Book By Its Cover » The Exquisite Book: A Peek at the back cover!

If you missed the last post announcing our book coming out this Fall with Chronicle Books, you should probably read that first, right here.

The homepage image is a tiny detail from Jordin Isip’s page (left) connecting to Paul Hornschemeier’s page (right). I love how Paul continued Jordin’s string and flipped the background colors for his following page.

Last week we got to see a proof of our Exquisite Book. A proof is the closest version to your actual book as possible. It’s as if they just print one book. You make a proof so that you can have a final look at everything and make sure it’s exactly how you want. Usually this is past the point of changing any major edits because text plates have already been made. You use a proof to make final color adjustments and other production tweaks.

I mentioned before that our book has an extremely unique format. Thanks to Chronicle for working so hard to help us figure it out. When you first open the book, there are ten regular bound pages that hold our introduction, Dave Egger’s forward, and “Twenty Questions” with artists from the book. Then the next section is ten accordions that all fold out 12 pages long. These have all the artist’s connecting artwork on them plus an opener and closer done by us that connects each section the the next. The last section is ten or so more pages of artists’ biographies. If you followed the horizon line from the cover of the book, it connects through every page of the entire book- connecting all the way to the back cover- meaning it connects full circle with itself!

Here is a sneak peek of the back of the book (it’s a photo of our proof). Inside the mound, lists all of the artists who appear in the book, in order of their appearance. You may notice that we don’t have a bar code, price, summary, or any of that other info that you usually see on a back cover. This is because our book is getting shrink wrapped. Luckily, we are putting in a separate piece of paper inside the wrap with all that boring stuff. That meant we had free range to do almost whatever we wanted on the back of the book. We felt like this was a good place to show off the full list of amazing talent who have contributed.

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Stay tuned for more posts about our book in the coming weeks…