Southern Most & Travels with Jeff

The stories inside of Southern Most & Travels With Jeff are wild portraits of America's underbelly written in the spirit of Kerouac or Vollmann if they were obsessed with graffiti and focused their lyrical prose on the griminess of the southern states.

The stories are simply two travelogues through early 21st Century America; multiple journeys overlaid on each other with the common destination of the strange swampy peninsula known as Florida. The main characters see the world through the lens of an outsider. Its all about graffiti, riding freight trains, finding a place to sleep, and dodging police. Adam Void positions the past as a reoccurring specter that peppers reality with stories of the last time "we were here", that one perfect ride years ago, and painting those spots that may have been long since buffed but are still running in our minds. There is a sense of time and aging in the real world, while also striving for an eternal youth in their odd fantasy world. These are not stories of hard-bodied street kings or crusty road-kid lifers. Southern Most & Travels With Jeff seem to show a vulnerability and humanity that are sometimes missing from subcultural narratives, while also mirroring a graffiti embellished meta-landscape where messages are being transmitted and received at all times.

The book itself is an exquisite collectively produced work of art. Matthias Hübner and Stavros Gialamidis brought the design and typefaces a unique and personal touch with infinite variations and artistic embellishments. Printed at the RisoKeller in Weissensee, the two-color risography gives the pages a warm and imperfect feeling. Adam Void's creative hand is present throughout as well, in various drawings, photographs, and ephemera. There are reproduced Polaroids, informational pamphlets, and scraps of found paper inserted at various spots inside the book that bring the adventure to another level.