John Del Bagno is a poet and an artist. As a long-time practitioner and teacher of a Buddhist discipline most people have never heard of, he saw a need for a book of meditations that would benefit the people he encounters in his day job as a caregiver. The author’s clear vision of what he wanted from the design made this an economical project overall. The biggest challenge was scanning the largest of the linocut prints, which are larger than my scanner.
Pliny’s Reflections
Leonard Shapiro is a retired attorney who keeps himself out of trouble by publishing a blog. Roughly once a year, his wife does an editing pass and assembles the posts chronologically into a little gift book for relatives and friends. A good friend of theirs is a gifted photographer of flowers and plants, so my biggest challenge is picking which of her glorious photos to use as the cover. This is a joyous project to work on whenever it comes in, and by taking a minimalist approach, we keep the overall cost within reason.
Medicine’s Michelangelo
Frank Netter is a name familiar to anyone now living who ever studied medicine. His medical illustrations are still in print. His daughter’s richly remembered biography was published in hardcover by a university press and was well received, but the author retained the rights to the softcover edition. She updated the text and added more color plates. The design challenge was to manage digital printing of a low volume of books with a substantial number of color pages and keep the cost within bounds so the book can be sold at a profit.
Nothing But Voice
A fun book for a fun client. We kept the musical motif going, integrating it with both the text (it has a “Prelude” instead of a “Preface”) and the design. The author has made hundreds if not thousands of friends in the course of a long career that began with a random invitation from a friend. The book is not just about singing, though. It’s also about learning leadership skills in a networked world of voluntary nonprofits—lessons that can be valuable in many contexts. So the design brief was to be musicky but not too musicky.
In Search of Barnabas Horton
Using twenty-first-century software to create an idealized simulation of seventeenth-century typography helps to immerse the reader in the subject’s life and evoke the period when he lived. This project presented a lot of enjoyable challenges: genealogical diagrams; complex tabular matter; hundreds of endnotes and footnotes; different typesetting styles for historical quotations than for narrative text; map work; image enhancement; five appendices; and even a bit of photography.
Measure Twice, Cut Once
With more than 350 photos and more than 175,000 words of text in a 440-page book, this project had a lot of moving parts, including a 20″ × 30″ family tree folded into a pocket inside the back cover. It all came together in the end to make a beautiful heirloom for the client’s family and friends.