Mary's right about the book's containing some of my pictures of Forum members who attended the 2011 conference at Hannibal. One picture (p. 45) shows them in the Mark Twain Cave, near the spot where Pat Ober delivered an impromptu talk about Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell attempt to petrify his dead daughter. The combination of Pat's always somber countenance and the proximity of the grisly experiment's site made for quite a creepy experience. (Pat can be seen in a green shirt, appropriately lurking in a shadow at the back of that picture.) A second picture on the same page more clearly shows Tim Champlin looking at a map of the cave outside its entrance. That picture is very appropriate for this book, as Tim is the author of the second volume in Voyageur Press's regional author's series: _The Wild West of Louis L'Amour: An Illustrated Companion to the Frontier Fiction of an American Icon_. His book will be released on August 1, according to the book's Amazon page (http://www.amazon.com/Wild-West-Louis-LAmour-Illustrated/dp/0760346887/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426528015&sr=1-1). With luck, Tim will have some advance copies when he attends this year's Hannibal conference in July. If you're interested in Louis L'Amour or western fiction, be sure to talk to Tim at the conference. (If you don't know what he looks like, look at page 45 of the Mississippi book.) Incidentally, Tim also has a second book coming out later this year--a novel titled _Mark Twain Speaking from the Grave_ (I think I have that right). It reveals the unknown story of what became of Mark Twain's long-lost wax recordings. He may have advance copies of that book, too, in time for the Hannibal conference. It's hard to imagine a more appropriate place to introduce book, as Hannibal, the cave, and the Mississippi River figure prominently in his novel.