Robert LeBlanc’s Gloryland takes as its subject a single worshipping community: the last Sign Following Pentecostal serpent-handling church in West Virginia, set deep in the Appalachian Mountains. Across 378 pages, the book follows a form of old mystic religious practice in America that the publisher describes as being on the verge of extinction. The photographs are LeBlanc’s; the collection is his documentary work, made within one congregation rather than a survey of many.

Setanta Books issued Gloryland in 2023 as a first edition, sized at 18.5 by 13 centimeters and bound as a PU textured leather hardcover, with an embossed front and back cover, black-and-white printing, oversewn binding on Bible replica paper, and a custom embossed box. That specification is not incidental to the subject. The scale, the leather, the paper, and the box together invoke the physical authority of a Bible while giving the photographs the status of a book object, so the reader meets the congregation through an artefact shaped like scripture.

Its significance lies in proximity and in what the subject represents. This is an intimate account of a small, often misunderstood practice, and the gallery presentation of the same work frames LeBlanc’s documentary photographs as a view into a uniquely American subculture. Because the church is described as the last of its kind, the book records a community at a moment when its continuation is uncertain.

For a collector, the strongest reason to attend to Gloryland is the conjunction of subject and form: a defined body of documentary work, sequenced at length, about a religious world rarely photographed from within, and published as a deliberately Bible-like object with a complete photography credit to LeBlanc. Signed copies are available on a dedicated bookplate tipped into the box, making the signed state a specified variant of this edition rather than an ambiguous extra.