This month’s All-Story magazine…

The current issue of All Story magazine features a “guest designer”. I picked up the magazine, not one of my normal picks, because that guest designer is one of my favourite characters: Mr. Tom Waits. The world is much more interesting place with him in it than it would be without.

There’s actually limited material in the magazine for Tom fan, but I figure it’s worth the cover price just for this page:

As usual, click through for the giant version.

In case you can’t read it, here’s the text, with slight punctuation editing, and one piece of a proper name missing:

To who ever,

These are oil stains I’v photographed in various parking lots in the U.S. and abroad, the horse I found on a stall door at Santa ?? Racetrack. The horse had chewed away the white paint on the door and left this incredible image of a horse sailing over a fence. After finding that I began looking for ghost images in the stains beneath cars. None of them have been retouched, they are like I found them. I took them with B+W film. I like to say I work in oils. See whatever you see in them they are the astonishing shapes and mysteries of the natural world.

T.W.

P.S. Oh, the shadow of the horse head is in fact a shadow of a horse head, at the track.

Obviously the letter accompanies a series of images. You’ll have to go buy the magazine to see those.

It pleases me greatly that Tom wanders the world looking at things like oil stains and seeing the beauty therein. And it surprises me not at all.