Sybil's Garage

The scarecrow on the cover of issue six is a real scarecrow photographed in a pumpkin field in New Paltz, New York. The subway station in the background is the Brooklyn-based G-train India Street (Greenpoint Avenue) station, symbolizing the move of Senses Five Press from Hoboken, New Jersey to Greenpoint, New York.

The intertextual "handwritten" notes in the margins of issue six reference work by Gary Numan and Tubway Army on their album Replicas.

The remote control on the cover of issue five is the remote that editor Matthew Kressel still uses for his television. The tentacle and the mushroom were created with the 3D modeling software Poser. The woman on the TV is associate editor Alaya Dawn Johnson's sister, Lauren, singing at a karaoke bar in Manhattan. This image was originally intended for the cover. In addition, the cover would feature a miniature galaxy floating in mid-air, spewing out the authors names in a spiral. Ultimately, however, the aspect ratio and contrast made the image unsuitable as the primary image.

Randomly sprinkled throughout issue five are quotes from the 1983 concept album "Dazzle Ships" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD). Many of the quotes are from the tracks "Genetic Engineering" and "ABC Auto Industry." The time 9:16 above the table of contents refers to the last stated time in the track "Time Zones," where recorded voices speak the exact time in multiple languages. The bar code under the quotes on page 71 is the same bar code on the back of the issue.

"Sybil's Garage" appears translated into several languages throughout issue number four. The red characters painted on the side of the building on the cover say "Sybil's Garage" in Japanese. A close phonetic approximation is "SHI-BO-RU NO GA-RA-JE." Other languages that appear throughout the issue are Russian, Greek, German, Korean, Hawaiian, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic and Italian.

The cover photograph for issue four was taken in Hoboken, NJ. The plant leaning out the window is a ten-year-old spider plant still living in Matthew Kressel's apartment. The leaping fish is a marlin, and the planet in the background is Jupiter. The empty store in the photograph is now occupied by a company that sells "joke" shirts. The leaping marlin was inspired by the Hoboken fish store, Joseph Apicella & Sons, which had a huge metal sign in front of their shop of a leaping marlin. Due to lack of customers, the fish specialty store closed in Spring of 2007.

On the acknowledgments page of issue four is a vertical strip of text that begins, "You should. You should quit..." The quote is from the Richard Linklater film Slacker where an anonymous man walks into a coffee shop and is admonished by a psychotic stranger sipping coffee.

In issue No. 3, on the page after the table of contents and also page 70, a silhouetted man and woman play chess. The quotes above their heads reiterate the last two moves of the famous immortal game of 1851 between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky. The game was honored in the movie Blade Runner, and the quotes in Sybil's Garage are taken verbatim from the film, reiterating one of the aesthetics of Sybil's Garage, the merger of the old and the new (a strong theme in the film as well). In Sybil's Garage, the woman wins the game.

The cover image for issue No. 3 was modified from an actual photo of Devin J. Poore's grandfather's garage in Columbus, Indiana. The original photo can be seen on page 69 of issue No. 3. In early 2006, at a party, writer Mercurio D. Rivera attempted to call the phone number on the door of the pick-up truck. The phone rang, but no one answered.

The rusty, shanty-looking photo on page 10 of issue No. 3 is actually the rear of the Hoboken Ferry Terminal, which according to the NY Waterway's website transports over 24,000 passengers daily.

On the cover of issue No. 2, small print reads "Sounds of odd literature with sounds," which is a paraphrase of text on the Man or Astro-Man? album, Project Infinity, which reads, "Sounds of man in space with sounds." The mandolins on the cover of issue No. 2 were taken from an image in a Sears Roebuck catalog circa 1910. At the top of the table of contents for the same issue is musical notation of a Bach composition adapted for the mandolin.

Matthew Kressel drew the shoelace on the top of page 3 of issue No. 2. Many of the images in that issue were taken from a hand-made, autographed book of engravings entitled Prelude to a Million Years by Lynd Ward, copy 102 of 920, generously donated by David Crane.