THE AFFECTED PROVINCIAL'S COMPANION, VOLUME ONE
Published by Bloomsbury, 2006

This book took five years to come to full fruition. It started out as an exercise, which then became a monthly column in the Philadelphia Independent. After the Independent closed its doors, I put together a self-published pamphlet that compiled all of the articles I had written up to that point, which I sold from my website. International orders started coming in, which encouraged me to send a pamphlet to an agent in New York. Within a week I had agency representation and muliple book deal offers.

I wrote, edited, designed, typeset, and illustrated the entire book; hence, my publisher Bloomsbury didn't have to pay for a designer. This allowed me to pull out the stops with the production, which was necessary given the subject matter. Being a kind of aesthete's handbook, the ideas in the book had to be expressed in the design. A gloss/satin softcover with four-color process was out of the question.



The book contains a trove of hyperbolic essays and meticulous philosophical diagrams, inspired by nineteenth-century sage writing and the eighteenth-century treatises penned by pamphleteers and natural philosophers. Despite their strangeness and humor, the charts and essays in the book have their own internal logic. The Companion is intended to be both funny and insightful--inauthentic, but sincere. One reviewer summed it up thusly: "Whimsy’s well-turned phrases (to say nothing of his illustrative graphs) are, though distanced and quaintly arcane, sweetly smart and modern."



The green hardcover is stamped with a silver foil botanical design. The book itself is intended to faintly suggest a Venus flytrap, as the reader is greeted with a vibrant magenta/plum endpaper design upon opening. This color scheme was also meant to evoke some of the beautiful creatures found near my home in the New Jersey Pine Barrens: luna moths, pine barrens tree frogs, sundews, pink lady slipper orchids, carnivorous pitcher plants, bog orchids, etc.



An eggshell paper stock was selected to harmonize with the warm colors in the book's cover design. For similar reasons, the book's text was set in Garamond, which was selected for its soft, organic letterforms and graceful contours. Through the lavish meticulousness of the design, I wanted to suggest to the reader that while the book is indeed being released by a major publisher, this little book has been painstakingly designed, illustrated and typeset by its author, and remains very much a labor of love.

The book has amassed a relatively small yet ardent following. Articles in the NY Times, radio interviews, appearances on European TV., lectures and readings at Ivy League universities, and film deals have all followed in the wake of its publication.

More information on the book can be found at my website. The book can be found in most book stores in the UK and US (Borders, B&N, Powell's), but is also available via Amazon.