Holden by Jacob Escobedo

Tuesday greetings collectors! It's Sara for one more day. The long birthday weekend has left us feeling a little disoriented—as if we're awakening from a long summer night's dream. Suddenly, the party's over and it's the second week of September. And while the celebrating's been nice—thanks to all of you who joined us along the way!—we couldn't be more excited about what's to come.

As we sometimes do when looking forward, today it makes sense to look back a little too. Holden is the fifth edition we've released by Atlanta-based artist Jacob Escobedo. Like the fine, furry and feathered friends of prints past, Holden is called so for the boy who likes the slithery-est sort of snakes the best. Elephant Sophie, Kerry the bat, crow Brandon and Jake the wolf, carry the names of the friends that chose these animals as their favorites.

Jacob's meticulous maps of the scales and finer details of small creatures, like this snake, have been fodder for rich discussions about the nature of animals and our most personal relationships to them. Jen has pleaded for her own drawing of an otter, after Ollie the Otter, who is in fact a dog. She also outlined a very appropriate excerpt from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, that I'll leave you with again today:

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I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.

And so we set forth this serpent into the 20x200 menagerie.