Bone Horn
A teaser for a novel, made to look like the case file the novel is about.
Design a promotional teaser publication that goes out separately from the book itself and pulls people into reading the whole thing.
The source text came out of a workshop where we turned a keyword into a publication. My word was grief, and the first cover was me drawing at it: the letters broken apart, torn yellow paper over white, the missing bits of the word drawn back in by hand. That stayed as the mood, but the format went somewhere colder.
If the book is a detective story then the teaser should feel like evidence rather than an advert. I set the title in letterpress, BONE HORN in a slab serif, and kept printing without re-inking so each pull came out fainter than the last. I ran those tests on newsprint, tinted stock and red paper to see which one carried the right amount of wear, and set the text pages to look classified: typed, ranged oddly, some lines struck through.
The final thing is a set of loose A5 sheets trimmed at slightly different sizes so the stack never squares up, held in a manila envelope stamped BONE HORN in red. It looks like something pulled out of a filing cabinet, which is the invitation.
Inside, the text is Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain's, a detective story circling Alice B. Toklas and a missing horn. I set it in a typewriter mono and split it across the measure, the narrator ranged left and the caller's replies pushed out to the right margin in italic, with nothing in the middle. On the page it looks like two people who never quite occupy the same space, which is what a phone call in a detective story is.
Loose printed sheets in a stamped envelope, a teaser publication in the form of a case file.
