This artist’s book examines marginalia found in twelve copies of Walden and provides commentary on the reading habits of strangers, assumptions about nature writing and learning, and the lingering effects of Thoreau’s classic work. By withholding the original text to focus solely on margin notes, Walden Marginalia turns the same kind of close attention Thoreau inspired in his readers onto the readers themselves.

Letterpress printed with photopolymer plates and hand-set Scotch Roman and Bodoni types. Case binding.

The short essay in Holes explores the artist’s younger brother’s relationship with digging holes in the yard when he was a child. Carson’s holes, like many youthful games, start out as innocent experiments but end up being repurposed in ways he never could’ve anticipated, and give insight to what kind of man he will become. Visually, the way the text, wax, and ink move down the page, accumulating weight from behind as the story progresses, mirrors both the act of digging a hole and the gathering of experience that can occur in our own backyards.