I was reorganizing my bookshelf last week and stumbled across a book I made back in 2004. It’s a small pocket journal whose dimensions are about 3″ X 4″ and it had fallen behind several other books and been forgotten. I can remember making this book because it turned into something I hadn’t intended when I started making it. Whatever I had in mind when I started this book changed along the way. I was beginning work on the cover and NPR had a remeberance about Jerry Orbach the actor that played Lenny Briscoe on Law & Order, he died in December of 2004. As I continued working on it, he book somehow morphed into The Book Briscoe. One of the things the Briscoe character was famous for was the sarcastic quip he typically uttered early in each episode as a dead body was discovered.

I have a personal favorite and I embossed it into the brass strip that runs around the edge of the front cover, in the event you can’t see it in the photograph, it says; “if I was kidding I’d be wearing a Fez and no pants”. I don’t know that I’d call this a tribute book because that really wasn’t my intent when I made it but it did start me thinking about possibly making a tribute book for Captain Phil Harris. For those who don’t know, Phil Harris was the captain of the fishing vessel Cornelia Marie, a crab boat featured on Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch series. Any time I would think about how bad my job was, all I had to do was watch an episode or two of Deadliest Catch to put it all in perspective. Phil Harris died on February 9th, 2010 after suffering a stroke on January 29th. It seems to me that metal would be my material of choice but time will tell as I continue to think about where I want to go with this idea.