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