110 pages · 60 renga · 6×9 paperback · Interior: 13 hours · Image preparation: 5 weeks · Cover: 2 hours · Print-on-demand
Poetry layout requires decisions that prose doesn’t — line breaks, stanza spacing, the relationship between white space and the poem’s structure. The design here was kept deliberately spare, in keeping with the Zen traditions that renga and haiku come from.
The 26 sumi ink brush drawings on rice paper were scanned and prepared for print individually. Average image preparation time across all projects runs about 15 minutes. These averaged just under 8 hours each. The tonal range of ink on rice paper — where nearly everything lives in the three-quarter tones and shadow details are easily lost — requires careful work to hold the openness of the original while keeping the darks from plugging up in print.
The renga poems were scanned and converted to editable text via OCR before layout could begin.