Although I call myself a book designer in the publishing world, at heart I am a book artist, as seen in my Isolation project, the printing of the original My Mighty Journey, and many other personal projects.
When artist and author Harriet Bart commissioned me to help her create her artist book, COVID: The Book of Days, I had to draw on all of my book-building and printing skills to craft a very special book that would meet her vision: letterpress, giclée, gold-leaf.
Creative Brief
Designing COVID: Book of Days was unlike any other project I’ve undertaken—technically demanding, creatively intense, and emotionally complex. Conceptual artist Harriet Bart is known for work that is both intimate and monumental, often rooted in memory, language, and ritual. Being recommended to her by a fellow artist and collaborating with her on this special edition was a distinct honor. But that didn’t make it easy.
Over a stretch of about fifty days in the spring of 2020, she created small daily artworks—inked lines, colored pencil textures, bits of collage—each one a reflection of the moment. There was no plan at first. Just ritual. From this emerged the idea of a “book of days.”
By 2021 when we first discussed the project, I thought I knew what I meant by my collaborative approach to book design with what I thought was a collaborative process. This project pushed me to expand that idea. Harriet’s vision evolved continually as we worked—a vision shaped by the need to revisit the still raw feelings of uncertainty during the early pandemic and, later, by the collective grief following the murder of George Floyd here in Minneapolis.
My role was to help this highly personal and abstract collection become something tangible—something that still felt true to the emotions behind its creation. As I often do, I began by trying to understand what the book wanted to become. We explored several forms: desk calendars, linear bindings, and unbound formats. Ultimately, we arrived at a boxed folio edition: a cloth-wrapped case containing individual folders, each made from gold-speckled paper and printed with excerpts from Emily Dickinson. This open, flexible structure supported Harriet’s intuitive process while offering a coherent visual rhythm.
Producing the Book
Translating the mixed-media originals into print was its own challenge. I scanned, separated, and cataloged each image, then developed a custom inkjet profile to match the continuous color areas on a suitable off-white letterpress stock (Rives BFK). Each sheet went through multiple stages: giclée printing, followed by multiple perfectly aligned passes on a Vandercook cylinder press for black and spot colors. The folio covers were blind-scored and printed with hand set in metal type.
Details
This also included added dimensional details, such as the reproduction of the clock faces, or the inclusion of actual papyrus—which I also letterpress printed—turning Harriet’s random COVID objects into reliably consistent production pieces. All black ink areas, from the text of the newspaper clippings, to Harriet’s handwriting in the prologue, to borders and frames were all printed in letterpress. Bright red elements (string, the cross, etc.) were also letterpress.
Tonal elements, such as the newspaper backgrounds, the burnt edges of the George Floyd card, the felt fabric, were all convincingly simulated with inkjet printing.
Then came the gold
Harriet’s aesthetic demanded not just the appearance of gold but the look and tonality of real gold. In retrospect, this fact should have been obvious, but not until after I experimented with every other conceivable approach to gold, from hot stamping gold foil to commercial metallic inks. I ultimately resigned myself to the need to apply gold leaf and formulated a sufficiently tacky letterpress ink to hold the gold leaf in precisely the correct shape and position. For each gold-marked page, I hand-pulled the impression in the Vandercook cylinder press, and immediately hand-applied the gold leaf—a delicate, painstaking process repeated for every individual print.
The box is part of the book
I also collaborated with book artist Jody Williams and Duncan Campbell at Campbell-Logan Bindery to design the presentation box. Its black cover includes a die-cut window that reveals the title sheet inside, requiring tight tolerances, precise alignment, and trimming during production.
Since the book is not bound, in the traditional sense, the box becomes an integral part of the book.
Reflections
From start to finish, the project spanned 19 months and over 430 hours of largely solitary work as the pandemic precautions wore on. And while the process wasn’t always smooth—and the outcome certainly not quite what I initially imagined—it was a deep and memorable journey. This book may not be Harriet’s most celebrated work. Still, it holds something powerful: a feeling of constraint, a rhythm of daily making, and the transformation of the world’s unrest into material form.
To be fair, this book and its process aren’t typical book projects. But the philosophy reflects the same values I bring to all my work: understanding what a book wants to become, shaping a form that supports the creator’s ideas, and turning complex or deeply personal material into something cohesive, expressive, and thoughtfully made.
