This is a personal project exploring some of the letters written between some of the key figures of the Beat Generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Neal Cassidy. The book highlights some of the letters that they wrote each other and includes my commentary and thoughts on the letters in the sidebars.

The book includes handmade and digital elements. To achieve the yellowed paper look, I hand-dyed paper with coffee or tea and experimented distressing it by scrunching it up in different ways and even baking some of the pages. I wanted some of the pages to look as if they were hand-written directly from the author, so I enlisted some folks to write the letters out. I then brought it all into photoshop and illustrator where I played around with different digital techniques to achieve the final look shown here.

I know how to bind books, so when the final layout of the book was complete, I printed the pages out and hand-bound a few copies. I love combining hand-drawn and digital, so this was a really fun project to simply just explore and learn.