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A quick bio:
I was born in West Virginia, grew up and consider myself from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and moved out here to San Francisco from Cleveland, Ohio with my wife back in 1987. I studied philosophy in school so naturally after leaving college, I worked as a cook. Spent nearly 10 years in the restaurant business, most of those as a head or executive chef. Great people, enjoyable work but long, hard hours of tedious management work with only short spurts of the truly joyous part of the job, creating stuff. I have two lines I use about my time spent in the restaurant business:
- I wouldn't trade those ten years of my life for anything
- Well..., maybe five of them
Being out here in San Francisco during the earthquake of 1989 (as the head chef at a tiny restaurant on Haight Street) was the most significant event in my life. No, walls didn't come down on me, no light-from-above epiphany moment.... but over the course of the next couple of months, I came to understand that life can be short and we're all just a slip-of-the-San-Andreas from walls tumbling down on us. If you gotta work, you may as well do something you have a passion for.
I've always had a passion for books, though the collecting bug hit me later in life than most. Ironically, I used to make a great deal of fun of collectors, figuring that the only thing that mattered was the content.
I was fascinated by poetry and the nature of the creative act so I began reading Robert Graves' The White Goddess. A wonderful read but dense, complex, and multi-layered. In attempting to better understand what he was getting at, I began to read his other work, some of which came out in only one printing. The day I spent $100 on a book simply because I wanted to read it (if you must know, it was The Nazarene Gospels Restored) was the day I started sliding down the path to where I am today. The day I bought a dust jacketed first U.S. printing of Watch the Northwind Rise (also by Graves), even though I had a perfectly good paperback reading copy at home, (it was, after all, a good deal ;-) was the day I knew I was hooked. I started scouting books as trade bait to acquire more Graves. Soon I was running ads in the old AB Bookman's Weekly, displaying my books at a local shop (Tall Stories, for those of you who remember it) and quoting dealers throughout the country (sending out index cards, how quaint).
In 1997, I opened Valhalla Books. Back then, we were set up sort of like an antique store, with folks renting bookcases and taking turns working the store. Two of my fellow exhibitors, Richard McLaughlin, Bookman and McNally Books have moved away from the Bay Area but often have a nice selection of quality books available on eBay.
Yeah, I know. I promised your current photographs. I thought you might forget about it. Well, you've been warned....
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| 2002 |
2004 |
Pose |
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| 2006 |
Black and white |
2006 |
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