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.
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.