In 1939, just before graduating from high school in the small town of Ridgeway in northeast Iowa, Everett Kuntz spent his entire savings of $12.50 on a 35mm Argus AF camera. He made a camera case from a worn-out boot, scraps from a tin can, and a clasp from his mother's purse. For the next several years, especially during the summers when he worked on his parents' dairy farm, he clicked the shutter of his trusty Argus all around the quiet town. Everett bought movie reel film in bulk from a mail-order house, rolled his own film, and developed it in a closet at home, but he never had the money to print his photographs. More than two thousand negatives stayed in a box while he married, raised a family, and worked as an electrical engineer in the Twin Cities. When he became ill with cancer in the fall of 2002--sixty years after he had developed the last of his bulk film--Everett opened his time capsule and printed the images from his youth. He died in 2003, having brought his childhood town back to life just as he was leaving it. A sense of peace radiates from these images. Whether skinny-dipping in the Turkey River, wheelbarrow-racing, threshing oats, milking cows, visiting with relatives after church, or hanging out at the drugstore or the movies, Ridgeway's hardworking citizens are modest and trusting and luminous in their graceful harmony and their unguarded affection for each other. Visiting the town in 2006 as he was writing the text to accompany these photographs, Jim Heynen crafted vignettes that perfectly complement these rediscovered images by blending fact and fiction to give context and voice to Ridgeway's citizens.

In sunbaked Terlingua, Texas (pop., a few hundred), residents joke that there is a musician under every rock. Located ten miles from Mexico in one of the remotest corners of the United States, the town had a recording studio before it had a school, a well-stocked grocery store, or even a water utility. Open jam sessions are a daily ritual, and some songwriters make a living from their craft despite being thousands of miles from New York or Nashville. Why does such a tiny and isolated place ring with singing and guitars? Based on more than two years of on-the-ground research, On the Porch tells the story of this small but remarkable community. Chase Peeler invites us into the music, introducing us to a cast of characters as unique as the town itself. He reveals how novices and experts perform together—a rarity in contemporary America. He recounts the devastation brought on by a border closure and describes how music is once again uniting people across the Rio Grande. He considers the impact of gentrification in an off-the-grid paradise, and how this threatens to transform a precarious musical ecosystem. On the Porch is a celebration of human musicality, of the role that music plays and can play in our lives, both in Terlingua and beyond.

Signs orient, inform, persuade, and regulate. They help give meaning to our natural and human-built environment, to landscape and place. In Signs in America’s Auto Age, cultural geographer John Jakle and historian Keith Sculle explore the ways in which we take meaning from outdoor signs and assign meaning to our surroundings—the ways we “read” landscape. With an emphasis on how the use of signs changed as the nation’s geography reorganized around the coming of the automobile, Jakle and Sculle consider the vast array of signs that have evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Archaeologist Dr. Henry Randalls is invited to Egypt,on a search for an ancient pyramid and possible treasure. Joined by his son and nephew, the trip's success is soon threatened with the kidnapping of his contact- the only man who knows the secret and its location. While the boys venture out to find the kidnappers, Henry follows a mysterious message and other clues that lead to a tomb where strange curses and suspicious accidents challenge his every step. Tension mounts with the surprise appearance of Duncan Phelps and his gang of thieves, who will stop at nothing to steal the fortune. But there is another force to be reckoned with that no knows about. A force that is as old as the pyramids and set to attack anyone trying to disturb its' sacred grounds. Will a treasure be found and taken? Will Dr.Randalls' group survive or will the tomb become their final resting place?

Photographers Linda and Robert Scarth have an incredible eye for that magic moment when small becomes beautiful. Matched with patience and skill, their eye for magic produces dazzling images of Iowa nature up close. Revealing the miniature beauties hidden among the patches of prairie, woodland, and wetland that remain in Iowa’s sadly overdeveloped landscape, the seventy-five color photographs in Deep Nature give us a breathtaking cross section of the state’s smallest inhabitants. The Scarths’ close-up images of showy orchis and northern monkshood, great spangled fritillary and painted lady, red-breasted nuthatch and eastern wood-pewee, ornate box turtle and gray treefrog, big bluestem and cotton-grass, and many other natural wonders look more like paintings than photographs. Beginning with an iridescent fly hovering over a neon-purple fringed gentian and ending with their iconic image of coneflowers refracted in dewdrops, they have created a sparkling jewelbox of images that will make us look at the small world around us with renewed appreciation. Attending to the small things in the fabric of nature is the Scarths’ source of artistic inspiration. Taking Walt Whitman’s “every leaf is a miracle” as their beginning, they celebrate not only each leaf but each feather, insect, dewdrop, flower, lichen, and intricate organism in the evolving web of life.