New Orleans native Heidi Pitre’s exhibition A Permanent Record is an ongoing series of illustrations on vintage library catalogue cards. A library in Navasota, Texas, offered her the checkout cards still in their books. She gathered them and began creating visual representations — directly on the cards — of elements in the title or text.

Aslan’s thick lion’s mane flares out over most of the card marked “Lewis, C.S. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” just beneath the pencil-scrawled names of Joey and Debbie, long-ago readers of that specific volume. The card for Stephen King’s The Shining features a vintage typewriter beneath a series of checkout stamps from 1986. Other cards date back to 1927 and feature portraits of authors like Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Abraham Lincoln.

This merging of art and literature, nostalgia and history, recycling and repurposing, invites the audience to engage with the artwork in a personal and imaginative way. The project also intends to foster conversations about reading across generations and, hopefully, to spark interest in older titles among new readers.