…is the colloquial name for the allergic reaction to the annual January hell-storm of cedar pollen that ravages the population of Austin. Steroid shots and nasal inhalants are paired with homeopathic remedies and local honey to try and stave off the haze that comes with each New Year.

In April of 2022, I was finishing my fourth and final round of chemotherapy when an order of 1,000 books arrived from South Korea to my newly acquired South Austin storage unit. Full-hearted and hairless, I packaged up the hundreds of pre-orders for my first-ever, self-published book project—a cookbook called Heart-Shaped Tomatoes about my then 101-year-old Italian immigrant grandmother Elda Cristini.

Over the next year, I spent hours in that 5-by-10-foot slab of concrete, shipping books to every corner of the United States. Among the shrinking stack of books, a new idea grew. Bookmaking had become an obsession with every step of the process from the spark of the idea to the act of rolling packing tape across a freshly folded cardboard box included in that obsession.

For now, Ceder Fever operates as a distributor for my own bookmaking practice. That practice exists within a niche of the photography world that sees and explores the photobook as a medium and artform in and of itself. Paired and sequenced images come together to create meaning that never existed within the individual images. In describing how he selected the works contained within his own book The Book of 101 Books, Andrew Roth describes his criteria as needing to be “a thoroughly considered production; the content, the mise-en-page, choice of paper stock, reproduction quality, text, typeface, binding, jacket design, scale–all of these elements…blend together to find naturally within the whole.”

While I am currently focused on the publication and distribution of my own projects, Cedar Fever operates with the firm belief that artistic communities rise together. Similar to the pollen that can take a year or more to manifest its debilitating allergic effects, that communal ethos can also slowly but surely spread—in Austin and well beyond.

In the future, I hope to expand Cedar Fever into something more–to eventually publish other artists’ works and exhibit works in physical spaces.

Thank you for following this journey. This is just the beginning.