Bill asked: "what was the breakthrough, tom?"
I ran horizontal lines across the spines, ending them with small circles, level
with the ends of the half-circles on the covers.The cover design is basically a
traditional one, used in France for semi-opulent work, in the 16th through early
19th centuries. I simplified a bit, and followed my own sense of proportion.
When I did the covers I didn't realize how common the design was, I had just
seen one or two and liked it. My teacher's practice would have been to put just
the title on the spine, but that seemed inadequate to me. I wanted something to
tie the covers together. When I went back to historical examples, they had scads
of parallel decorative rolls across the spines, or sometimes single big central
panels. The idea on those old bindings was to give the maximum appearance of
luxury when the book was shelved. But these seemed to me to be to busy for the
covers, and in any case they didn't actually tie together the whole package---
in the 18th century and earlier, no one considered the covers and spine to be
one subdivided unit that needed to be tied together. The superficially best idea
would be to use one big lozenge (diamond) on the spine; but this causes problems
with getting straight lines to look straight on a curved surface, and it left
no-place good to put the title. The final idea hit everything right: simple,
tied things together, left a good space for fitting in the title, good
proportions possible.

Tom Conroy
Berkeley