A few years ago, I made a set of 12 editions and a slipcase as a show piece. Essentially, when I was teaching a class somewhere, it would be put out it with a few other samples of my work as an example of what you could expect from my class.

Most people who see this thing really like it and periodically, I do bind editions for a variety of reasons. The covers for this set were made with a decorative paper but I was more interested in doing something with graphics. The books you see below are the same ones I’ve made for PLAY in the past but this time I used an image of Sedona, Arizona for the cover art. I wanted more than that though, I wanted the same image to span the spine so you could see the entire image across the set. I wanted these to be a piece of art on the shelf so that when they were in the slipcase in the correct order the image itself was the primary focus.

To get this effect, I used Adobe Illustrator and laid out guides so I’d know where the spine was. Then, I used transform to keep shifting the image across the cover so that each edition had the correct section of the image on the spine. This was just a proof of concept to see if I could get the alignment correct. I’m planning on making a set of twenty so the image is much larger on the shelf but I’ll need to shoot a panorama to have an image wide enough to pull it off.