waiting to be unearthed. I’ll probably be doing this the rest of my life.