Collage artist and painter Jim Harter was born in Lubbock, Texas, but has wandered the world in search of enlightenment and images. Harter is an “image archivist,” a self-defined profession which has produced fifteen major collections of engravings and rotogravures from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries for Dover and several other publishers. Harter has worked as a freelance illustrator for many magazines, book publishers, and newspapers, ranging from the Berkeley Barb to theNew York Times. Harter’s American Railroads of the Nineteenth Century was included by the “A List” as one of the exceptional books of 1998. His work has been cited in John and Joan Digby’s The Collage Handbook (Thames & Hudson, 1985), in Psychology Today, and elsewhere. His most recent collection of his collages is Initiations in the Abyss: A Surrealist Apocalypse (Wings Press, 2002). The illustrations inAlms for Oblivion are collaborations between Harter and the author.