My Little Black Book

Here's what one of our black bookers had to say about her book.

My Little Black Book

This project began with a generous dose of procrastination, but eventually I began working on it during a roadtrip to Winnipeg. When I was sketching on the road we drove through a whiteout blizzard, for several hours. The blank pages didn’t seem quite so intimidating when drawing an entirely white landscape. Most of the drawings I made during this experience were covered up by other pieces of paper, but that is where it began.

As the book evolved, I started to think about it as a story with no beginning, no middle, and no end. I wanted every page to be spectacular just in case that was the first page a viewer opened to. And I also wanted to be huge. I had a picture in my head of a book so thick with paper and glue that the pages would be flayed when open or closed.

The secret theme that was tucked into the back of my little black book didn’t make sense the day I got it; The small slip of paper read “I Hate it When They Leave”.  As it turned out, the hardest part of this project was accepting that the better I made it, the less I might want to give it away. Fortunately, making this one book and giving it away was well worth the opportunity to see the other 119 books that were given out over two months ago.