So here is a 'draft' of the Never-Ending book that I made for my Artist's Book class. The goal of the project for me was to figure out the form a bit, and to create a story to fit the form - one that had no proper beginning nor end, a kind of eternal circulating story.

The end result was a little disheartening, I think because I had to produce 15 copies in a week. It took me two days to figure the form, one day to write the story, one day to figure out the image I wanted to use, two days to get it set up in Photoshop (I tried other programs first), and a day to print, fold, cut and mark. In that time, my personal computer went to the computer store (where it still awaits redemption from its sticky "n" key), and so I had to figure out how to check out a Mac laptop from school, use it, and as I hoped, hook it up to my printer. But the hooking up to my printer didn't work so well, so I had to go to Kinkos to print, which costs an arm and a leg. This resulted in the difficulty that I couldn't do the two or three mock-ups I would have preferred to have done, and so there ended up being one huge mistake, and three smaller flaws...

The huge mistake was a repetition of text that made it so the story isn't properly circular. The smaller flaws were 1) printing the image upside down in relation to the text (but it's mostly shadows so not such a big deal), 2) forgetting to add the colophon to the print (who cares?), and 3) not being able to take note that the drop-shadow on the garamond font doesn't look so grand at such a small scale, and in fact makes it look blurred and illegible. The other thing I might have changed would have been to thin the text so it could be larger and more inviting to read. I would also think about making the text circular instead of blocky.

Nonetheless, the idea was exciting for me, and has spawned other possible never-ending story ideas. Here're some pics of the most flawed version (I left the less flawed versions at school and so couldn't photograph them today...):