A face peers over the bedcovers. At the window, a horned silhouette spreads its clawed hands. Twelve small panels play the scene out like a storyboard for a bad dream, and they sit deep inside The Beast Inside and I, the “graphic poem” written by Laurelin Vaire and illustrated by Don Phüry.
The authors describe a young woman whisked away in the dead of night, travelling with a mysterious beast through a landscape where time and space stop mattering. They hope the format will carry poetry to readers who might walk past a traditional collection. Our part was the object that carries it: an A5 hardback, case bound in cloth, foiled twice, with printed endpapers and 52 uncoated pages. So let’s walk round it, outside first.
Tiefblau cloth under gold antlers and a silver moon
The case is wrapped in Winter & Company’s Wicotex Brillianta in Tiefblau, an inky blue with a fine visible weave, stretched over greyboard. Your fingertips find the texture before your eyes have settled on the title. Choosing cloth for your own hardback? Our page on linen and cloth covered hardbacks runs through the options.
Two gloss metallic foils sit on that cloth, and they have separate jobs. Gold carries the big shapes: the title, the antlers, a pair of moth wings, scattered stars and an ornate scrolling frame. Silver is rationed to the crescent moon and the eye spots on each wing, so the coolest light on the cover comes from the night sky. Early quotes had explored white and gold foil with a debossed panel; the design settled on gold and silver alone, supplied as separate artwork layers, the larger gold design on one and the small silver details on the other. That is how a two foil cover should arrive.
Worth borrowing: with two foils, give one the big gestures and save the other for a handful of meaningful accents. Two metallics competing for attention cancel each other out.
Endpapers patterned with antler and flame
Open the boards and the printed endpapers take over, a repeating pattern of antlers and curling, flame-like flourishes in pale gold on a dark ground, like wallpaper in an old manor house. The endpapers use 170gsm uncoated, a heavier sheet than the text, because they also hinge the book block to the case.
A printed endpaper tells the reader the story has started before the first line. Here the antlers echo the cover and turn up again later on the beast itself.
A title page set like an old frontispiece
“A Graphic Poem” sits above the title in gothic-flavoured capitals, framed by a sepia Greek key border, with tiny butterflies among curling flourishes. It looks a century old, which makes the strangeness that follows land harder. The butterflies pick up the moth wings from the cover. The authors write about letterforms fading into imagery and back again, and the type and the drawings do share one visual language throughout. For more on how verse can be shaped on the page, see our notes on formats and layouts for poetry books.
Panels split by bars of light
All 52 inside pages carry four colour print on 115gsm uncoated, and that stock suits Don’s drawings. Uncoated paper has no sheen, so dense sepias and charcoals stay soft and even under a reading lamp, and a warm parchment tone runs through the book. A single blood red is reserved for chapter titles and page numbers.
The cleverest device is the light. In several spreads the panels are divided by glowing bars instead of white gutters. Across one sequence, a horned figure cradles a sleeping woman among desert mesas under a pale moon, and over the following panels the pair seem to harden into the rock around them. In another, galaxies, a starburst and forks of lightning are sliced apart by beams. On matt paper those bars look like light falling across the page rather than printed white.
Before committing to the run, we pulled loose, unbound proof sheets of the poem pages on the chosen stock, so the authors could judge the sepia on paper rather than a backlit screen. If your artwork is drawn and tonal, all graphite and heavy shadow, ask for uncoated paper and a flat sheet proof together.
The spine, redrawn before casing in
One detail needed a conversation. The cover artwork carried horizontal lines running the full width of the spine. On a case bound book, a design that tight to the edges leaves no margin for the fraction of a millimetre that trimming and casing in can move. Mike asked whether they would like to pull the lines in. At first they were happy to go ahead as drawn; minutes later they decided to rework the spine content, and we paused the job until the new artwork arrived. Our artwork notes for hardback cases and spines show where the safe areas sit.
Once cased in, the hardbacks crossed the Atlantic to their makers in the United States. Planning a cloth hardback with foil of your own? Get a price for a cloth covered, case bound book.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
