Old Record Press

Books that begin in the old record — the county papers, census returns, deeds and gravestones of Lawrence County, Missouri — and stay accountable to it.

The books

Paperback & ebook · April 25, 2027

What the Hills Keep

A Novel of the Ozark Hills · by A Friend

None of them is wicked. Every one of them is tried.

On the last Saturday of April, 1885, two men met on the public square of Mt. Vernon, Missouri, and within a minute, in front of half the town, both were dead. The novel walks the story back to its spring, in the tradition of Harold Bell Wright’s Ozark novels, and is drawn from the county’s own newspapers, census returns and gravestones.

Format
Paperback, 5 × 8 in, 396 pages · ebook
ISBN
979-8-9978503-0-2 (paperback)
Price
$21.99 paperback
Published
April 25, 2027 — the anniversary of the day on the square
In progress

Williams Graveyard, Volume One

The people buried in a half-acre ground three miles west of Mount Vernon, one at a time, from the record

The first burial was in 1847; the ground was deeded to itself in 1870 for one dollar. Volume One gathers the residents’ stories as the documents tell them — the deeds, the census returns, the death certificates, the county papers and the stones — and is being written in public, one resident at a time, before it is a book.

The press

Old Record Press is a small independent press. Its books start where a family historian starts — with what was written down at the time — and they keep the record and the invention in separate rooms.

The fiction says plainly that it is fiction, and names its inventions in a note at the back. The history is printed beside the documents it was drawn from, so that anyone can check it. Both are offered in the same spirit: that a county is made of the people who are buried in it, and that most of them are still there to be found.