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The Books of Anger

$25.00 - $75.00
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Set of 5 notebooks, 8 pages each.
Limited edition of 12 sets.

💵 Pay what you can: $25, $50, or $75. Your choice. No judgment.

Resentment ◦ Irritation ◦ Exasperation ◦ Frustration ◦ Fury

Five flavours of anger, each with its own 8 page notebook.

Why anger?

Dan Pink posted questions to feed to an AI chatbot to help "confront difficult truths."

I tried it out.

The most powerful anchoring statement it returned: "The trick is not to become more agreeable. It’s to aim your independence at something worthy of it."

This project is an attempt to do that: to apply my design and technical skills to create something beautiful and functional that also stretches my mind, and catalyzes conversation.

If I've learned anything in the last five years, it's that I'm angry, I've been angry for a long time, and I've eaten a lot of that anger, claimed it wasn't anger at all, tried to find loopholes to let me think my way out of anger. By spending some intimate time with these angry words, I hoped to find some route out of that cycle by giving me a tool to label what I'm feeling, and own it.

The Front Covers

I printed the covers on my Golding Jobber No. 8 letterpress, a 111 year old behemoth. I set the titles in 120 point Akzidenz Grotesk, all-caps, and printed them using Victory Ink rubber-based Pantone Orange 165 on white 74 pound card stock.

The metal type is big and bold, and it feels big and bold when you pick up each letter and set it into place.

The Back Covers

Printed in black ink on the back of every book, in 11 point (who ever heard of 11 point type?) Futura Bold, a typeface and weight I love dearly.

The Inside Pages

The inside pages are 24 lb. coloured paper; each flavour of anger has its own colour:

  • Resentment — Red
  • Irritation — Blue
  • Exasperation — Green
  • Frustration — Yellow
  • Fury — Orange

The Binding

The covers and the inside pages are hand-bound together with colour-matched cord, using a link stitch, a new-to-me stitch that's slightly more complicated than a simple pamphlet stitch, but a lot more satisfying.