Dark Spring Press –
The book as photography’s materiality.

Dark Spring Press is a small, growing publisher of photography books that sought on innovative way to present the work of internationally acclaimed fine-art photographer Ken Rosenthal. We proposed a range of designs inspired by Ken’s photographs, taken over a period of 15 years at his family’s cabin in Washington state. The final book design encompassed a complex balance of components: the materiality of a raw graphics board cover, the tactile debossed typography of the spare, modernist cover design, the exposed smyth-sewn binding, the superior white text-weight interior sheets without descriptors or markers, and the solid grey endpapers.

The final 112 page monograph was the coordinated work of a team made up of a local commercial printer, a book binder, a letterpress master printer, the publisher, and the photographer. As a monograph, Days on the Mountain is not only a masterful presentation of the photographer’s densest, darkest work but on art object that evokes a sensory response in the hand.

Design, writing, editing, text offset printed
in six colors, cover letterpress printed in
two colors, smyth-sewn.