Daily Collages. Every single day (except one) for 37 years -- from 1964 through 2000 -- John Evans took whatever he found kicking round the streets of his Lower East Side neighborhood, and turned it into a daily collage," as reported by John Strausbaugh in The New York Times. Over those years, John created some 10,000 collages, each stamped with the date he made it, "filling more than 100 notebooks." Except for one page, the one dated February 11, 1996, which was left blank because he was too sick to go outside that day. But on every other day, he just picked up whatever he could find.

That might be "playing cards, business cards, ticket stubs, cigarette packs, fortune cookie fortunes ... political fliers, scraps of newspapers and magazines, ripped up snapshots, matchbooks ... shreds of fabric and wrapping paper." Then John'd paste "this discarded ephemera against a painted background" and rubber-stamp the date on it." The result, according to a critic who reviewed his work back in 1976, is "a world of romantic intervention conjured out of odd juxtapositions of weird and familiar things." The New York Historical Society called the work "a stunning visual record ... the last four decades of the 20th century." While this daily routine made John Evans neither rich nor famous, his work has, at long last, been published as a book: John Evans: Collages.

The book probably won't make him rich or famous, either. Its publisher, Jim Mairs of Quantuck Lane Press (the site seems to be down at the moment), has wanted to put it out since the early 80s, when W.W. Norton & Company, his employer at the time, passed on it "because the artist wasn't famous enough to justify the expense." Well, 20 years later, Jim Mairs has spared no expense. A selection of collages -- 365 of them -- has been photographed by "the venerable firm Mondadori" of Verona, Italy, and a limited-edition run of 5,000 copies, plus another 100 "deluxe box copies" have been produced. At $75 a copy, Jim says he'll lose money even if he sells them all. But that's okay, says Jim, because Collages "is the most fun of any book I've done." As for John Evans, he stopped making collages at the end of 2000: "I thought the end of the 20th century seemed like a perfect time to not be doing this anymore," adding, however: "I still am almost always looking."

Tim Manners, editor