More Than Enough

Detail from the collage

A collage of covers

By Moristotle

Vic Midyett emailed me on Wednesday afternoon this week that his and Shirley’s package to me had just been delivered at my front door, right on UPS’s schedule. The email arrived almost before we heard the deliveryman ring our doorbell. His big box contained a stretched canvas on which Shirley had painted a modified collage of book covers^* from Moristotle & Co.’s Book Authors’ Corner.

With Jack Cover (1942 – 2014) on June 4, 2011

    When I first beheld the painting, I marveled at how well Shirley had rendered me, the way I was reveling in the shaded sun with my wife and a friend nine years ago, when we visited him on the deck of his home in North Raleigh.
    But something seemed strange to me, didn’t feel right: the absence of detail in the book covers, many of whose titles were hardly decipherable, and few of their details. I thought they deserved equal billing with that smiling editor.

24" x 36" (the ratio of a 6" x 9" paperback book)

    Vic assured me that Shirley always intended to render the book covers in an abstract way, to give them less billing than the image of me, whom she wished to credit for my contribution to the books.
    I remained unsure about “top billing,” so Vic had to reassure me further: “Morris, it is okay for you to take credit for your work. Neither of us feels that you take or give yourself the credit you deserve for the work you do.”
    I am grateful to Vic and Shirley for this sentiment, and I humbly accept Shirley’s painting in that spirit. I will treasure it, as I treasure their friendship.

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Photographic mock-up of covers to be represented

Copyright © 2020 by Shirley Deane/Midyett, Vic Midyett, & Moristotle