X COLLECTION

Since 2006, Gavin has been creating custom “Design” clamshells, for one of the largest collections of signed Modern-Firsts in the world. Each of the first editions is a significant piece of American or British literature from the last two hundred years; from Dickens to Woolf, from Joyce to Pynchon. All are signed or inscribed and the collection as a whole represents some of the rarest volumes in the world today, all requiring their own custom designed covers.

To date, I am not sure of the exact number I have produced but it must be near a thousand or so, with 400 made from 2014 to the present. Working on this project has allowed me to flex my design muscles and improve my finishing techniques. Each piece has allowed me to explore a variety of techniques; onlays, inlays, underlays, incisions, stamping, airbrushing, leather dyeing, surface gilding, Lacunose and craquelle techniques, eggshell and wood veneer, as well as a decent variety of printing methods, such as monoprint, wood-block, mag-plate, and half-tone polymer printing, and of course photo-transfer.