Phaidon

Phaidon took on a carousel book pitched with a book it had published as the model. Phaidon took on Jimmy Soni's coffee table book about a Brooklyn carousel after his pitch. Soni had used the High Line book as his model, and the editor had edited that very book, so he laughed.

The designers of the High Line book get credit for the design.

How I Write

The carousel book's small caption space forced choices about which stories to tell. Soni rewrote all the captions for the Brooklyn carousel book. With almost no space, he had to decide which stories to keep and which to cut.

A book made to be flipped through needs a different structure than 70,000 words of prose. The book used tissue paper overlays to show the horses' original colors, the thing the restorer obsessed over. Soni: "talk about word economy. You don't have any space at all."

How I Write▶ 1:27:35