The cover is made from two discarded women’s boots that I found in the basement of my apartment building.

The buckle was also part of the boots, but now serves as a clasp to close the book.

The stitching (all the stitching that is not left over from the original pattern of the boots) is all hand-stitched and rough.

Given the nature of the material used, and its source, the faux leather had to be cut into shapes and then stuck together to make a large enough surface area. This lends the book a frankenstein’s monster sort of look…

Continue reading below for lots more pictures and background info.

I made all the paper in the book myself, and pressed symbols into each of the pages. I had to first cut the shapes out of linoleum before pressing them into the still-wet handmade paper.

Afterwards I stained the imprints with ashes, and then used a fixer to make it stay put.

The code on all the pages is not so much a code as an alphabet. The letters merely stand in for roman letters that make up english words.

The texts in the book are poems and prose by me, chronicling my experiences this past year.

The texts are printed on tissue paper (I had to stick the tissue paper to normal weight paper in order to get it through the printer — then peel off the tissue paper) which is in turn stuck into the allocated spaces on each page.

I created a font so as to make typing out all 26 pages of symbols easier. I had originally planned to just write the pages by hand with a pen, but it was tedious to make the spacing nice and not to smudge everything.

Below: Two typical pages from the book. A symbol above and text continued in the space below.

The symbols on each page stand for letters of the roman alphabet, and they appear in alphabetic order, providing the key to the code on the pages.

opening words of the book (the weird formatting of the text is a clue as to how the code in the book is read):

Closing words… A poem about contentment.

These two pages are the only pages that have unencrypted text.

The pages are bound through the spine of the book. The binding is visible from the outside.

What is it and why did I do this?

It started out as a project for my paper making class – we were told that we were expected to make "artist’s books" by the end of the semester. An artist’s book, I learned, is a "book object" – that is, it looks like a book, but it is a work of art in itself, and isn’t necessarily read in order to be appreciated.

More often than not they are essentially sculptures, or very elaborate books with no authored content, or with abstract content.

My book is full of bad poetry/words, but the poems are not the focus of the book, as the poems are encoded in a pictographic alphabet I constructed with a friend when I was younger (I clearly had just as little to do back then as I do now). So when you open the book, none of the words can be understood.

Embossed on each hand-made page is a symbol from the alphabet mentioned above, and the pages are in alphabetic order. So the key to understanding the book is in the book itself.

In doing that I hoped to make the book a metaphorical object, an artists’s book, representing understanding. Or one aspect of understanding in particular, which is that the answers we seek (in understanding life, love, books, films, people, ourselves, etc etc) are, more often than not, directly in front of us — right under our noses — and if we would just look harder, or in a different way, we would unlock all the answers.