Lisa Congdon + A Collection a Day in Portland

This Friday at Land, Portland.

A note about A Collection a Day preorders: due to a situation beyond our control, the mass mailout of preordered books has been delayed. Things will be in the postal system as soon as possible. The situation has also affected the mailing of Issue 9, but that is now back on track as well. Thanks for your patience.

Some pictures from the event

Lisa’s exhibition will be up for another month at The Curiosity Shoppe in San Francisco, and the book will be there too! Thanks to all who came out and made quite the crowd in the tiny shoppe.

Thank you to Lauren and Emily at The Curiosity Shoppe for their hard work and attention to details. Thank you to Derek and Lauren for opening their shop to us during a very exciting time (they had their baby boy earlier this week!) And the biggest thank you to Lisa for allowing me the pleasure of working with her and her Collection a Day imagery to create such a beautiful object and book.

Flip through the book…

Looking forward to tomorrow’s book launch! See you at The Curiosity Shoppe in San Francisco tomorrow evening from 6-9pm.

San Francisco here we come!

This Friday is the reception for Lisa’s A Collection a Day. It will be held at The Curiosity Shoppe in San Francisco, from 6-9pm. If you are nearby, I hope you will come and see the exhibition and celebrate Lisa’s incredible project and book.

For those of you who preordered the book by March 13 and live in San Francisco, I’ll reserve a copy for you in case you’re able to attend. The rest of the preorders will ship in April as we just have a limited quantity of preview copies for this special event.

The book nestles securely into some foam which protects it during shipping.Here’s a view of the inside back of the tin’s cover. The embossing looks and feels great.

A little look…

A Collection a Day‘s book launch at The Curiosity Shoppe in San Francisco draws ever near! (March 18) The tins are still in China, but will be shipping soon. Just a few hundred will be arriving by air in time for the launch, with the bulk of them having to be shipped by ocean freight and then by truck across North America. Then the finished books need to be inserted into the tins, repacked and sent to the fulfillment warehouses. Complicated!

Thank you very much for your preorders! The finished book housed inside the beautiful tin will be shipping sometime in April. More details will be posted here as they are available. There’s still time to get the preorder price of $25 (save $10).

A Collection a Day at the printer

More details and video when I get home!

Proofing then printing

Work/Life 2 and A Collection a Day are getting down to the last stage: printing! The proofs are signed and I’ll be heading to Winnipeg next week to see both projects on press.


The shot above shows how many signatures make up the 448-page A Collection a Day book! These books will literally be on press for days!

Where the time goes…

Woah, things are busy around here! The past week has flown by, but not without a whole lot going on:

Last Thursday celebrated the release of issue #8 and the Letterpress Sampler — more pictures posted soon, I promise!

I’m reviewing the printer proofs of A Collection a Day, I got to see the printer proofs of the Shoegazing Notecard Set published by Chronicle Books later this year and Work/Life 2 is off to the printer in a matter of days.

The Elegant Cockroach by Deidre Martin and Stefanie Augustine made it to #3 on Calgary’s Bestseller list! (hey locals, let’s get it to #1!!! Check the book’s page for local bookstores.)

Martha Stewart Living is hosting an amazing contest on their website, called Prized Collections, in collaboration with A Collection a Day: 

“In the February 2011 issue of Martha Stewart Living, we celebrated the collections of some of our favorite tastemakers. We were especially taken with Lisa Congdon, whose assortment of midcentury kitchenware only scratches the surface of her passion for collecting. An artist and illustrator, Lisa spent 2010 blogging a new collection every day; in spring 2011, Uppercase will publish her book, “A Collection a Day.” Now it’s your chance to share your collecting artistry with us. Upload photos of your prized possessions by March 28 for a chance to win one of three line drawings from Lisa, plus a copy of her new book. The finalists will be featured on MarthaStewart.com.”

Tif Fussell’s blog, dottie angel, got a nice mention in the current issue of the Australian magazine Inside Out. (Also exciting: the style director of the magazine will be featured in the next issue of UPPERCASE.) Tif has some really nice notebooks for sale in her shop. We also got some great news about the foreword to her book, but we’ll save that reveal for later!

And on a personal note, at nearly 11 months old Finley is finally cutting his first tooth. Which means that I barely slept a wink last night, but at least he’s feeling happy right now. He also began standing by himself this week.

Congrats, Lisa…

…on being featured in the latest issue of Martha Stewart Living! Looking fabulous!

I’m pleased to share that the collections editor of Martha Stewart Living magazine, Mr. Fritz Karch, is writing the foreword to A Collection a Day.

A Collection a Day: packaging mockup

This is a mockup of the Collection a Day packaging.

It’s a tin with a hinged lid.

The actual height is indicated by the edge of the white paper.

Ever since I asked Lisa if she would allow UPPERCASE to publish her A Collection a Day project as a book, I’ve envisioned it packaged in a special collector’s tin. Throughout 2010, Lisa documented her various collections through daily photos on her project blog. It was an incredible idea, and one that she followed through on brilliantly. However, with the excitement of her daily posts behind us, I wanted to make something lasting, tactile, hefty, covetable… all the things that one cannot accomplish virtually. Since the project is all about the love of things, whether special treasures or mundane objects made meaningful en masse, the book version of A Collection a Day takes that exuberance to heart and becomes a desireable object in itself.

As a graphic designer, it has been a dream to try my hand at packaging — to think in three dimensions and imagine something in a material and production process that is new to me. I love the challenge. Imagine with me the mockup above with a glossy finish, and two levels of embossing on the decorative band, bread tags, 3-6-5 and the title. Imagine opening the hinged tin for the first time to discover a little block of a book and gently lifting it out. You can either keep your book in the tin, or (as I have imagined it) keep small collections of your own inside the tin. The memory of my grandmother’s buttons kept in a cookie tin was my inspiration. I can still recall the wonderful racket a gentle shake would make!

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In case you didn’t see this earlier, here’s a quick video of the book block (the block is with the tin company, otherwise I would have photographed it with the cover design on it.) Imagine 448 pages of amazing objects, beautiful design and fine typography.

Pre-order the book here on its own or as part of the book bundle.