Artist Sara Ybarra Lopez sits at her dining-room table, pasting four pictures into her new book, “Galatea: Heart of Port Townsend.”

It’s the final personal stamp she’s putting on each of 50 books that, despite promises of early delivery from her publisher, arrive just one day before her book signing scheduled for Gallery Walk on Dec. 6. The rest of the order is missing, but she has been assured it is on the way.

She has little time before the book signing, and the finished books stand up around her workspace as the paste dries, and then are stacked and given a final press to flatten them out.

The book project began years ago, when Sara’s husband, Mark Twain Stevenson, was the lead sculptor with David Eisenhour at Tom Jay’s Riverdog Fine Arts Foundry in Chimacum. Together, they recast Port Townsend’s most distinctive piece of public art, “Galatea.”

Also known as “Venus Rising from the Sea,” Galatea stands in the center of a pool of water, less poetically named the “Haller Fountain.” She’s diminutive, naked and bronze, at the foot of the Taylor and Washington Street stairs that connect downtown to Uptown.

Over the years, Galatea has been dressed, usually in the dead of night, in everything from a Santa Claus hat and a boa, to a red bra with red rose petals scattered into the pond at her feet. Her pond, over the years, has had trained trout swimming in it, and certainly spare change thrown into it, but most often, someone gets giddy with a bottle of detergent, and bubbles rise in mounds up over the edge of the fountain and into the street.

Sara, who is also a sculptor, began her study of Galatea to complete a Goddard Master of Fine Arts thesis. She says that as she researched, she “came to know her hometown in ways she never expected.”

“I began to see events line up side by side in a circular pathway and Galatea standing at the midpoint in a spiral of time,” she said.

GALATEA HAS SEEN IT ALL

If Sara had written a book about all those events spiraling around Galatea – the Roaring 20s, when the ladies hiked their skirts and cut their hair; men and women in uniform for two world wars, Korea and Vietnam; the big-finned cars driving up and down Water Street in the 1950s; the influx of so-called hippies in the 1970s; and later, retirees, and all through it, drunks staggering by (Port Townsend once had the highest alcohol sales of any town in Washington state), bicycle riders, climbing children (and later, circling on their skateboards), athletes training on the stairs, sidewalks installed, torn up and repoured, businesses opening and closing, street trees planted and cut down, Christmas trees put up and taken down, flower baskets filled with petunias and lobelia, hung up, watered, and taken down – it would be a big, unruly book full of noise.

Sara restrained herself from getting caught up in all of that fascinating minutiae, and wrote a concise story about just the statue. The cover is a beauty: a close-up of Galatea with a pink flower in her hair. She traces the statue’s origin to the J.L. Mott Iron Works foundry and finds others like her, many cast in the same cheap pot metal as she was in 1906.

After Galatea was removed in 1993 and recast in bronze, her original form lay in pieces, heaped behind the Jefferson County Museum of Art & History. Bill Tennent, on his first watch as the new museum director, gathered up the scraps and brought them inside to the part of the museum that was Port Townsend’s old firehall, where they’ve been reassembled into a sort of FrankenVenus. She’s worth a look, too.

Books can be ordered at

carapacearts.com, from the “links” page on the website; purchased from the Jefferson Museum of Art & History gift shop, 540 Water St.; at the new Port Townsend Fudge Co., 922 Washington; or at Home Staging, a pop-up store at 835 Water St.

(Jan Halliday’s reference to getting caught up in Port Townsend history brings to mind author Ivan Doig’s experience of nearly going blind while reading the thousands of words written in very small script by Port Townsend’s most prolific diarist, James Swan, for his book “Winter Brothers.”)