"Goodwill" book

After completing the two-plate linocut series, Anita asked me if I would consider binding a set of the prints into a book. I liked the idea, but didn't think that four images was enough, so I decided that I would insert pages of text between each image:

There was no narrative story for the series, but the theme of functional buildings lent itself to economic themes. During the spring of 2008, the storm clouds of the impending financial disaster and economic recession were gathering on the horizon. Oil prices remained high, food shortages threatened political stability in many nations, and the collapse of the housing bubble was beginning to take its toll on financial institutions.

I consume a vast amount of news in my day job as a financial analyst, most of it about specific corners of technology, but I headlines about global issues, social change, and green technology are often too interesting to me to ignore.

I sifted through articles that I had read and bookmarked during the months that I had been working on the print series and found a set of articles that fit with my functional building series. The most obvious was an article on wind turbines to go with the windmill print.

Themes that I found across all the articles were notions of scarcity and hope. As a fundamental tenet of economics, the idea of scarcity reflected the economic role of the functional buildings represented. 

Hope was just what made the articles exciting to me. While all the stories dealt with the challenges of scarcity, they offered a glimpse of progress. 

I considered titling the book Scarcity, but felt that it didn't capture the optimism I wanted to convey. Goodwill (and other Intangible Assets) is of course an accounting pun, and hence loosely tied to economics, but it is also undeniably positive in tone.

The text was added using a monoprint method for transferring printed material, which means that the book is one-of-a-kind, for now. I used proofs of some of the darker tone plates for the inside covers and recycled some wrapping paper for the outside cover. The wanted the natural imagery of the cover to contrast the symbols of development in the series.