‘Letters to My Dad’
2015
Role: Design, cartography, bookbinding
2015
Role: Design, cartography, bookbinding
In December 2014, my then 88-year-old grandmother finished her memoir, Letters to My Dad That I Never Wrote, a series of unwritten letters to her late father. This edition was set in a binder so family could add their own letters and use it as a living document, but I thought it was important to have a finished edition that could be passed down through the family.
I trimmed, folded, glued, bound and desiged the book myself. The centerpiece is a double-gatefold with maps of greater Dubuque, her family farm, and Iowa. Stories, poems, and siblings’ contributions are also packaged in the versos of gatefolds, visually set apart as if included in letters. Every photograph in the book can be removed, passed around, and placed back into the book. The photos were printed separately and placed in the book with reusable glue dots, sometimes overlaid on the text to add a layer of visual dimension and symbolize the photos’ enclosure within the letters.
I trimmed, folded, glued, bound and desiged the book myself. The centerpiece is a double-gatefold with maps of greater Dubuque, her family farm, and Iowa. Stories, poems, and siblings’ contributions are also packaged in the versos of gatefolds, visually set apart as if included in letters. Every photograph in the book can be removed, passed around, and placed back into the book. The photos were printed separately and placed in the book with reusable glue dots, sometimes overlaid on the text to add a layer of visual dimension and symbolize the photos’ enclosure within the letters.
Stories, poems, and siblings’ contributions are packaged in the versos of gatefolds, visually set apart—as if included in the letters.
Every image in the book can be removed, passed around, and placed back into the book.
