it started because i painted a cigarbox black and then didn't want to be one of those people who paint cigar boxes. i put a collage on the lid - a picture out of national geographic of a lion taking down a gazelle, and a bit of text that went with it moreorless - but that didn't assauge my fear. i thought that maybe if i put something neat in the box, that would justify my black-painted-and-magazine-collaged trend. but what to put in the box? i wanted something that had a reason to be in the box, that wasn't just some neat thing that happened to be in a cigarbox. i decided to put a book in the box, because i've been meaning to put some of my poetry together, and that seemed neat.


but how to put the book in the box? if i just made a book and stuck it in the box, i wouldn't have really helped anything. i wanted to attach the book to the box somehow, but have it still be functional, easy to open and page through and read. afterall, a book isn't much good if you can't read it.


eventually, i punched out the back wall of the box, the one that the lid is hinged to, and decided to make that a hinge as well, so that the top could lie all the way flat, and attach the book to that part. but still, the logistics evaded me. at the library, i found a book to help me. it turns out that instead of using the back part of the box at all, i'm going to attach the lid and bottom of the book as the covers, and bind it with a coptic stich. i bought a ton of bookbinding supplies, an awl, a few pounds of handmade paper, and hemp, and spent two hours making a sewing cradle and a hole jig.


except now, i'm not sure if i want to put poetry in it, after all. anyone with any ideas for filling up a thirty-page-or-so book-in-a-box?