Beth Kephart on Designing My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera
Beth Kephart is an award-winning teacher, the co-founder of Juncture workshops, and a book artist. She is the award-winning author of more than three dozen books in multiple genres, including Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays, and We Are the Words: The Memoir Master Class. Her book Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River (Temple) has become a regional classic.
Beth not only wrote My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera but also designed the cover and the gorgeous end papers. Here she takes us through her process.
It seemed to me that the primary tomes on the history of paper were dressed in versions of royal purple. And that books on the art of paper craft and binding were often celebrating multiples—many handmade journals, many bindings.
Might we avoid purple? I wrote to my editor, as discussions about the book’s look got underway. Might we develop something singular and centering?
I wanted bright and modern for My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera, a “memoirist’s guide,” as the flap copy says, “to the role paper plays in our construction of ourselves.” I wanted a cover that would declare itself from across the room in a bookstore. I wanted a book that would feel as handmade as the crafts that obsess me—handmade paper, hand-dyed paper, quilted paper, marbled paper, bindery, collage.
I was invited to give the cover a go—to bring my fascinations to a 5.625 x 8.25 dimension. Daunting, sure. Intimidating. But it was a weekend of rain and my cyclamen was in deep bloom, and inside my tattered New Shorter Oxford, the definition for paper goes on and on.
Also, but not secondarily, I am the proud owner of a quite smart-looking pair of scissors, and I’d been lately making experiments in colored cyanotypes, and I had an abundance of embroidery and binding threads on hand, and once, while taking photographs of some of my own book arts, I discovered the seductive habit that Hanshi paper has of marking soft transitions.
End papers
Working in the one room with sufficient natural light, I laid the elements down and arranged. I could hear my husband’s pottery wheel spinning in the basement room below me. I could hear the rain on the roof above. The placement of the cyclamen proved to be the tricky part, and after that, the scissors.
I stood on a stool to give myself distance. I kneeled on the floor. Finally, drawing my breath in and standing very still, I took some photographs.
When Kate Nichols of Temple University Press received the art, she transformed it with her perfect-on-the-first-round typography. And there it was, My Life in Paper, a book whose end papers I marbled and whose chapters will be delineated by recent experiments in cyanotypes and whose quiet nature feels as close to handmade as any mass-produced book could be.
Final cover
My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera will be published November 3rd 2023 by Temple University Press.
Visit Beth online at bethkephartbooks.com and at her Etsy shop here.
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.