Please, Let Me Explain

Hello, special friend, and welcome to the 2019 More Unhappiness issue! The 88 pages now cradled in your hands were created in the summer of 2019, immediately following the completion of the immense The Crap Hound Big Book of Unhappiness, aka Crap Hound No.10.

Here’s how it happened: In the months before the book’s press date, I was still uncovering new material, much of it excellent. The page count was locked in, though, so making room for late additions meant removing existing imagery. During a ceremonial massage with an Inuit shaman who often meditated in the bushes at the end of my street, he honored me with the suggestion of a supplementary issue that would hold any and all extra material. I was overjoyed, no longer forced to choose between new and existing images. I could set aside late-arriving material, happy and secure in the knowledge it wouldn’t go unseen. It was a way to cheat the deadline, and since the book was in horizontal format, I’d have a chance to see the topic of unhappiness on standard vertical layouts.

Limits of timing and page count, not quality, determined what was included here, so you’d be making a life-changing mistake by assuming this issue is a buffet of sad leftovers sinking into a wilted bed of old kale. Some images in this issue are among my favorites in either volume (one fine example: the terrifying Zodiac Killer-style personification of fire on page 54). Many striking finds here needed new layouts to do justice to their detail.

Much as that old wine-scented shaman honored me that day on his cardboard spirit mat, I now honor all over you by offering this sacred companion issue. Or perhaps you’re honoring me by reading it. But then I end up honored twice, which seems greedy. You know what? It doesn’t matter.

Pick something and be done with it. I’m tired of talking about this. Enjoy the issue, and thank you for reading!