What the book becomes

On the last review before a book goes to print

I am doing the final layout review of In Light and Verse listening to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker pas de deux. A final layout review is one of the few moments when a designer experiences the whole book at once, and it is the last threshold before the book becomes a physical object. It is the last moment when decisions can still be questioned. During this kind of review I always work with instrumental music because it occupies the part of my brain that would otherwise drift, keeping me present for both the technical detail and the whole.

There comes a moment when the book stops feeling like a collection of files and starts behaving like a single object. Today I am moving through the opening spreads of each chapter, a full-bleed photograph paired with a single line of poetry that names what the chapter is about to become: The World Within, Fracture, Wilderness, Longing, Convergence. Each chapter begins with an image and a fragment, and together they establish a rhythm that carries through everything that follows.

In the chapter opening spreads above: Photographs by Micah E. Wood, Connie Imboden, Vivian Marie Doering, Joanna Tillman, and Kirby Griffin. Poetry by Lady Brion, Tracy Dimond, Renee Angle, Abdul Ali, and Ailish Hopper.

The book brings together 74 contributors across five chapters. Poetry was selected and sequenced by Chelsea Lemon Fetzer, photographs were chosen by Cara Ober, and my role as creative director followed, integrating both, ordering the images to respond to what the poems had already built, and making the conversation between word and image visible on the page. Much of the detailed page work happened in close collaboration with Laura Haffner, whose careful eye helped shape the book throughout the design process. None of it would have been possible without Lillian Jacobson, whose editorial work held the collaboration together from the start: the submission forms, the contributor communications, the captions, and contracts that brought 74 artists into the same book. The book is 240 pages, a limit set not by creative preference but by print costs and distribution economics. We had far more extraordinary work than the book could hold. Every spread represented work that survived dozens of difficult choices.

Looking at the photographs together for one final time, I realize that my relationship with Baltimore has also been built through attention. I came to Baltimore from Brazil and chose to make it home. I built my practice and my family here, and learned to see the city through the artists whose work has shaped many of the books I have designed. Here, in these photographs and poems, is what Baltimore looks like when its artists pay close attention to it.

A publication designer spends months becoming familiar with a book before readers ever see it. Over the past several months, I have lived with these pages, returning to them again and again as the relationships between photographs, poems, typography, and sequence slowly took shape. I know many of the contributors through their work long before knowing them as people, and there is something about that anticipation that feels like what a book is for. It creates the conditions for encounters that would not otherwise happen. Once the book leaves the studio, its life belongs to others: readers who recommend it to friends, teachers who bring it into their classrooms, booksellers who place it where someone unexpectedly discovers it. I look forward to meeting more of the contributors whose work has occupied my attention for so many months.

The designer’s role in the book chain is to make something people want to keep. What happens next belongs to everyone else.

In Light and Verse is now available for preorder. You can find it at bmoreart.com.

In Light and Verse
Published by BmoreArt

Editors: Cara Ober and Chelsea Lemon Fetzer
Book Design: Raquel Castedo Studio (Creative Director: Raquel Castedo; Designer: Laura Haffner)
Editorial Assistance: Lillian Jacobson
Gallery Coordinator: María Sánchez
Proofreading: Elizabeth Hazen, Lillian Jacobson, Rebecca Juliette, and María Sánchez
Contributors: Abdu Mongo Ali · Abdul Ali · Devin Allen · Renee Angle · Khadim Baluch · David Beaudouin · Shirley J. Brewer · Lady Brion · Kelvin Bulluck · Schaun Champion · Tracy Dimond · Anna Divinagracia · celeste doaks · Vivian Marie Doering · E. Doyle-Gillespie · Tafisha A. Edwards · Bill Gaskins · Audrey Gatewood · Joseph Mario Giordano · Kirby Griffin · Jalynn Harris · Curran Hatleberg · Elizabeth Hazen · Lindsay Stuart Hill · Ailish Hopper · Connie Imboden · Sherry Insley · Kei Ito · Tiffany D. Jones · NIA JUNE · Saskia Kahn · Kt Kanazawich · Persephone King · Kendra Kopelke · Sam “goopcat” Levin · Steven Leyva · Alejandro Lucero · Dora Malech · Kathy Mangan · Ben Marcin · Jacob Mayberry · Shae Mccoy · Gregory N. Mckay · Jonna Mckone · Mollye Miller · T. Mae Moll · Kyle Myles · Glenford Nuñez · Kyle Pompey · Jill Fannon Prevas · Lia Purpura · E. Brady Robinson · Anne Rong · Michael Salcman, M.d. · Anysa Saleh · Jake Saltzberg · Jane Satterfield · S. Shaw · Lynn Silverman · Josh Sinn · Elizabeth Spires · Bria Sterling-Wilson · Steph Sundermann-Zinger · Tramaine Suubi · Joanna Tillman · Paula Gately Tillman · Justin Tsucalas · Elena Volkova · Shan Wallace · Marceline White · Micah E. Wood · Cherrie Woods · Alec Zabrecky · Stephen Zerance

The invisible hands inside every book

A morning in Jackie Milad’s studio

Walking into Jackie Milad’s studio, I felt something close to luck. The collage tapestries covered the walls, large-scale works layered with Egyptian iconography, personal drawings, and that particular vibrant pink that runs through Jackie’s practice like a signature. Sixty handmade shabti sculptures, inspired by ancient Egyptian funerary figures, were arranged around the room, each one distinct. Vivian Doering, the photographer, was already set up and moving.

What struck me immediately was something Jackie describes in her own words: the shabtis seem to have walked right off the collage tapestries. In the studio, surrounded by both, I could feel that relationship. The small figures and the large surfaces were in conversation, already becoming the book.

That morning has stayed with me as one of the clearest examples I know of the book chain made visible in a single room.

I have written before about what book historians call the communication circuit of the book: the network of people and decisions that carries a text from an author’s mind to a reader’s hands. I often think of it more simply as the book chain. Most of those decisions happen months apart, in different places, among people who may never meet. What I witnessed in Jackie’s studio was unusual because part of that circuit briefly became visible all at once.

Jackie and I worked in what became a production line. We would decide which shabtis belonged together, sometimes by similarity of texture or scale, sometimes by contrast, depending on what each grouping needed. Each arrangement would go in front of a collage tapestry for Vivian to photograph, and then we would move to the next. The decisions were made in the room, with the objects in hand. Which shabti belonged next to which could not have been determined from a screen or planned in advance. It required the kind of knowledge that only emerges when people, objects, and ideas occupy the same space.

On the right-hand page, Jackie Milad holds sculptures from her Shabtis Gather series, photographed by Vivian Doering against one of her collage tapestries. Published in Shabtis Gather: Jackie Milad (BmoreArt, 2025), designed by Raquel Castedo Studio.

Jackie’s hands appear in some of the photographs. That was her instinct, not mine. She had spent time in museum study rooms, including the British Museum, the Petrie Museum, and the Walters Art Museum, holding ancient Egyptian shabtis with her bare hands. She had thought deeply about what it means to touch an object that someone made thousands of years ago, and what care is transmitted through that act. When her hands appear in the images, they carry all of that. They give scale to the shabtis, and they give the photographs something harder to name: the presence of the person who made these things and the quality of attention she brought to making them.

There is a line from those photographs back to those museum study rooms. There is another line forward to the reader who will eventually hold the book Shabtis Gather and feel, without quite knowing why, that this is an object worth keeping.

That is what the book chain does. It carries human presence from maker to reader through decisions that accumulate in a physical object. The designer’s role in that chain is not to arrive with answers already formed. It is to be present enough, in the room and in the relationship, to understand what the content needs to become.

I left Jackie’s studio that morning having learned more about her practice than any amount of time looking at her work on a screen would have taught me. That knowledge shaped every design decision that followed. Seeing the relationship between the collage tapestries and the shabtis firsthand changed how I thought about scale, sequencing, and pacing in the book. The collage works are visually dense and richly layered. If every page carried that same intensity, the reader would stop seeing it. I began introducing more space around certain photographs, giving the images room to breathe and allowing moments of focus between moments of visual complexity. The balance was delicate. Too much space would separate the works from one another; too little would flatten their differences. You cannot always see where that learning goes. But it is there, held inside the book.

***Shabtis Gather: Jackie Milad*** was released in September 2025. In ancient Egypt, shabtis were small funerary figures placed in tombs to accompany the dead into the afterlife. Milad reimagines this tradition through sculpture, collage, and drawing, creating contemporary shabtis that explore memory, migration, and fragmented heritage. The 200-page bilingual publication presents more than 150 images of Milad’s work alongside essays by Egyptologists Dr. Alice Stevenson, Dr. Fatma Ismail, and Heba Abd el-Gawad, in English and Arabic. Designed by Raquel Castedo Studio and published by the artist in partnership with BmoreArt, the book offers the most comprehensive presentation of Milad’s practice to date.

Three moments

1 At the paper sample table

There is nothing like visiting a printing plant and working through their paper samples by hand, running a finger across the surface, holding a sheet to the light to read its fiber, pressing two stocks together to feel the difference in weight and yield. I am deciding, in those moments, how ink will sit on this surface, whether it will be absorbed softly into uncoated paper or sit sharply on coated stock, and how that will affect every text block and every image in the book I am designing. What I learn in those moments comes entirely from physical contact with the material, and no screen can replicate it.

2 At the press

Checking press proofs, watching the machines run, talking to the printer about a color that needs adjusting on the press sheet. This is where the design is finalized in material terms, beyond what the screen shows. A color that looked right in proof behaves differently under the press, and the printer knows things I do not know yet. Those conversations are part of the work.

3 Holding the finished book

After being present at every step, paper selection, color proofing, binding decisions, finishing choices, receiving the finished book is a particular kind of reward and a particular kind of reveal. Throughout the entire process, I have been making decisions about things I cannot fully see until they are done. That gap between decision and result is where craft knowledge lives. I am drawing constantly on accumulated physical experience, using memory and imagination to see forward into a material reality that does not yet exist.
“I am constantly choosing processes and materials that we can only see once they are actually done. There is a lot of imagination that needs to be used, based on previous experience.”

On AI and the question of book craft

Books are already being made with AI assistance, and in some cases generated entirely by AI. I don’t find this, in itself, especially remarkable. AI can simulate the outputs of many people in the book chain — text, layout, image selection. It can produce something that looks like a book.

What it cannot do is accumulate the tactile knowledge that comes from years of physical presence in the production process. It has not stood at a paper sample table and felt the difference between two stocks with its hands. It has not had a conversation with a printer about a color that is pulling warm on the press. It has not held a finished book that it made decisions about six months earlier and felt the gap between what it imagined and what it holds.

That knowledge, sensory, embodied, accumulated through repetition, error, and presence, is what a skilled publication designer brings to the work. It is what makes a well-crafted book feel different from a generated one, even when a reader cannot name exactly why.

For designers at the beginning of their practice, this kind of knowledge is still available to be learned. It comes from being present where things are made, and allowing that experience to shape how you think and decide.

Benjamin knows this instinctively, at sixteen months. He holds the book in his hands and tests what it will do, learning in the most direct way possible what it means to encounter a designed object.

That stays with me every time I step into a production space.

What a toddler knows about books that AI doesn't

On craft, material knowledge, and the kind of imagination that only comes from touching things.

My son Benjamin is sixteen months old. He has a small collection of cardboard books, and watching him with them has taught me something familiar that I hadn’t named in a long time.

He tests the pages, folding the hard corners and bending the covers to find their limits. He chews on them, holds them upside down with complete confidence. When my husband and I read to him and do the voices, he lights up for the words and the pictures. But on his own, what interests him most is what the book allows him to do, how it resists and yields, how it opens and closes, what it weighs in his hands. He is, at sixteen months, a devoted student of materiality.

I find this thrilling, because it is one of my favorite things in the world too.

The matter of invention

In 1986, the Italian designer and theorist Ezio Manzini published The Material of Invention, arguing that materials are not neutral containers for ideas. They are constitutive of them. The substance you work with shapes what you can imagine and what you can make. Material is not packaging. Material is meaning.

Manzini was writing about design at an industrial scale. But the idea applies just as strongly to book design, and it has stayed with me since I first encountered it. A book is not a text delivered in a container. It is a designed object in which every material decision, from paper weight to ink density, binding method to typeface, is part of what the book says and how it feels to be read.

Ezio Manzini, La materia dell'invenzione (Milan: Arcadia / Progetto Cultura Montedison, 1986; English edition: The Material of Invention, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

This is, in theory, obvious to designers. In practice, it is increasingly rare knowledge, because experiencing it requires being physically present in the production process. And that presence is disappearing.

Some material decisions can only be understood by touch. This artist book is a companion to Post-Consumption Benediction, a two-person exhibit that featured Adam Stab and Jordan Tierney at BmoreArt’s Connect + Collect Gallery. Wooden cover fabricated at Open Works, Baltimore. Limited edition, 2023. Photo by Vivian Doering.