South of Heaven.

2010. PETTIBON, Raymond. South of Heaven. By Jim Thompson, with an introduction by Arnold Hano. Illustrated with 44 duo-tone offset lithographs on red paper by the artist Raymond Pettibon. 4to, 309 x 220 mm., bound in publisher's red paper over black cloth. San Francisco: Arion Press, 2010.

South of Heaven is based on the laying of a pipeline from an oil source in West Texas to Port Arthur on the Gulf in 1927. Hano writes in his introduction to the Arion edition, "so real in its depiction of the horrific working conditions, it takes its place among the finest proletarian novels of this country. What Upton Sinclair did to the meat-packing workers, Thompson does to oil pipeline workers. It has cold-blooded murder and cold-blooded deaths that are not criminal, at least not by the usual standards of jurisprudence. Men die on the pipeline. That is their fate, in a world indifferent to that fate." Pettibon illustrates this edition with forty-four drawings, printed on red sheets interleaved in the text. Nearly all of Pettibon's artworks contain texts or captions. Some are quotations but most are his own highly creative writings. For South of Heaven he has used excerpts cunningly chosen and elided from the book, combined with his own improvisations on themes in the novel. One of an edition of 400 copies.