First Draft of the Cover for ‘American Peasant’

Note: This looks a lot better at full size.

We’re now down to short strokes. Lucy flies to Washington, D.C, this weekend, so I’ll spend the entire time mostly naked, in my bathrobe rewriting sections of the “American Peasant.”

It’s the most enjoyable part of the book-making process – both the bathrobe part and the rewriting part. Why? The book is done. Now I can see the whole project for the first time and improve it. Before I was just tightening spleen nuts – not knowing how that might affect the colon rotors.

The book will go to press in May and be released in early July.

Today I worked on the diestamp for the cover. After about four aborted attempts I pinched off the image above.

This might not be the finished cover. It is a polarizing design and looks like a 1970s novel about sex tractors from behind the Iron Curtain (are those boobs or plowed fields?). The text is difficult to read at first. The swirls are disorienting. And that’s exactly why I love it.

We create about five or six cove…