Recent (Adventure) Commissions
The work below represents commissions completed in the last six months. I only realized in the last week that they all have elements of a voyage, which is probably why I agreed to do them in the first place. The first is a screw-post photo album commissioned as a gift for a woman embarking on a Lord of the Rings Tour in New Zealand.
This book, meant to represent the front door of Bilbo (and later Frodo) Baggins’s residence, was quite the undertaking. Both the cover boards and each of the approximately 140 removable photo album pages are hand cut with a scalpel from museum board templates…no board shears or plough involved. The outside of the front cover is French Chagreen goatskin on multi-dimensional Davey board/museum board, the inside is comprised of two layers of pared goatskin onlays. All fittings are solid brass.
The second and third commissions are case bindings of existing paperback, perfect-bound texts. The volume pictured below is a cherished copy of Moby Dick, rebound as a gift to celebrate the survival of many years of teaching.
The book is bound in Harmatan goatskin with pared Harmatan onlays in an original design. I utilized the original covers to the book as paste-downs on the interior of the covers and employed hand-marbled paper as flyleaves.
The third commission is a special edition of a self-published travel journal detailing a woman’s adventures in New Zealand and Australia. It was ready just in time for her to embark on her next voyage, this time to the Caribbean.
Her original book covers, also utilized as paste-downs on the inside covers, featured a skyline of Sydney which I echoed in the design. The original cover design is comprised of pared, dyed and hand-cut Harmatan onlays.