About

Crap Hound is a clip art zine made by Sean Tejaratchi. The first issue came out in Portland, Oregon, in October 1994.

Apart from a short introduction and the credits at the back, it's all pictures: thousands of black-and-white images cut from old catalogs, ads, rare books, medical textbooks, religious tracts and other paper ephemera, mostly printed between the 1920s and the 1960s.

Each issue has a theme, or a few of them that don't obviously go together: Clowns, Devils & Bait. Death, Phones & Scissors. Sex & Kitchen Gadgets.

Sean arranges the images into dense, careful page layouts where things that don't belong together end up side by side. The result is funny, a little unsettling, and hard to put down.

In the early 2000s, Chloe Eudaly of Portland's Reading Frenzy began reprinting the original issues, and in 2008 Church & State became the first new issue in nine years.

Later, buyolympia.com took over publishing Crap Hound. By 2018 every issue was back in print, reworked and expanded along the way: the first issue grew into Death, Phones & Scissors, and the second and third were combined into Sex & Kitchen Gadgets. Pat Castaldo explains how it all fits together in Crap Hound Reprints Explained.

In 2019 Feral House published The Crap Hound Big Book of Unhappiness: 544 pages and about 12,500 images of 20th-century pop culture's attempts to picture human misery.

In 2020, Sean decided to do away with issue numbers, realizing that 1) he had kept changing them and 2) people would ask for old issues by number even though they had merged into a new one. There's a whole blog post about it by Pat. The result is, every Crap Hound image from any old issue has become part of a new one.

As of 2026, Sean is still working on new issues.

See all the issues, or read what people have said about Crap Hound.