The Friends of the Montauk Library movie series begins next Thursday at 7 p.m. with “The Way, Way Back,” a coming-of-age story about a 14-year-old boy’s summer vacation with his mother and her overbearing boyfriend. Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, and Liam James star in the film, which the Philadelphia Inquirer called “sly, richly modulated, emotionally engaging, and brutally honest.”

    Future programs, all of which take place Thursdays at 7 p.m., include the animated film “Monsters University,” “The Heat,” a comedy starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, “Kings of Summer,” a comedy that premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, “2 Guns,” an action film with Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, and “Much Ado About Nothing,” a contemporary take on Shakespeare’s comedy. All films are free, with refreshments, and will be shown at the library.

    Bay Street Theatre’s Literature Live! series will present “The Diary of Anne Frank” from Friday, Nov. 8, through Nov. 26. The play, written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, is an adaptation from the book about eight people hiding from the Nazis during World War II. It won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best play in 1956. The Bay Street production will be directed by Joe Minutillo and is suggested for ages 13 and up. Tickets are $12 for students and $25 for adults, with special pricing for schools and other groups.

    The American premiere of “Lost Childhood,” a concert opera based on the award-winning memoir of Dr. Yehuda Nir, will be performed by the National Philharmonic on Nov. 9 at 8 p.m. at the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, Md.

    Dr. Nir, who has a house in Springs, is a Holocaust survivor whose father was killed by German soldiers in 1941. His memoir details his survival, along with his mother and sister, and their return to Poland in 1945.

    The opera moves from Poland in 1939 to New York City in 1993 and a meeting between a postwar German and a Jewish Holocaust survivor, both psychiatrists and each deeply troubled by his own lost childhood. Tickets to the one-night-only performance range in price from $28 to $84, but children age 7 to 17 will be admitted free.

     Neo-Political Cowgirls, a dance theater company dedicated to works that explore the female voice, is presenting a dance and choreography workshop titled Be a Cowgirl for a Day, on Nov. 9, from 12 to 4 p.m., at Guild Hall.

    Participants will create, design, and direct a personalized dance theater piece, telling their stories through gesture, movement, and text put to music. Dance experience is not a requirement for the workshop, which costs $40.

    The Hampton Theatre Company, which has been bringing drama to the people since the mid-’80s, opened its 2013-14 season last week with Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities,” a meaty choice and hopefully the beginning of a winning season for the Quogue group.

    Mr. Baitz’s play, first performed at Lincoln Center in 2011 and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that year, is set on Christmas Eve 2004 at the Palm Springs home of Lyman and Polly Wyeth, a well-to-do Republican couple with connections in both Washington and Hollywood. Their children are visiting — Trip, a producer of a reality justice show starring old celebrities as jurors, and Brooke, who is returning for the first time in many years after a successful novel and a nervous breakdown. Also staying with the Wyeths is Silda, Polly’s sister, who is in early recovery (again) and just out of rehab.

    The lines are drawn early in the evening: The parents and children don’t see eye to eye politically. Silda is the “cool aunt,” still in touch with the Jewish heritage that Polly has packed away in favor of County Club beige, and Lyman, an actor turned ambassador, wants to avoid any unpleasantness and keep the peace between his wife and daughter.

    But peace will not be kept when Brooke brings several copies of her soon-to-be-published new book, which dredges up a deep and dark event from the family’s past — the terrorist actions and suicide of Lyman’s oldest son.

    To say more would give too much away. This play is about the slow reveals. Although there is much talk of judging and fairness, Mr. Baitz shows how hard it is to adjudicate a verdict when family is involved.

    The set, designed by Sean Marbury, is a loving tableau to desert design, complete with big stone fireplace, a wall of autographed pictures from Nancy and Ronnie and John Wayne, and windows showing the rocky and arid Coachella Valley beyond. It was gratifying to see Mr. Marbury pick up and wear the cloak left by his father, the brilliant designer Peter Marbury, with such grace and style.

    Diana Marbury, artistic director of H.T.C., offers a wonderful performance as Polly Wyeth, a woman comfortable in her habitat and easy to dismiss as a WASP, but with layers of both coolness and warmth underneath, and a need to protect her standing at any cost. “You can die from too much sensitivity in this world,” she says, a phrase with a meaning that warps as the evening progresses.

    Craig Braun as Lyman Wyeth gives a solid performance as the king of all he surveys, and why not? It’s December of 2004, Dubya’s in charge for another four years, and all is right in his world. But Mr. Braun brings layers of depth to Wyeth as well, especially toward the end of the evening.

    Vay David adds levity as Aunt Silda, a woman with dark secrets of her own, and Ian Bell offers bright spots as the youngest wise-cracking son in a dysfunctional family. But it is Morgan Vaughan as Brooke who steals the spotlight. Her heartbreaking portrayal of a woman on the verge — of losing her mind, of publishing another book, of telling her family what she really thinks of them — is brought to a head in the second act, and Ms. Vaughan’s performance is heartfelt and real every step of the way.

    Sarah Hunnewell directs this able ensemble with a deft touch. There is some awkward blocking in the beginning, but it sort of works with a family that feels awkward around each other anyway. And the message — that the truth shall set you free, no matter what that truth is — rings out loud and clear in Ms. Hunnewell’s production.

    Hampton Theatre Company’s “Other Desert Cities” runs through Nov. 10 at the Quogue Community Hall.

    Autumn seems to be film festival season on the South Fork. This weekend, the World Peace Initiative Hamptons debuts at Guild Hall. As a satellite of Artisan Festival International, its mission is to promote peace and cultural diversity by showcasing both the work of artists and over 25 films from around the globe. The community has been invited to attend along with international guests including environmental engineers, diplomats for peace, filmmakers, fine artists, and fashion designers.

     “We are an initiative, not just a ‘film festival’ or a ‘fine arts festival,’ ” the festival’s founder and executive director, Princess Angelique Monet, said in a release. “Promoting and expressing peace through select art forms provides a unique and entertaining platform that allows our guests the opportunity to form their own opinions based on the information being presented.”

    The program begins with an opening night Halloween masquerade character ball tomorrow from 8 to 11 p.m. The party will benefit the Children and the Arts Program and children will be welcomed with adults. Tickets cost $20 per person and can be purchased online at afiworldpeaceinitiative.org.

    Screenings and programs run from 10 a.m. until 10:15 p.m. on Saturday and from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Sunday.

    The cinema segment, supported in part by a grant from the Suffolk County Office of Film and Cultural Affairs, includes several highlighted selections with accompanying special programs.

    “Forget Us Not” by Heather E. Connell documents the fate of more than 5 million non-Jews targeted by Hitler, focusing on several “lesser-known voices” including a disabled man, a Roma girl, and a Ukrainian child. The director will attend a panel discussion.

    “Lesson of Hayti” by Terry Boyd, Edward Harris Jr., and Byron Hunter examines “the unique history of black self-sufficiency and political power in the United States from its origins” following the Emancipation Proclamation, told by prominent historians and scholars. A discussion with Mr. Hunter and the film’s narrator, Dougie Doug, an actor and comedian, will follow.

    “Chasing Shakespeare,” starring Danny Glover and Graham Greene, is a love story by Leonardo Santana surrounding a mystical Arkansas Native American family. The screening celebrates National American Indian Heritage Month and there will be a performance at the festival by the InterTribal Dancers. “Egypt Through the Glass Shop” shines a spotlight on the Middle East when a hip-hop producer turned filmmaker travels to Egypt and delivers a “powerful first-hand account of the Egyptian Revolution.”

    “Look Up! The Sky Is Falling” is, according to the festival, a new genre of documentary that “integrates a mobile app component.” Addressing what festival organizers “believe is the single most important and terrifying environmental issue that the planet faces today — geoengineering and chemtrails,” the film shows how George Barnes, the filmmaker and Telly Award-winning director, makes a “terrifying discovery” while testing time-lapse camera equipment, then playing the footage backwards. He discovers the use of aircraft to spray the sky with toxic particles, “with the intention of blocking the sun and forcing climate change while creating unknown consequences.” Also discussed in the film is aluminum and its relationship to “aluminum-related diseases such as autism and Alzheimer’s.” It introduces a “revolutionary new app” that allows for instantaneous viewer activism. There will be a panel discussion with environmental experts and the director following the screening.

    Tickets for individual programs are $15, $12 for senior citizens, and $10 for children under 15. A day pass is $35 or $30 for senior citizens. They are available at afiworldpeaceinitiative.org.

    A search, via its Web site, of the John Jermain Memorial Library’s catalog will yield a wealth of media, from literature to periodicals to DVDs.

    A search of the Sag Harbor library’s Web site will also reveal a collection, now numbering approximately 100, of CDs produced by local artists. Recently added titles include “Go West” by Inda Eaton, “Time Bomb Love” by the Glazzies, “Smoke and Mirrors” by Joe Delia and Thieves, and a CD compilation of live recordings of the Thursday Night Live Band from the weekly jam sessions at Bay Burger, also in Sag Harbor.

    The collection, said Eric Cohen, the library’s coordinator of technology and media, was conceived last year after he had returned from a biannual conference for public libraries. “I went to a presentation on idiosyncratic local collections,” he said. “The people doing it were really talking about a collection of zines” — the small-circulation, self-published magazines that flourished in the pre-World Wide Web era — “but then they mentioned, at the end, that they were also starting a local music collection.”

    A thriving, year-round community of musicians on the South Fork allowed the creation of a local collection, Mr. Cohen said. Last year, shortly before Sag Harbor’s Great American Music Festival, he proposed the idea to Catherine Creedon, the library’s director, who, he said, was “very enthusiastic.” Kelly Connaughton, the festival’s organizer, was similarly enthusiastic, and connected Mr. Cohen with some participating local artists. “I was able to get them to donate albums,” he said. “It took off from there.”

    Mr. Cohen reached out to the music community by contacting local media, including The Star and radio stations, and posted an appeal for donated CDs on the library’s Web site, newsletter, and Facebook page. “And when I go to music events — I attended this year’s festival again — I ask for albums,” he said, “if I can get near artists.” To date, he said, no one has declined to donate work.

    The collection, which represents some 60 artists, includes both the celebrated and the lesser known, united only by their residency. That means that local favorites including Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks, Ms. Eaton, Michael Weiskopf, InCircles, Caroline Doctorow, Mr. No-Shame, and the HooDoo Loungers are alongside Judy Carmichael, the renowned stride pianist, who lives in Sag Harbor, and another well-known pianist and vocalist, Billy Joel.

    With its collection, the library has assumed a role as a nexus for local music in the way that Crossroads Music and the Stephen Talkhouse, both in Amagansett, provide the community with musical-instrument sales and instruction and a live-performance venue. Another common denominator is MonkMusic Studios in East Hampton, the recording and mixing studio owned and operated by Cynthia Daniels, a Grammy Award-winning producer and engineer. Many of the titles represented in the library’s collection were produced at Ms. Daniels’s studio.

    “It was an honor to be asked to contribute to the collection as a member of the local music community,” Ms. Eaton wrote in an e-mail. It was after an appearance at the Great American Music Festival, she said, that she was asked to submit a copy of “Go West,” her latest release. “Go West,” she wrote, is “an Americana roots rock-style album and features appearances by some of my East End favorites: Lee Lawler [of the band MamaLee Rose and Friends], Nancy Atlas, and Caroline Doctorow.” The album was recorded by Ms. Daniels at MonkMusic Studios.

    “We are proud to be included in the local music collection,” Mr. Casey, a former Sag Harbor resident who now lives on the North Fork, wrote in an e-mail. In establishing the collection, Mr. Cohen had contacted him seeking his recordings. “We were more than happy to contribute. We have a lot of fans and friends in Sag Harbor who might not come across our recorded original music otherwise,” Mr. Casey wrote. “For 20 years I was a Sag Harbor resident and frequent visitor to the library, so it is especially nice to ‘leave something behind,’ so to speak, for others to (I hope) enjoy.”

    “Like the community at large, our local music community is generous beyond words,” Ms. Eaton wrote. “To be included in this collection is a tremendous honor.”

    Mr. Cohen initially hoped to implement an audio-streaming function by way of the library’s Web site so that patrons could listen to the collection remotely, but it has proven challenging on multiple fronts. “It’s challenging my technical skills,” he said, and “in order to make it to legal, we have to have an agreement with artists,” as well as a means to authenticate that listeners are patrons of the library. Most artists, he believes, would not be in favor of allowing their work to be freely downloaded. The library’s officials, he said, are considering paying artists an honorarium for online performance of their work, but that remains under discussion.

    Until such a function is implemented, listeners can obtain a sizable and still-growing collection in a physical format by visiting the library. Since contributing his music, Mr. Casey wrote, “several fans have mentioned they discovered one of our songs on local radio and were able to find it at the Jermain library. Perfect!”

From East Hampton to Paris

    East Hampton will be represented at Paris Photo 2013, an art fair held at the Grand Palais from next Thursday to Nov. 17 that hosts 136 galleries and 28 publishers specializing in photography books. Harper’s Books will be exhibiting for its ninth year, bringing more than 30 books and photo albums, including several albums from the Vietnam War, as well as a deluxe edition of its own publication, “Yea Yea Yea” by Stuart Sutcliffe and Richard Prince.

    Also heading to the City of Lights is Mary Ellen Bartley, a photographer from Wainscott who will be exhibiting some of her “Paperbacks” series with the Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Group Show at Drawing Room

    The Drawing Room in East Hampton is hosting a group exhibition of works by Stephen Antonakos, Alice Aycock, Mary Ellen Bartley, Sue Heatley, Costantino Nivola, and Toni Ross from tomorrow through Jan. 13.

    Mr. Antonakos is represented by works on paper from the “Cuts” series, in which he sliced through large sheets of paper to literally break the picture plane. Ms. Aycock is showing drawings from her 1998 series “Project for a Fountain,” executed in blue ink on cream-colored paper. New photographs from Ms. Bartley’s “Sea Change” series offer a modulated view of the beauty of the Atlantic Ocean.

    Ms. Heatley’s relief prints, hand-printed on Japanese Sekishu paper, juxtapose abstractions derived from nature. Costantino Nivola is represented by late sculptures executed in tin, in which he cut through the metal as if sketching with tin snips. Ms. Ross’s new stoneware pieces were inspired by the “soul houses” she saw in museums on a recent trip to Egypt. A reception will take place Saturday afternoon from 3 to 5.

Paint It Black

    The Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill will be painted black for “In Stereo,” a show of work by Peter Sabbeth and Ross Watts that will open tomorrow and remain on view through Dec. 8.

    Mr. Sabbeth’s paintings are a kind of elegy for handwriting, which he feels is facing obsolescence, along with other cultural artifacts such as home telephones. Mr. Watts creates minimal, conceptual paintings, sculptures, and installations. His wall sculptures are composed of hundreds of strips of paper, torn or cut by hand and held to the wall by compression. Both Mr. Sabbeth and Mr. Watts live in Sag Harbor. An opening reception will be held Saturday from 5:30 to 8 p.m.

Jim Gemake at Peter Marcelle

    A solo exhibition by Jim Gemake, a mixed-media artist, opens Saturday at the Peter Marcelle Gallery in Bridgehampton and will remain on view through Nov. 30. Mr. Gemake uses found or discarded objects that he assembles into new configurations.

    “There is a sense of salvation, of bringing these objects to a new life and with a new meaning,” according to Mr. Gemake. An opening reception will take place Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Retreat Juried Show in Sag

    The Retreat’s 5th Annual Juried Art Show will open at Richard J. Demato Fine Arts in Sag Harbor with a reception Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. and remain on view through Nov. 20. The competition, proceeds from which benefit the Retreat, a domestic violence shelter in East Hampton, received more than 200 submissions from across the United States and abroad.

    Sara Nightingale, owner of the eponymous gallery in Water Mill, and Scott Sandell, visual arts director at Stony Brook Southampton, selected the top 25 entries for the exhibition. Three of the selections will earn the “best in show” designation and a separate exhibition at the gallery in 2014.

“Land and Sea” at Ashawagh

    “Land and Sea” is the theme of this weekend’s exhibition at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, which features work by Lew Zacks, Anne Sager, Stephanie Reit, Lynn Martell, and Mary Stern Grossman.

    Mr. Zacks’s paintings focus on the changing landscape of eastern Long Island. The abstract qualities of architecture and nature are the focus of Ms. Sager’s photographs. Ms. Reit’s paintings and mixed-media works also treat the disappearing farms and landscape of the East End. Ms. Martell uses a wide color palette to highlight the luminescence of the local landscape. Elements of geometry are used as building blocks in the landscape paintings of Ms. Stern Grossman.

    The gallery is open Saturday from noon to 8 p.m., with a reception from 5 to 8, and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.

    Guild Hall will open two exhibitions this week to inaugurate the museum’s fall season, each lively and provocative in its own way. In one gallery, Thomas Moran’s stylistic legacy and his preoccupation with European art movements will be examined in “Tracing Moran’s Romanticism and Symbolism.” In the other, Christa Maiwald will offer “Short Stories and Other Embroideries.” Ms. Maiwald was the winner of the 2011 members exhibition.

    The Moran exhibition was organized by Phyllis Braff to draw attention to the museum’s acquisitions both recent and longstanding and an extended loan by one collector. The show also features some other significant loans, including an 1884 painting from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

    Phyllis Braff, the curator and a co-editor of the Moran catalogue raisonne, organized the show with an eye to putting the artist within the greater context of what was happening in both America and Europe at the time he was painting.

    “He was addicted to America in his content, but used the stylistic tradition of European masters, using glazes, under-painting, and charcoal undertones” to express himself, she said last week. “He was never a plein air painter.”

    Indeed the stories that emanate from the Studio, his residence and working space on Main Street overlooking Town Pond, center on him taking sketches he made out West and translating them to canvas. “He used sketches as references and changed and adapted the views selectively,” co-opting landscape traditions established over centuries by Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and J.M.W. Turner, Ms. Braff said.

    While not a strict Romanticist and certainly working years apart from them, he shared some of the same sensibilities in his earlier works, such as “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” from 1859, which cribs from the poet Robert Browning cribbing from Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” In 1862 he revisited a Turner subject taken from Homer’s “Odyssey” in “Ulysses Deriding Polythemus.”

    In the same vein, he was not a member of the more modern “Symbolist” movement in art, but rather used symbolism the way old masters would. In 1864’s “Nutting, Autumn,” viewers will see a family gathering nuts, which he painted for the Philadelphia Sanitary Fair, a fund-raiser for the wounded from the Civil War. The peaceful scene sent the message that “soon all of the horrors of the war would be over, and families can get back to doing such activities together,” Ms. Braff said, adding that Abraham Lincoln visited the exhibition.

    The National Gallery painting from 1884, “The Much Resounding Sea,” has East Hampton’s Main Beach and Homer’s “Iliad” as inspiration. Homer seems to be an enduring inspiration. Ms. Braff said Moran was much attached to his earlier “Ulysses” painting, and it hung over the mantel at his East Hampton studio from the time he built the house until his daughter Ruth Moran died and the house was sold. This is also the painting on extended loan to the museum from Ian Cumming of East Hampton.

    In quite a different fashion, Ms. Maiwald’s recent embroideries tackle the zeitgeist with the famous and infamous stitched on seat cushions, lampshades, pillows, and pinafores. Each unit of a piece focuses on one person or subject, or at the most two. Yet each piece gains its potency and heft from the assemblage of those multiples set out in installations such as “Servitude,” representing famous tyrannical bosses such as Gordon Ramsey and actual tyrants such as Imelda Marcos as needlework portraits on miniaturized maids’ uniforms mounted over lamps.

    In “Musical Chairs: Economic Crisis in G Minor” from 2009, various bad actors and regulators from the financial meltdown of 2007-8 are depicted in brightly colored seat cushions, the musical chairs theme and installation implying the fluidity with which some of these figures moved from the industry that created the problems into the regulatory arena that was charged with solving them.

    “Garden Party” from 2007 is another lamp installation with found children’s dresses serving as the support for images of dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il. On an apparently lighter note but with darker undertones in the context of the Bush presidency, are the portraits of comedians from “Laughing Stock” featuring Jim Carrey, Whoopi Goldberg, and David Letterman to name a few. Her work from this year has taken on broader themes. One series features famous artists and their creations and another, “Plant Therapy,” conflates gardening with mental health issues and disorders.

    Ms. Maiwald, who lives in Springs, has been using the fiber-based medium since 2000, choosing it for its portability as well as the inherent tension that arises when edgy subject matter meets homespun charm. She has also worked in sculpture, film, photography, and installation art. She continues to work in video art as well. Guild Hall will present a gallery talk with her on Nov. 17 from 2 to 3 p.m.

    An opening reception for both shows will take place on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. They will remain on view through Jan. 5.

    Artists’ books have taken many forms. The ’70s were a sort of golden age, when boundaries between mediums had dissolved and so many artists were creating books and other ephemera that Martha Wilson founded Franklin Furnace in Tribeca as a repository for such work. In 1993, the Museum of Modern Art purchased the Furnace’s collection, which had become the largest of its kind in the United States.

    These thoughts come to mind when visiting the artist Barry McCallion’s house in Springs, where he creates his astonishingly beautiful and utterly unique books, an artistic treasure trove in an unexpected spot. Situated on Flaggy Hole Road, literally a stone’s throw from Maidstone Beach, it has been the full-time residence of Mr. McCallion and his wife, Joanne Canary, since 2000. It is the same house — though much changed — that his parents rented from 1943 until the early ’50s.

    Before showing a visitor his own work, Mr. McCallion brought out Riva Castleman’s “A Century of Artists Books,” which traces the development of the form from the late-19th century. “What this does nicely is to show the entire range,” Mr. McCallion explained. “At first, illustrations were subordinate to text, then there was a gradual transition to a point where text and image had equal weight, and eventually artists began creating textless books.”

    Born in the Bronx, Mr. McCallion’s first involvement with books was as an English literature major at Columbia. After graduating, he moved to the West Coast, earning an M.F.A. at Claremont Graduate University. It was there he become involved with Fluxus, an international network of artists, composers, and designers noted for blending different artistic mediums and disciplines in the ’60s and ’70s. Among the dozens of artists associated with Fluxus were Joseph Beuys, John Kale, Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, and Carolee Schneemann.

    Recalling his introduction to the group, Mr. McCallion said, “When I was in California I was doing conceptual pieces. John Cage’s ‘Silence’ was very important to me. So I wrote to him. I said, ‘Here I am, all of 24, doing work nobody else is doing out here.’ ” After a pause, he added with a laugh, “I didn’t yet know Ed Ruscha’s work.” It was John Cage who told the artist that Dick Higgins, a composer and poet, and other members of Fluxus, were coming to California.

    “There was suddenly an impactful group that arrived on the West Coast,” Mr. McCallion said. “Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams, and George Brecht were all important to me.” Mr. McCallion traveled in England with members of Fluxus for a year, then returned by boat, docking in Montreal. From there he settled on a farm just across the Canadian border. “I realize now we should have driven farther south. Living off the land wasn’t fun,” he said. “At least not for me.”

    A grant from the Berlin Artist Program (DADD) took him in 1975 to Berlin, where he stayed for four years and met his wife, who was teaching at the John F. Kennedy School there. This was followed by a two-year grant from the Gardilanne-Moffat Foundation that provided him with a studio in Paris. He returned in 1981 to the United States, where he worked for two years managing a photo-retouching studio. In 1983 he was awarded a two-month artist residency from the Australian Arts Council, followed by a month in New Zealand, courtesy of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council. “I like to say I ran out of countries that were willing to support me at that point.”

    His involvement with books began in the early ’70s, when he created a character he calls the oarsman, “which came in part from my literature background and my having read the ‘Odyssey’ far too many times.” The oarsman would travel from place to place and experience different things. Mr. McCallion created a series of collages at first, then provisioned the boat with two and three-dimensional pieces, including food and books. “The oarsman’s library was the first series of visual books I made. In all, I did around 35.”

    By the late ’90s, he stopped the series because it was losing its mystery for him. “As O’Neill said, ‘the kick had gone out of the booze,’ ” he said, laughing. An avid surfcaster, Mr. McCallion then wrote several short stories about fishing, which, to his surprise, he sold to a high-end, glossy fishing magazine. He followed that with two unpublished novels, written over a 10-year period. “I proved it was just as hard to get something published as it was to get something exhibited.”

    In January 2011 he started the second oarsman’s library, in which sometimes the character appears, sometimes the boat, sometimes neither. Before long, he showed the books, which were purely visual, to Priscilla Juvelis, a rare-book dealer in Kennebunkport, Me., who agreed to represent him. She suggested he put text in some of the books. “I said if I did add text, I would do Joseph Conrad’s ‘Typhoon.’ I had such a good time I did five versions of ‘Typhoon,’ as well as several involving the character Kurtz from ‘Heart of Darkness.’ Using text let me revisit books I loved.”

    Mr. McCallion’s books use an impressive range of materials and techniques. In one, he drew with white ink on a volume of black pages. In another, the center of each page has been replaced with a square of clear plastic, so that you see not just the drawing on the page in front of you, but also the drawings behind it. Mr. McCallion does a lot of cutting. In “Typhoon,” for example, he created three-dimensional dioramas of a stormy sea framed by fragments of text. In “Heart of Darkness” he adds to pasted bits of text his own hand-written version of the same fragments.

    Other books include Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” and “Gold Mountain,” inspired my Maxine Hong Kingston’s characterization of the way immigrants imagine the U.S. Another volume, “Interiors,” consists of collages, for which he found a paper with a sticky underside — the principle of contact paper — that allows him to make collages without glue.

    It’s difficult to do justice to the variety and complexity of the books in words or in photographs. They are ideally experienced by hefting and opening the boxes and exploring the contents in what becomes a very personal exploration of an artwork. In September, the Amagansett Library offered a hands-on book-share of more than 30 of Mr. McCallion’s books. Five are on display in a vitrine in the library.

    “A book is wonderful because you can spin out so many ideas,” Mr. McCallion said. A tour of his library of handmade books reveals that remark to be an understatement.