The electric pencil

"This is the story of Edward Deeds, a man who spent his entire adult life in mental institutions. Deeds's subtle and wonderfully imaginative drawings are populated with a remarkable cast of characters. His subjects include striking portraits, landscapes and architecture, fanciful boats, trains, and cars, birds and animals--a meticulous rendering of Deeds's inner world and his poignant tribute to a faded, genteel past. Rescued from a trash heap by a 14 year old boy in 1970, and discovered thirty six years later by Harris Diamant, the collection consists of 287 drawings done on ledger sheets from State Hospital No.3 in Nevada, Missouri."--BookDepository.com.

The meticulous, and wildly imaginative pencil and crayon drawings portray an unusual cast of characters: nineteenth-century dandies, Civil War soldiers, country landscapes dotted with roaming animals, and fanciful architecture-- none of which existed in the actual mid-twentieth-century landscape of Deeds's own life. Deeds bound his artwork as a present for his mother, and in 1970 the album was rescued from the trash. Originally done on ledger sheets from State Hospital No. 3 in Nevada, Missouri, here they are reproduced in the sequence of the original album.