Your Sheep Are All Counted: A Roadside Archaeology of South of the Border Billboards

Review "Hailing from the Midwest, my family's highway adventures never led us to the kitschy delights of South of the Border—or more disappointingly, past the iconic East Coast landmark's limitless series of even quirkier billboards. Fortunately, P.J. Capelotti's impressively researched book vividly captures the seven decades-long (and still going!) experience in all its charming, disarming and unapologetically idiosyncratic glory. Your Sheep Are Counted is a rousing road trip back through time—serving up a fresh laugh, fond memory or clever surprise around every bend." -Rich Ratay, author of Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip"How many people (like me!) saw South of the Border billboards and didn't get to stop there, but never forgot them? P.J. Capelotti tells their strange and charming backstory in Your Sheep Are All Counted. It's everything you never realized you needed to know about an enduring part of roadside Americana." —Andrea Pitzer, author of Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World Product Description The highway billboard: a beacon promising food and fun to generations of road-weary families. For East Coast road-trippers, the most eye-catching and memorable of these advertisements belong to South of the Border and its mischievous mascot, Pedro. With clever puns, “Pedro-speak,” and a menagerie of animals and pop-culture references, South of the Border captures travelers’ imaginations and has them counting down the miles until they reach this roadside oasis. In Your Sheep Are All Counted, P.J. Capelotti chronicles the growth of South of the Border from tiny beer stand to a destination in itself, complete with shopping, food, motels, games, fireworks, gambling, and more. Along the way, Capelotti dives into a rich archive of billboards past and present, exploring the landscape of advertisements that has helped make South of the Border an American legend. Richard Ratay, author of Don’t Make Me Pull Over!, says, “P.J. Capelotti’s impressively researched book vividly captures the seven-decades-long (and still going!) experience in all its charming, disarming, and unapologetically idiosyncratic glory. Your Sheep Are All Counted is a rousing road trip back through time―serving up a fresh laugh, fond memory, or clever surprise around every bend.” 272 pages, hardcover, 11 x 8.5 inches, full color. From the Author South of the Border began in late 1949 as a small beer depot in Hamer, South Carolina, in response to a ban on alcohol sales in nearby Robeson County, North Carolina. In the decades since it has evolved into a remarkably enduring roadside attraction. It was originally sited alongside the two-lane highway that was, and in places still is, US-301. As segments of that highway, along with US-501, morphed into the four-lane Interstate 95 in the late 1960s and early 1970s, South of the Border grew alongside it, until it is now more than three times the size of Walt Disney's original Disneyland in Anaheim, California. It is perhaps the last great Eastern Seaboard survivor of the unique attractions that once lined America's roadsides.In this new book, we create a visual catalog of several hundred billboards from over a thousand surviving images located at South of the Border itself, along with images collected in the 1980s by University of Pennsylvania architecture scholar John Margolies,as well as the visual results of his own years of driving through the American South in his pickup.Highway billboards are notoriously difficult to pin down in time and space. We think of them as more or less permanent wayside navigation markers along our roads and byways, when in fact they appear, evolve, and vanish for a variety of reasons: changing advertising campaigns, increasingly harsh and unforgiving winds and weather, and the roads themselves being re-routed, widened, or straightened. For those of us who were young passengers on the drive between the Northeast and the S