A small print series I made between projects. The substrate is a pile of pages I tore out of a thrift-store paperback. The inks are gouache and screenprint. The lines are the kind of one-liner that sounds like it came from Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, or somebody at a 1940s dinner party who had been waiting all evening for the right opening.

Every page starts the same way. Tear a page out, paint a flat color block where the type wants to go. Let it dry. Overprint the line in heavy condensed sans, set so big the original prose only shows around the edges.

The constraint is the page itself. Whatever the paperback gave me on that page is what I had to work with. A wide page got a big block. A narrow page got a tighter line. Pages with chapter breaks at the top got the type pushed lower. Pages with a number in the corner stayed in the corner. The found object did half the composition; I did the rest.

The whole series exists because I wanted to spend an afternoon doing something physical that did not need a brief, a stakeholder, or a deck. Tear, paint, dry, overprint. Move on to the next page.

One paperback. The whole series came from one secondhand book. Twenty pages, each one chosen for its margins and the pacing of the prose underneath.

One color per page. Painted by hand with gouache, no taping, no editing. Wherever the brush stopped, that was the edge of the block.

One typographic vocabulary. Every page set in the same heavy condensed sans, same weight, same spacing rules. The interest comes from the variation in the substrate, not the type.