It's July, 2009, And We're Touring Charleston

If you go to www.sammydogbooks.com and order a copy of The Adventures of Sammy the Wonder Dachshund, Sammy's Last Week in Charleston by Jonathan Miller – and we recommend that you do exactly that – the first thing you're going to be impressed with is the size of the book you get in the mail. A foot long – how appropriate for a book about a dachshund – and ten inches high, it looks and feels very substantial for a paperbound volume. The stock is heavy, and the colors just pop off the page at you.

But wait; there's more. This book is a fun story, an engaging travelogue, and an impressive showcase for 22 beautifully assembled – there's no other word for it – prints.

As the story opens, Sammy's boss calls him on a Sunday morning. Sammy is a fact checker for an Internet company, and his boss wants him to take a better job in another city. Sammy can't pass up the opportunity, but he is now left with only one week to say goodbye to Charleston, SC, the city he loves. As the week goes on, Sammy tours his favorite places, and we go with him. He hits the places you would expect, like King Street and The Citadel, a few that we might not have thought of, like a Piggly Wiggly supermarket, and a few, like an abandoned boat near Folly Lake, that tourists mostly don't see or notice. All of these locations are real, and even if you've never visited Charleston, Miller's artwork is so vivid that you're going to feel like a native.

Let's talk about that artwork for a minute. Miller was good enough to spend some time on the phone with us explaining how he does it. With very little formal art training – he was a business major in college – he developed a style of cutting out pieces of construction paper and assembling them into 12" by 18" sort-of-mosaics, enhanced with outlining that he does with a black Sharpie pen. Each of the 22 illustrations in the book took 40 to 50 hours to produce. Take a look at the Angel Oak illustration. Look at all those tiny green pieces, each cut by hand and glued by hand. That piece took 63 hours. Look at the sunset on Colonial Lake and see how well Miller renders reflections on the water with pieces of orange construction paper. And all the fans in the grandstands cheering on the Charleston RiverDogs; we don't want to even think about what it took to cut and paste each one.

Sammy has many friends in Charleston, most of them human, and all of them rendered in a post-modern-but-not-ironic, almost-Keane, wide-eyed style. We note with approval, though not surprise, that many of Sammy's devoted friends are young, hot women.

As we suspected, there is a real Sammy (that's him at the left), but he doesn't share living quarters with Miller. He lives with one of Miller's friends, but always seemed like the kind of funny guy who would have adventures worth chronicling.

Finally, you reach a page with a The End sign, and you look one page beyond, just in case it's a joke and there are more good things to be seen. There are not. But the good news is that there are more Sammy adventures coming, including a trip to Africa next. Miller tells us that Sammy will be traveling all around this great country of ours. There's just the little matter of all those hours of illustration. We hasten to hang up the phone so he can get to work again. We're eager for the next book.

Go to www.sammydogbooks.com and order a copy of The Adventures of Sammy the Wonder Dachshund, Sammy's Last Week in Charleston by Jonathan Miller. Do it now.

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