To Make a Book, Walk on a Book

On the making “Koya Bound”: A book of photographs from the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage walk in Japan

When making a book, I find it’s useful to walk on the book. To peek over it and look for patterns, shuffle pages, grouping and ungrouping the loose sheets. Walls work too — a book can be made on a wall. But floors are easier. And there’s something joyful about the tip-toe dance you do across a room when it is filled by a book.

I spend most of my time writing and brainstorming books with others. Photographer Dan Rubin and I had long discussed making a book together. In March of 2016, we walked for eight days on the Kumano Kodo, a thousand year old pilgrimage path in the mountains of Japan.

When we finished the walk, we made our book.

We hid for a week in an old house in the middle of nowhere Japan. We Amazon Primed[0] in a cheap Brother laser printer and some knock-off Chinese toner. We then sifted through the 3,000 or so photos we had taken on the walk, whittling them down to about five hundred. Those were printed, placed on the floor, and walked upon.

By the end of the week, the skeleton for the book was complete and we’d go on to finish it over the coming months. The book is called Koya Bound and it recently won a AIGA 50 Books |…