I was listening to the radio and they played a song by Keane, which sounded good, so I went over to the website of the public library to see if they had any CDs I could check out. While searching I came across this biography from 2014, by Adam Parfrey and Cletus Nelson, of the artist Margaret Keane, famous for her paintings of big-eyed waifs, and her husband Walter, who promoted the art. I’d read bits and pieces of their story over the years from occasional news articles, and it was interesting to see it all in one place. It’s kind of a weird book—this is not something you can tell from seeing the online listing but is apparent with the physical copy—it just looks a bit unprofessional. And, indeed, it’s published by a small press. But the tools of professional-looking book publishers were available in 2014 for anyone with a computer, so it seems like it was a conscious choice of the author/publisher to give it that Hollywood Babylon look. The other thing is that the book is short, only 160 pages (not counting notes and appendixes), and many of those pages are taken up by photos, so maybe the low-budget-looking layout was just a way to pad the material to fill out a whole book.

Anyway, I liked the book. It has a judicious tone, tells an interesting story, and even features an appearance by Tom Wolfe. You never know what you’ll run across, listening to the radio.

P.S. The Keane album came in from the library and I listened to it but couldn’t get into it at all. So, good thing I read that book so something positive came out of the experience.