The Billy Chronicles consist of three original short stories: D.B. and the Double-Five, Lizard and Julio Go Nel-o, and The Colonel’s Chicanery. They were written by Craig Jobson (after a 35-year captivity in Texas), who recorded them on a CD; designed the cases; rendered the illustrations; couched the paper; hand set the type; and with some very fine help from Columbia College Chicago students Rhiannon Alpers and Matthew Bagshaw, letterpress printed each story, bound up and cased in all the components.

Each story relates the experiences of the once and future Texas State Domino Champion, Big Billy. As a sequential narrative, the stories are a close look at incidents in the life of a self-centered, boisterous and pretentious manager of a Street and Waste Water Department for a small Texas town during the 1970s. He is a profane and shrewd individual whose life has meaning only in the context of winning his favorite bid-style domino game, “42,” which forms the underlying theme for the three stories. All the stories are true, happening in Big Billy's mind exactly as he relates them.

The stories exist in three different forms: as text in three separate concertina books, as 15-35 minute performance pieces recorded on each story’s CD and in each of the three book’s eight illustrations. Each form of the story gives a different nuance to the narrative.

The tenor of the stories is satiric, tongue-in-cheek, encouraging light reading or casual listening. But the underlying content invites a second look at a person or event. Satire may diminish the person who is its object, but it can also be a mirror that shows us a side of ourselves that we might wish remained unknown. Behind the satirist and artist is a reformer who would like to see a better world, who believes progress is possible and change is essential. It is my intent to amuse. It is also my intent to say, as individuals, we can do better.

Each story is editioned to 15 numbered copies. They are hand printed in two colors on a Vandercook IV using handmade cotton and abaca paper. They are printed with 12 and 14 point hand set Clarendon and bound with book cloth and goat skin. Each case includes a CD of the performed story (with the slide guitar stylings of the Rev. Floyd - an officially ordained Texas minister), a set of liner notes, a 14-foot concertina book, and a set of tournament-quality dominoes.