My Village (Annotated)

This annotated edition of "My Village" includes the following previously unpublished material:Thirty pages of illustrated reading notesTables and a family tree to identify the charactersList of 68 references to place the work in context.What if a reporter could travel back in time — not to cover kings and wars, but to capture the soul of a village?Imagine a sharp-eyed, inquisitive investigator slipping unnoticed into the backstreets of 1890s Auvers-sur-Oise. He moves among the villagers, blending into wedding feasts, market days, and riverside gossip. He listens, he sketches, he records—every fleeting glance, every whispered secret, every fragment of daily life.This is precisely what American painter and illustrator Elmer Boyd Smith has done. Through forty-eight vivid chapters and nearly 150 drawings, he delivers an astonishingly immersive record of a world long past. He introduces us to the Romaru family, his neighbors, and to an unforgettable cast of characters which include the postman, the priest, the wandering magician, the old hermit. Each encounter unveils confidences and forgotten sketches, revealing a village as alive in its quiet moments as in its grand festivities.For the first time, this edition includes forty pages of newly written notes, decoding the names, places, and details that Smith deliberately obscured — allowing us to step, at last, into the real Auvers, hidden behind his fictional Valombre. Read more