Here are this weeks featured Professional Dogs … waiting excitedly for Jolabokaflod! Or…

… maybe not. 🤣 Anyway, below are closer views of each dog portrait and below each is the text line in the book.

As mentioned in a prior post the Aurora Gallery quickly sold out of my book The Professional Dog and asked me to bring more asap. So I did. When I delivered the books I saw the nice display the Gallery has done for The Professional Dog.

They even put this notice on the bin that had held printed copies of my book…

…so they were happy to see me come in with these freshly signed copies.

Here’s a closer look at the display. Someone at the Aurora Gallery does hand lettering extremely well!

Here’s the other display rack at the Gallery with my books and cards. I like it that this rack looks so ordinary as I think it may help people consider getting my books as gifts without feeling too “precious” about it. As regular readers of this blog already know I create my books as I do an art object rather than as a book publisher in the traditional sense.

Leaning into the Jolabokaflod season I particularly enjoy having copies of my sketchbook available at the Aurora Gallery and here. I’m enjoying the multilayered pun of having created a book full of sketches of books and readers that also talks about finding books! You can preview my entire sketchbook here too.

But I include these sketchbook pages in this post because they’re good descriptions of how we handle our holiday jolly book flood (Jolabokaflod)

As mentioned last post, and hinted above, we started our Jolabokaflod festivities by ordering books online from a number of our local independent bookstores. Our book orders will come to our doorstep in waves, or small tsunami floods.

The first wave to reach us was from Vintage Books!

What we got for each other: “The Boy, the mole, the fox and the horse” by Charlie Mackesy, “A Surprise For Christmas” a collection of short mystery stories from British Library Crimes Classics as well as novels by Kate Carlisle, Sarah Dreher and John Mortimer.

A few days later from the bookstore Another Read Through we got the books pictured below. When we ordered we selected one of their book bundles. A book bundle, according to the bookstore, is a surprise set of books the store selects for you based on your stated preferences. Since both my spouse and I enjoy a good surprise we ordered a small book bundle, told our preferences … and the store sent us titles by Louise Penny and a Christopher Moore! We are both very pleased with our book surprise! Also very pleasant, perhaps even best of all, was the handwritten note from the store owner!

We got all of our holiday cards into the mail. And our mantel is filling with holiday cards sent to us! That’s one of the fun aspects of this time of year, the sending and receiving of cards.

So you can see it better here’s a closer look at the card image I made by hand using ink and gouache and then photographed for reproductions using moo.com

Months ago when I created the artwork my spouse took a photo of me working on it because it might amuse people to see it. Here ’tis 👇

Here’s the sketchbook page drawing had done before beginning the ink and gouache painting of this image idea. I’m sure you can see what parts of the drawing I kept and what I changed when I did the painting version. Most notably I changed the angles of the sled, the ski’s and the pile of books.

Since we’re nearly upon the holiday I’m going to post more sketchbook pages on my social media and on this blog next Monday…

…and as my sketchbook page above says I hope your holiday is full of love in ways that make you glad to be alive.