About the book:
The book tells the story of Tom Layward, a 55-year-old law professor from New York City who has just dropped his daughter Miri off at university in Pittsburgh. Rather spontaneously, he decides to travel across the United States instead of returning to his wife in New York. His wife, Amy, had an affair 12 years before and Tom made a promise to himself that he would leave her once their children had moved out of the house. Tom is also unhappy with his life and without fulfilment, describing himself as being in a “C-minus marriage”, which will only give him the opportunity of a “B-grade life”.
He was recently placed on administrative leave by the university due to a series of violations: he refused to use him/her preferred pronouns on his e-mail signature line; and he provided legal advice to a National Basketball Association (NBA) team owner who is in the public spotlight after making racist and sexist comments. These transgressions cause him to be vilified at the university. His students petition for his removal and to add to his misfortunes, he has an unknown, yet lingering medical condition that causes heart palpitations, fatigue, and intermittent facial swelling.
Tom drives across the United States, visiting old friends, an ex-girlfriend, and a former business partner; and also interacting with strangers. He eventually reaches California where he visits his son Michael, and plans to visit his father’s grave. The novel explores themes of mid-life crisis, long-term marriage, and the complications of getting older.
About the binding:
- A full leather binding bound in scarf-jointed green and yellow goatskin with a grey suede onlay wrapping around the whole cover.
- The book has contrasting leather joints in orange (with a central black stripe) on the front joint, and green (with a central white stripe) on the back joint to match the doublures.
- The design is built up using coloured leather onlays that are embroidered over using a variety of different style stitches including: French knots; Couching; Running stitch; Holbein stitch; Lazy daisy stitch; Whipped stitch; and Seed stitch.
- The covers of the book are also tooled with 23½ Medium Deep gold leaf using hand-made finishing tools.
- The endbands are double tiered and sewn with silk threads.
- The edges of the book are trimmed, sanded and decorated with a wash of yellow acrylic paint.
- The foredge of the book is hand-decorated with green acrylic paint to join together the patterns printed onto the front and back endpapers.
- The endpapers have a pattern of netting printed onto them with green acrylic paint, and touched in with a paintbrush.
- The binding has edge-to-edge paper doublures which are hand-decorated with leather onlays, embroidery and blind tooling.
- The leather onlays of the doublures run around onto the cover design at two points: once on the front where the white road line flows into the basketball court markings; and once on the back where the black traffic light pole flows around into the basketball pattern.
- The title of the book is embroidered onto a leather label on the spine, like a garish “diner-style” sign.
- The book is housed in a drop-back box with the spine patterned in the same way as on the spine of the book.
- The box is covered with green and yellow bookcloth, a page from a map and is lined with marled felt.
Design Description:
The book is set in modern day USA, with the main character (Tom Layward), taking a road trip across America. Although Tom cover thousands of miles and references different scenery during his impromptu road trip, the scene I set for the book cover was when he drives through Las Vegas.
The cover design illustrates a road scene, with grey tarmac (often called asphalt, blacktop of pavement in the USA) and the central yellow road line shown at the very base of the cover design. At the side of the road are a series of cacti including “Barrel Cacti”, “Prickly Pears” and “Hedgehog Cacti”, some of which illustrated in flower (interestingly, the familiar tree-like “Large Saguaro Cacti”, commonly associated with desert areas, do not grow wild in Las Vegas as it is generally too cold and it receives less rainfall for them to thrive naturally!). Tom and his wife Amy have a rather prickly marital relationship to the prickly cacti hold extra meaning in the choice of design!
The title of the book, “The Rest of Our Lives”, appears on the spine of the book, sewn onto a leather label disguised as a colourful diner-style sign with embroidered gold lights surrounding it. On the back cover of the book there is a set of traffic lights set on green for “GO”, as Tom continues on his journey. There is also a yellow diamond-shaped road sign, which in the USA is a warning sign used to alert drivers to potential hazards ahead. In the book, Tom suffers from a mysterious heart condition which causes facial swelling, heart palpitations and fatigue. On the sign is a carbon-tooled outline of a heart beat to make reference to this.
The iconic “Welcome To Las Vegas” sign appears on the cover of the book, edited to just say the word “WELCOME”, also featuring two basketballs either side of the letters. This sign is one of the most famous and recognisable landmarks in the world. It was designed in 1959 and has become a symbol of the city’s glitz, glamour and retro neon aesthetic. As the drop-back box is opened, I like to think this is welcoming you to discover the binding!
Ben Markovits, the author of the book, used to be a professional basketball player in Germany, and there are many references to the game throughout the story. The main character frequently seeks out “pickup basketball” games, using the game as a way to reflect on his life, family, and choices. Pickup basketball is an informal, spontaneously organised game of basketball, typically played without a referee, where teams and rules are flexible. Players meet at a court and organise themselves, often by waiting for a game to finish and the winners staying on to play against new challengers.
With all the mention of basketball I felt it important to tie it into the design, so the doublures, endpapers, book edges and the endbands are all done in homage to the game. The endpapers are printed with a chain-link fence, commonly used as a boundary for a variety of different sports courts. The chain-link continues across the foredge of the book to tie them together.
The front edge-to-edge doublure of the book is illustrated with part of a basketball court layout on it on dark green paper, with the hoop and net sewn using a variety of different weight threads and an orange basketball is passing through it. The same, much larger, basketball is then illustrated on the back orange paper doublure, with the “pebbles” applied using blind tooling. The “pebbles” on a basketball are the tiny raised dots that create friction, providing players with a better grip for dribbling, passing and shooting.
The endbands are double-core and sewn with silk threads. The colours are chosen to match those of a basketball (burnt orange and black), which is sandwiched with “Crayola green”. On page seven of the book there is a quote, “But there were also things like…one of Amy’s kindergarten pictures, glued bits of sea glass, and real sand and grass, and the sea painted in Crayola green”. This colour description stuck in my head and I used this across the binding in the printing and painting of the chain-link fence, as well as in the endbands, plus the bi-folded second sheet of the endpapers.
The box also features cacti and the diner-style sign with the title on, glued to the spine of the box. I have also used a couple of pages from a Rand McNally Road Atlas from part of Tom’s route as a detail on the drop-back box. Rand McNally is an American technology and publishing company best known for it maps and atlases. It publishes books of detailed road maps of the road networks in The USA, Canada and Mexico. Tom buys one in the book so part of it made it into the box design!
Please visit the blog section of my website to read a series of three posts about how this book was made. If you want to hear me talking more about how this book was made, I was invited to speak with Stepan Chizhov and Pavel Voronin from iBookbinding about my experience of binding a Booker Prize shortlisted novel. You can view it and listen to the stream here.