In my Book Design Technology class at Cal Poly I was tasked with formatting, printing, and binding a limited edition book. I chose the novel Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I have loved this novel since childhood and I saw this project as an opportunity to create a version of the book that was meaningful to my own family — my mother in particular. In the end I produced two copies of the book, giving them each unique endpapers, making them one of one.

This project was a labor of love. The book started as a .txt file, and from that I formatted each page. I made meticulous decision after decision, from choosing roman numerals to making sure each spread had as few orphans, widows, and runts as possible. I created custom chapter icons, drawing them from a fountain pen to match the novel’s patina. The text formatting process took dozens of hours, growing my appreciation of print typography and production. In the end, it became one of my favorite projects to date.

After formatting the text file into printable PDF spreads, the class was able to print their books. We then folded signatures and sewed the book together. In total, my novel ended up being 446 pages plus tip-ins.

When finished sewing we moved onto creating the book case and end pages. For the binding of the books, I chose a brown book cloth, accented with hand-painted gold titling. I added muted pink bookmark ribbons. For one of the two books, I painted the end pages with golden stripes.

After printing, binding, and casing in both books, the next task was designing a dust jacket. To begin curating the feeling that I wanted for the dust jacket, I built a quick moodboard.

With Little Women being a classic, I felt a pull to keep the outer jacket relatively classical and exclude photography while also using a limited color palette. In the end, I chose to keep the dust jacket on the simpler side. See the final product below.