The Art of Racing in the Rain

This book was not what I expected, so I'm glad I read it before I bound it! For some reason I expected it to be about a dog who loves chasing things—you know, good old-fashioned foot-racing.

In fact, this turned out to be a charming, meaningful, and reflective book, written from a dog's perspective, with the rare power to hold my attention while talking about car races. It was reminiscent of the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and certainly a worthy evening's read.

With three themes of its content in mind—dog as armchair philosopher, car races, and rain both real and metaphorical—I set about designing its new look. Enzo the dog takes the main focus, as on the standard cover, this time as a silhouette but with remarkably similar ears. The racing theme found its way onto the endpapers in the form of flying checkers, and a pale blue cover paper sets the rainy theme. For just a touch of class, I used black leather on the spine.

Oh, and I really love adding hand-stitched headbands to books.

I was a little crunched for time on this; my brother wanted it as a birthday present for a friend.  Were I to try again with more time, I'd add some silver detail on the cover—or maybe orange?  I do love blue and orange, and it would maintain more of the original look.

I'm also not entirely happy with the typesetting of the title. Normally I would spend hours obsessing over that!  I might have tried making the dog silhouette full bleed on the left, right against the black leather shoulders, with the title set more to the right... oh well.  It's done now, and all concerned parties have communicated their satisfaction.

Two things that went quite well this time were the spine and the insides of the covers.  I finally realized that I need to crease the shoulders so that the spine is much wider than the text block.  This gives the French grooves more definition, allows the book to open without wrinkling the leather, and gives me wiggle room so that the spine doesn't end up narrower than the rest of the book (a BAD problem).  As for the insides of the covers—by which I mean the cover material which wraps around to the inside—I achieved a very clean, even, square edge on both the paper and leather portions this time around.  Weirdly uneven lumps under the endpapers are not cool!