The Accidental Collector

Readers who fell in love with The Eighth Lively Art will delight in the stories and profiles that the painter and paleontologist Wesley Wehr has collected in this follow-up to his earlier memoir of Pacific Northwest artistic and intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s. Above all, these are Wehr's accounts, distilled by passionate recollection, of what some remarkable artists and thinkers brought out in him and in each other--stories of creative people and how they inspired, influenced, challenged, and occasionally infuriated one another.

Wesley Wehr, painter and composer, is affiliate curator of paleobotany at the Burke Museum of Natural History, University of Washington. He is the author of The Eighth Lively Art: Conversations with Painters, Poets, Musicians, and the Wicked Witch of the West.